folk music & technology in the usa.
Overview
“The Garden in the Machine: Folk Music and Technology in the USA” probes the surprising uses of technology in the folk music revival, which is typically understood as an antimodern, Luddite movement. In fact, many musicians, scholars, and participants in the folk revival turned to technology as a means of addressing how tradition and heritage might relate to the emancipatory possibilities of modern industrial democracy. Could one establish roots and, at the same time, flourish in a pluralistic, global society? How might technology serve not to impoverish cultural life, but rather enrich individualism and collectivity in a modern world? What about folk music’s problematic connections to racial purity and nationalistic exclusion? Could technology transform folk music from those legacies to the sound of a “garden in a machine,” a pastoral vision of social belonging that could nonetheless whir dynamically within the engine of modernity?
The book brings together music history and the history of technology to probe, through careful archival study and clear explanation, how folk revivalists in fact processed music—and ideas about music—through machines, not outside of or against them. The figures studied in the book expand our understanding of folk music as part of, rather than a rejection of, technology, modernity, and pluralistic democracy. The book also expands who counted as a folk revivalist and what folk music could sound like. Overall, these folk revivalists did not seek out the “machine in the garden,” which American Studies scholar Leo Marx once named as the quintessential pastoral American view of technology, so much as strive to locate a garden in the machine: they wanted to see if heritage, tradition, and roots could fit inside the machine of modernity.[1]
The book begins with classic US American folk music figures—Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger—who imagined their instruments as democratic “machines” that opposed fascism, hatred, and oppression. It then turns to a much wider range of musicians, folklorists, and participants in the folk revival: the Afrofuturist bandleader Sun Ra, who linked Egyptology to space travel, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, with their slogan, “Black Music: Ancient to the Future”; the book examines the homemade microtonal instruments and ideas of composer Harry Partch and the experimental work with tape machines, computers, and software by the composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. The book explores the printing of folk music as a technological remediation. It looks at how musicians treated their instruments as technologies. It examines the uses of computers to study ballads, global song styles, and treat 78 recordings as algorithmic data. And it explores folk revival conceptualizations of social networks and geospatial mapping.
Overall, the book contends that if we better understand the details of the folk revival’s engagements with technologies of print, transcription, audio recording devices, data mapping, and computers, they reveal not a simplistically antagonistic relationship between heritage and modernity but a more sophisticated summoning of the past as a resource for moving forward toward a more pluralistic, democratic, and emancipatory civil society. This is not just “the invention of tradition,” as Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger famously put it, but an effort to connect old roots to new routes by way of sound.[2]
Today, as more rigid and sometimes reactionary definitions of nation and heritage press in on contemporary American life, histories from unlikely places such as folk music’s engagements with technology have something to offer current concerns and difficulties. The “garden and the machine” was no Eden, but it does remind us that the choice is not merely between rigid, oppressive conceptualizations of heritage and atomized, alienating forms of modern life. Can US Americans—can humans as a whole—imagine a world in which the garden of rooted community even powers the machine of interconnected, democratic, modern emancipation? Listening back to how folk revivalists tried to address this question can aid us in trying to get the engine tuned up and running right today. Perhaps it can even help the garden grow.
Table of contents
Introduction—This Machine: Woody Guthrie’s Guitar and Pete Seeger’s Banjo
The book uses new findings in the Woody Guthrie Center archives to explore his idea of placing the slogan “This Machine Kills Fascists” on an acoustic guitar during World War II and Pete Seeger adaptation of the phrase to write on his banjo, “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces It to Surrender.”
Chapter 1—Ballads, Sorrow Songs, and Songbags: Debates About Printing Oral Culture
In the early part of the twentieth century, folk music scholars debated how to represent oral and musical folk sounds using the technology of print. They developed competing ideas of how folk music might return to oral forms from the page. Print was not the end of folksong, but a technological step along the way of its continued life.
Chapter 2—Diddley Bows, Dulcimers, Zithers, and ‘Fotdellas: Music Instruments as Vernacular Technologies
Musical instruments themselves are technologies of sound production. The use of the diddley bow among African American musicians, Jean Ritchie’s books about the dulcimer, Sidney Robertson Cowell’s commissioned technical drawings of a instruments among the multiethnic communities of California, and Jesse Fuller’s one-man band instruments such as his homemade ‘Fodella trouble assumptions about primitivism and expertise, instead presenting instruments as tools for achieving modern autonomy.
