What Does Democracy Look Like?
I had the honor of creating the theme music for a new show from To The Best of Our Knowledge that attempts to answer this very question. The show comes from Wisconsin Public Radio in Madison, WS, and is called Demanding Democracy. It is exactly what we need if we want to improve the tone & substance of our national dialogue. Featured interviews include Cornell West, Tavis Smiley, Julian Assange, and Keli Carender, the first Tea Party activist.
I was asked to try to capture ‘the sound of democracy,’ and tried to capture the sound of many voices trying to be heard at once. At our best, we do this in a way that each voice can be heard and appreciated for its own distinct point-of-view. The theme music features sound bytes from the interviews, including bytes from Tavis Smiley, Cornell West, Keli Carendar and others.
Demanding Democracy Theme Music
TTBOOK airs on WBEZ Sundays at 6 pm, but you can listen to the podcast at the link below.
Attorney General Eric Holder delivered a candid address on the way we don’t really talk about race in America. The speech was given at The Department of Justice in February of 2009, shortly after Barack Obama’s inauguration. However dark our past has been, we elected a black man to be the president of the United States. It was one of the moments that I was most proud to be an American.
Whether you think Obama is a socialist or that he’s tied to big money, whether you think he wants to give the government the power to create ‘death panels’ or that he gave away too much in the health care bill, we elected a black man president. We need to let that soak in as a culture. We can give ourselves some credit.
Nothing happens overnight, but only 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, and 45 years after the Civil Rights Act, we, as a nation, assembled a majority of the country behind a leader of color. It is not immediate, but it is progress.
Eric Holder’s speech, however, cast the way we continue to talk about race and interact with each other in a stark light. How honestly do we really talk about the way we perceive our differences? How candid are we about those aspects of our own perception of race that remain rooted in centuries of mistrust and misunderstanding? How often do we deliberately take ourselves out of our own comfort zone, and really try to get an idea of what it looks like from the other side? Why do we tiptoe around this central fact of what it means to be American?
As a white male, it is not possible for me to have an accurate idea of how it feels to dream in black or brown skin. My own ability to dream, to imagine other ways to live & work, feels unlimited. 
The gap between how I see myself as a successful artist, father, and contributing member of society is not terribly at odds with the values of my peers and those whose opinion I care about. How differently would I think, dream and act if, among my friends and those whose approval I care about, there was a suspicion of intelligence and cooperation with established culture and ideals? Would I have the courage to wear my pants up around my waist? Wear a jacket and tie? Would I be willing to take an honest, menial job, knowing that there was no future in it, and that there is no respect? How differently would I feel every time I saw a cop? How often would I be incensed by the suspicious looks from clerks in the drugstore or the cab drivers that sped by my outstretched hand? Finally – would I be careful not to aspire too much?
We are dialogue-challenged when it comes to race. We need to be candid with each other. Probing. We need to set aside some of our political-correctness, our fear of saying something wrong, and be honest with each other.
We do have a model, I believe. In many ways, we have done this in our music. We have traded instruments and styles of performance back & forth for hundreds of years. We have created music that draws on our collective and separate histories. We have created an exquisite musical culture that honors both traditions and continues to grow and incorporate new forms of expression. It has been messy, often cruel. It has been self-serving. More often than not, those who receive credit are not those who were the initial creators. We still need to look those realities squarely in the eye.
When we do, however, let’s also stop and take pleasure in the incredible beauty that the counterpoint between our cultures has made, the amazing music that the simultaneous fear and attraction between our intertwined cultures has produced. And . . . let’s remember that there is a whole lot more music to be made.
Which Side Are You On?
In 1931, mine operators hired gun thugs to force their way into Florence Reece’s log cabin in Straight Creek, KY in search of her miner husband, Sam. After they left, Florence scribbled her outrage in the form of a song on her kitchen wall calendar, to the tune of a familiar broadside ballad – “Jackie Frazier.”
