Newsletter
Fall
2001 Volume XXXI, No. 1
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Thoughts of Silver Spring, 1938
by Mike Seeger
I was born in 1933 during the time that
Charles and Ruth were “discovering” American folk music and developing their
mission on its behalf. Just a few years earlier all their efforts had been on
behalf of modernist composition. Now they were singing folk songs with Tom
Benton and other artists in New York and later in Washington with artists,
musicians, and intellectuals attracted by the New Deal. Our parents sang with
us and encouraged us. They played “Get Along Home Cindy” on the piano to get
us to go to bed at night. They played European piano music and Southern folk
songs for us as we danced a circle around the couch and family desk in the
middle of our huge living room. Singing was always around the house, and by
the time I was five or so I knew all the words to “Barbara Allen.” We sang as
a family, often from mimeographed song sheets or one of the Lomax books. We didn’t have a radio; it was to my
parents as TV is to many of us now. They were fighting against the
commercialization of mass culture which was killing off older traditions, and
they didn’t want us to be part of all that. They certainly succeeded, at
least with us. Since 1960 I’ve spent my life performing and advocating for
vernacular music. From 1938 to 1944 we lived in the far
Washington suburb of Silver Spring, near the end of the bus line. Our house
was sparsely furnished, certainly not decorated — kind of barn-like. The
green desk, dish cupboard, and sideboard were our main family furniture and
had been made by my father. On the mantelpiece was an unfinished WPA-era
plaster sculpture of a man hanging from a scaffold, lynched, and a judge and
jury looking away from him. A mid-1930s painting by Ben Shahn and a couple by
Bernard Steffen, both family friends, were an important part of our wall
hangings. Our neighbor on one side was a beefy Texan
carpenter/fireman whose periodic slaughtering of his chickens is one of my
indelible childhood memories. Our other next-door neighbor was uptight and more
remote. My elementary school principal lived across the street. We were
oddballs in the neighborhood — the house was rented, its exterior and yard
neglected. Perhaps because of this, inside we were a close family, with music
very central. We also “helped” Dio at the sewing machine and watched her darn
our socks and learned how to sew on a button. (We kids all used my childhood
name for our mother; we called our father Charlie, as Dio did.) We searched
for moths in the seams of our woolen clothing before we put it in mothballs
for the summer. We learned how to make our own breakfast and sandwiches very
early. Dio’s homemade very-whole-wheat bread could become crumbs almost
immediately. She was a subsistence cook. Simply cooked animal innards,
veggies, fruits, and bread were our health-conscious fare. We occasionally had other people living
with us — I can’t remember why; maybe a combination of financial necessity
and someone to look after us kids while Dio was working on her music projects
or travelling with Charlie. On several occasions we had household help. I
especially remember Mamie Hairston, an African American woman about 30 years
old from piedmont Virginia. She stayed with our family more than ten years,
usually working a day at a time. I don’t think she ever married. She was
awkward and whimsical; she had a lovely nature. She fit right in with us.
Charlie called her a “first-century Christian,” a truly good person. She
showed us kids how to make sassafras tea. Sometimes she mildly warned Peggy and
me to be good or she’d have to give our parents a “bad report” when they
returned — she had to do that at least once, and it led to a ceremonial
spanking. Visitors were high points for the family.
I don’t remember who many of them were, but we loved Pete’s visits. He was in
his early days of playing Southern music at the time and also entertained us
with puppetry. I remember John Lomax giving us a ride on the running board of
his Chrysler (?), and I’ve been told that Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie visited
our home. I think the greatest delight for the family was Henry and Sidney
Cowell’s visits. Their excited music talk was fun even though we didn’t
understand a lot of it. Henry gave us piggy-back rides. We kids always asked
him to play his “Jig” though I think Dio wasn’t so keen on it. He played the
piece with his fists and forearms, and it was a little rough on her precious
piano. In retrospect I think the exuberance of that piece and its other
musical qualities fit right in with my mother’s playing and also what I was
getting from the field recordings I was listening to. When I was around seven, I was given the
great honor of being allowed to use the variable-speed record player that my
mother used for folk song transcription. She used earphones that sounded like
a telephone, but I preferred the speaker. I couldn’t use it on her desk, so I
sat on the floor with it. I sharpened the cactus needle we used to play the
200 or so aluminum field recordings that made up the largest part of our
family record collection and listened to Jimmie Strothers, Leadbelly, and the
Ward Family of Galax, Virginia. I also listened to our very few commercial
recordings, which included Dock Boggs’s “Pretty Polly,” Gid Tanner’s
“Fiddler’s Convention in Georgia” (I almost wore it out), and artists such as
Sonny Boy Williamson, Fats Waller, Norman Phelps and the Virginia Rounders,
Billie Holiday (“Strange Fruit”), Meade Lux Lewis, Sidney Bechet, Josh White,
and Winifred Christie playing Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Last but not least, there were several 78
rpm, 12” very fragile pressings from the early 1930s of Ruth Crawford
Seeger’s “String Quartet, Andante” which, pressed off-center, had an
additional 78 rpm pitch variation on top of the intended ones. It seemed wonderfully
strange. I loved that too. During those Silver Spring years, Dio took
care of the family, gave birth to Penny, edited several books of folk songs,
including American Folk Songs for Children, which was soon to
introduce many thousands of families to the songs and her creative piano
arrangements. All with a cranky portable typewriter, without driving a car,
without diaper service or a washing machine (or a weather forecast), and
mostly before dial telephones. As an unself-conscious five- to eleven-year-old,
I absorbed a lot of those Silver Spring years — the family life, the singing,
the visitors and their talk, my parents’ passionate belief in musical values.
It’s given me a strong foundation for my life, and I’m thankful. |