Chapter 3—Melographs and Seven-Pointed Stars: The True Lover’s Knot of Transcribing Barbara Allen
Literary scholar Bertrand Bronson and musicologist Charles Seeger sough to treat traditional ballads as data. Bronson employed an IBM tabulation machine and Seeger used a “melograph” machine to compare versions of the classic ballad “Barbara Allen.” Their inquiries raised questions about what counted, exactly, as the definitive version of a folksong when measured by its component details. Instead, folksongs such as “Barbara Allen” remained but seeds in the garden in the machine.
Chapter 4—The Fidelity of Folk Music: Cook Laboratories and the Dream of Accurate Sound Recording
Emory Cook was an audio engineer who worked with Folkways Records to record music, particularly in the Caribbean. His story points to a wider group of audio engineers who expanded the definition of folk by way of audio engineering. They shifted what folk music was and what it could be—often insisting on the inclusion of the ambient, animal, natural, environmental, and non-human: a true garden in the machine that broadened the definition of folksong.
Chapter 5—The Global Jukebox and the Celestial Monochord: Folk Music, Cybernetics, and Systems Theory in the Cold War
During the years after World War II, the folksong collectors Alan Lomax and Harry Smith connected folk music to the new field of cybernetics, using ideas of computation and even digital computers themselves to explore folk music as a system of knowledge. Their efforts to turn folksong into data and process it through computation anticipated issues of big data and its uses today, in the current age of AI.
Chapter 6—Humbead’s Revised Map of the World: Folk Scenes as Social Networks
In 1968 in Berkeley, California, two folk revivalists developed a complex map of the world as a folk music Pangaea, with over 800 names of the map’s population drawn around the edges. Humbead’s Revised Map of the World anticipated visions of computerized network and one of the creators, Earl Crabb, event became a pioneering computer programmer.
Chapter 7—Rethinking the Revivalism in Afrofuturism: The Folkways of Sun Ra’s Spaceways and Ancient to Modern with the Art Ensemble of Chicago
Sun Ra, the bandleader, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, a group of Chicago musicians, reimagined jazz as a music that fused Egyptology and ancient African, Asian, and indigenous sounds with futuristic visions of African American life involving space travel, science fiction, laboratories, and galactic worlds beyond the existing one. Rarely understood as engaging with concepts of folk music, they emerge in this study as seekers of new configurations and possibilities for African diasporic life and culture as fusions of tradition and technology.
Chapter 8—Root Notes: The Avant-Garde Revivalism of Harry Partch’s Microtones
Harry Partch grew frustrated with the tempered intervals of modern Western musical scales and built his own microtonal instruments to create folkloric operas. Partch described himself as “a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry” who connected primitive pursuits of “sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual” with rigorous, complex ideas of composition, troubling the boundaries between folk and art music in search of what he called “corporeal” musical theater.[3]
Chapter 9—Accordion Software: Pauline Oliveros’s Electro-Acoustic Ecology and the Pursuit of Deep Listening
Pauline Oliveros is rarely thought of as a folk musician, yet much of her work sought to blend traditions of accordion playing, her main instrument growing up in Houston, Texas, with tape machines, computer manipulation, software programming, and other technologies. Out of her mixing of older and newer approaches, she arrived at an ecological vision—the world of music rooted in “deep listening” and augmented by technology.
Epilogue—Unnatural Blues: Streaming Folktronics, the Return of the 78, and Vera Hall’s Ghost
The epilogue explores uses of older “folk” sounds in more recent times, noticing how streaming creates folkloric modes of listening; paying attention to the return of antiquated technologies as, paradoxically, traditional culture; and, most of all, the circulating voices of folk musicians in today’s wireless world.
[1] Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
[2] Eric Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
[3] Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1974), viii; Partch, quoted in Jonathan Cott, “Partch: The Forgotten Visionary,” Rolling Stone (11 April 1974): 20; Genesis of a Music, v.