“Which Side Are You On?” would become one of the most poignantly familiar and lasting statements of class conflict. It was during that 1931 Harlan County miners’ strike that Molly Jackson, the folksinger & midwife who sings the opening line of “A Yankee Clipper In Congo Square,” grabbed a pistol out of the hands of one of the union breakers and shoved it in the bum of the bum!
The IWW singers perform: Which Side Are You On? read more…
Official “Yankee Clipper” Release!
Created out of a passion for American regional and popular music, “A Yankee Clipper In Congo Square” highlights the way American musical styles interact and complement one another. Part traditional folk, part film music, and part remix, the album is a modern historical mashup built around original recordings from 1929 – 1959, and surrounded by samples and live performances of modal jazz & bebop, delta blues, classical orchestral voicings, 70’s rock & funk, and pattern music. Composer Steve Mullen is joined by Byrd Ziegler and a number of the musicians involved in the making of the album for this live, interactive media event that marks the official release of this one-of-a-kind recording!
Byrd Ziegler is an experimental filmmaker and mixed media artist whose work is described as ‘Visual Music.’ Through the live manipulation of film, slides, and drawings, she uses different media to heighten and ‘mix’ our sensory perceptions. She plays off of the feelings and meanings we assign to images in an effort to approach our “collective sub-conscious” from a new direction!
America: More Gumbo Than Melting Pot?
Though we’ve all accepted it as the standard description of American culture for over 200 years, I’m starting to think that the melting pot metaphor falls far short of the reality here. It assumes that assimilation is the ideal, that we somehow want to create this uniform national identity. It assumes the loss of unique ethnic & cultural characteristics, and it is not, in practice, what has happened here in the United States.
The Melting Pot
The reality is much richer and more textured. Assimilation assumes the melting away of the specific characteristics that define ethnic identity, and begs the emergence of a ‘standardized’ American culture. We’re far too contrary as a nation, however, to paint such a simple and homogenous picture, and when we look closely at American culture, the strains of each of the individual ethnic groups that contribute to our collective noise remain apparent, however deeply buried they may have become over the years. They remain visible in the vibrant neighborhoods in our cities and in rural regions throughout the country. Characteristics are taken on by other groups, traded and re-expressed on a natural and on-going basis, but the original DNA remains visible when we have the eyes to see it.
We all borrow from each other, keep what fits, alter it to work with our own style, and put it out to be borrowed back and changed again.
This is especially true in our music, and why music is such a great place for us to constantly redefine who we are as a culture. It’s how the banjo – with its “half-barbaric twang” – a stringed instrument from Africa that epitomized the plantation ‘darkey’ in the middle of the 19th Century, could end up being the instrument most Americans now associate with an Appalachian ‘hillbilly.’
It’s how urban African-American musicians could take swing from the ‘whorehouses’ in Missouri and ragtime ‘piano professors’ in New Orleans, combine it with the bent notes of the Delta blues, improvise their way through European-style songs from Tin Pan Alley, and come up with our most singular musical achievement – jazz.
When I picture a melting pot it puts me in mind of some sort of cosmic oatmeal, a bland & tasteless soup whose ingredients are too softened to have any real definition. I’d be happier with a bowl of gumbo, full of spice & definition. And that’s what we’ve done. The process hasn’t been gentle. It’s been full of cruelty, hardship and inequality.
But we’ve managed to pass the notes back and forth until we came up with music no pure ethnic culture could have ever created, a fitting reflection of the society we’re trying to make work, full of competing strains and contrary rhythms.
It may not always be pretty, but I happen to think it’s a thing of complex and incredible beauty.
Well – How Did I Get Here?
If there is an image that defines the early 1980’s post-punk / post-disco “what do we do now?” dilemma, it’s David Byrne in his bowtie and horn-rimmed glasses posing – with art-school hipster attitude – the definitive existential question: “Well . . . how did I get here?!”
“Once In A Lifetime” will go down as one of the culture’s pivotal records, not just for the catchiness of the tune and the brilliance of Brian Eno’s production – but also for its self-conscious irony.
So David Bynre’s question remains. How did we get here? For me, the answer to that question ultimately has to do with creativity. Steve Reich talks about how “Stravinsky said something to the effect that composers grub around for roots. . . . It’s an instinctual searching for what it is that gets you musically excited.”
