Folksongs of Another America captures Midwestern music history

Dust-to-Digital collection fills a gap in the American songbook

Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946 fills a gap in the great American folklore catalog. While the historical trail of music-making in the Southern, Western, and Northeastern United States has been abundantly mapped and distributed, the music and folkways of the upper Midwestern states and Great Lakes region are not as well-blazed. For the adventurous music wrangler, Folksongs of Another America is a relatively unfamiliar beast with a strange voice and an endearingly quirky disposition. The latter quality is most vividly on display in the short introductions, storytelling and conversations taking place between the performers and documentarians throughout the recordings.

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Packaged as a hardbound book, Folksongs of Another America features 175 songs on five CDs plus 12 songs that are part of a short documentary film on DVD. It’s a time machine set for 1930s and ’40s rural America in a region settled by a diverse array of people including indigenous North Americans and immigrants and their descendants primarily from northern European countries. The languages and dialects stem from Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Finnish, French, Polish, Russian, Cornish, Yugoslavian, German, Hungarian, Polish, Croatian, and Serbian origins.

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While some of the melodies are familiar, having spawned nursery rhymes, lullabies and children’s songs (e.g., “Turkey in the Straw”), most of the music, which has never been widely available, provides a historically illuminating listening experience. The basic folk song forms are here — yodels, ballads, limericks, hymns, rags ,and polkas — but the voicings are not far from the assimilation point where the Old and New Worlds began to drift apart. Even when the lyrics are delivered in English, sharp and distinct ethnic colorations, inflections, timbres, and tone cast the ear back to Europe rather than forward to the future America.

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One of the memorable track sequences in the collection features Emery DeNoyer, a lumberjack from Minnesota who sings a trio of tunes: “Snow Deer,” Shantyman’s Life,” and “Irish Jubilee.” The latter song is derived from an epic Irish poem linked to the Tammany Hall political culture in late 19th century New York. A sequence of French-Canadian songs on the third disc includes a beautiful example of group harmony singing, “Non que j’aime donc que la boisson (No, So I Don’t Love Anything But the Drink),” led by a Canadian-born farmer and logger named John Cadeau. Anyone who has been enthralled by the a cappella singing troupe Les Charbonniers de l’enfer will instantly recognize the musical DNA.

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Although brief (47 minutes), the documentary, The Most Fertile Source: Alan Lomax Goes North, provides an invaluable visual context in which to imagine the music contained on Folksongs of Another America. We get to see, not just hear about, the levees constructed by Croatians singing a ragtime blues depicting their arduous task. We watch a middle-aged Serbian man perched on a rickety chair outside of his ramshackle house singing about the Balkan War of 1912. We see a Finnish photographer named Wäinö Hirvelä sitting at a desk while singing and accompanying himself on a zither. In the film’s most charming sequence, a group of Finnish Americans perform a type of square dance in a small field, keeping in time to the ripping fine fiddling of Charles Korvenpaa who stands next to a pond. The setting — on a well-kept farm in the hamlet of Green near the shores of Lake Superior, a creek spanned by a footbridge cutting across the grassy stage, shot in the late afternoon sunlight — could hardly be more evocative of the romantic notion of old-time rural America; with a Finnish twist.

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All of the music on Folksongs of Another America was recorded and compiled by seasoned folklorists Lomax, Sidney Robertson, Alan Lomax, and Helene Stratman-Thomas during separate travels through Wisconsin and Minnesota, and at folk festivals in Chicago and Washington D.C. The Most Fertile Source is a digitally mastered mash-up of silent film footage, field recordings, and voice-over readings of letters and notes written by Lomax on a six-week trip to Michigan in 1938. The 430-page book, written by James P. Leary, a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies, contains information about the project’s history and principal participants, and notes about every song and performer.

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Technically a co-production between Dust-to-Digital and the University of Wisconsin Press in collaboration with the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the Association of Cultural Equity/Alan Lomax Archive, Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946 is a fascinating, comprehensive and essential entry in the American folklore canon. (5 out of 5 stars)