Whether I knew it at the time or not, that’s what drove me in making this album. It was about finding where the music I loved came from, and about trying to identify the core characteristics that tie the countless regional styles of American music together.
It was about connecting dots – personal, musical & cultural.
I can’t say I connected all the dots, but I do see our ‘musical cultural’ interaction in a new way. When I hear Almeda Riddle sing “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” I hear an ancient European folk melody that’s lived in an Appalachian holler, been dragged across the Mississippi Delta, and is now sung in the Ozarks by a white woman with as blue a 3rd & 7th as any slide player I’ve ever heard, and I can hear the whole country in that one voice.
When Tower Records went out of business a few years ago, I went in to pick up as many deals as I could afford. While I was rummaging around I found a gold mine – collections of old vintage & archival recordings that I had never heard, most of which I’d never even heard of. Some were field recordings from the Library of Congress. Some were old commercial releases that had been re-issued (legally and illegally,) and some I have yet to determine the source.
For a guy who realized he loved music when he first heard Bill Evans’ “Trio ’65″ & Traffic’s “John Barleycorn Must Die,” these recordings filled in a lot of the blanks. They started to tie the various American ‘folk’ genres together. I immersed myself in these recordings – singers, guitarists, storytellers, fiddle players and so on, for whom music had been the defining instrument of their daily lives, whether at home, at work, at church, at the picnic, at the juke joint, and who – for the most part – were never known beyond the county they lived the balance of their lives in. I was captivated by these voices, each with incredible distinction and deep history, who spoke for and defined a very particular region. And I was drawn irresistibly to the idea that these voices would have sounded great together, that these highly individual voices were all a part of our common cultural noise, and that with the technology available to us now, I could try to put some of them in the studio together, however separated they had been by decade, geography, ethnic origin or otherwise.
So that’s what I’ve done with this record, hopefully with a great deal of respect for these incredible artists I never could have met, but have had the honor of working with. And as for the opening question – how did I get here? – well, the answer keeps unfolding . . . and unfolding . . . and unfolding.
Steve
It was an attempt to come up with an image that best described what I was trying to do with this album. I put a Yankee clipper in Congo Square because there is no place in America where it would seem more out of place, to put an unmistakeable image of white, merchant-class New England in the heart of Carnival . . . to see a group of sailors wandering around in the only field in the southern United States where African-Americans were allowed to gather & play ancestral drums before the Civil War . . . to hear the sound of sea shanties in what is now Louis Armstrong Park . . . .
I wanted to combine images that, at first glance, appeared to have no connection. That is what I was trying to do with the songs on this album. The album is an attempt to capture a few of the subconscious connections in our cultural history, a stretch that I feel is best captured with music.
I don’t know of anything that drives creative expression harder than context, than putting something familiar in a place it has no business being, and where it’s cast in a completely new light. That’s what I tried to do with “A Yankee Clipper In Congo Square.” I took nine of the most idiosyncratic and powerful performances I knew of and combined them with musical styles, instruments and voices that were as far removed from each of those individual voices as I could imagine – Caroline & Katherine Shipp singing a Delta game song wrapped up in a Celtic fiddle tune; Deacon I. D. Beck of the Mt Olivet Old Regular Baptist Church standing in the platform shoes of Robert Plant, hair flying in the smoke & lights of Jimmy Page’s guitar blasts; Blind Willie Johnson with a back-up band that includes ‘the Edge,’ Jimi, Miles, the pattern music of Steve Reich & Robert Fripp, the orchestral voicings of Aaron Copland and Aretha’s background singers; Margaret’s “Creek Lullaby” interrupted by an African-American field holler & Wade Ward’s Appalachian banjo playing, and especially a Wisconsin woodsman, Noble Brown, singing a sea shanty with ‘the professor’ himself — Mr Jelly Roll Morton.
I became very close with these voices as I worked on this album. I’d like to say they became my friends. I certainly hope they would enjoy where we wound up together. And I hope you will, too.
Steve
