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Deep Cuts from Deep Gap: A Doc Watson Playlist

“People get more of a message from you than they do from an entertainer, and they believe in you. Now, you can say amen and forgive the sermon.” --Ralph Rinzler to Doc Watson, November 25, 1964. Archives Technician Rori Smith recently found a list sent to Ralph Rinzler from Doc Watson of all the Folkways albums Watson owned in 1963 and wrote a beautiful post about it. Rinzler archivists also put together your new favorite playlist to go along with it. Do you have a favorite track from Doc's collection? Read more...

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“Quelbe!” by Stanley and the Ten Sleepless Knights Now Available

Stanley Jacobs, bandleader of Stanley and the Ten Sleepless Knights, embraced quelbe music at a young age in the 1940s. “That’s all we knew,” says the St. Croix musician about the historically overlooked but more recently revered musical style of his homeland. For him, quelbe was music, and music was quelbe.

‘Quelbe! Music of the U.S. Virgin Islands’ (now available here) is the Smithsonian Folkways debut for this legendary group that recently celebrated its 40th anniversary of continuing this old-yet-new dance music. The album’s release is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s celebration of Black History Month.

The primary ingredients for quelbe music are call-and-response singing and drumming, accompanied by African-influenced dance. Listeners will hear the squash (gourd rasp), steel (triangle), flute, and banjo ukulele, in the contemporary trappings of electric keyboard, drum set, conga, and electric bass. The all-new recordings are accompanied by a 32-page booklet with photos and extensive notes by GRAMMY winning producer Daniel Sheehy.

Among the standout tracks, “Cigar Win The Race” is a rollicking song that fully embodies the spirit of quelbe. “Sly Mongoose” has a relaxed backbeat, and “When You Had Me” has a melody as cheeky as its lyrics, which tell the tale of a fickle former flame.

As the ninth volume in the Smithsonian Folkways’ African American Legacy Series — a multi-year collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture — this album expands the project’s scope to beyond the 50 states in a spirited fashion.

Band History:

When Stanley and his Ten Sleepless Knights formed in the early 1970s, quelbe was largely overshadowed by more commercially glamorous styles of music from the United States and other Caribbean islands. Class-based notions of propriety and superiority inflicted themselves on views of lifestyles associated with local, rural people of humble means. Quelbe music was thought by some to be scandalous. The lyrics of quelbe songs often contained sexual innuendo and double entendre, telling stories of clandestine sexual trysts and other lewd behavior. Few people would have guessed how much the genre would climb the social ladder in the Virgin Islands over the next four decades as the Virgin Islands focused on instilling the cultural heritage.

In 2003, the Virgin Islands legislature passed a bill officially making quelbe “the vocal and instrumental style of Virgin Islands.” Then in 2010, the band, whose members include a psychiatrist, a firefighter, an international basketball referee, and a racehorse owner, became recognized as its chief protagonists. It was a victory for a genre of traditional music that had once been snubbed, but is now celebrated.

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Watch Iraqi-American oud player Rahim AlHaj captivate the audience in the latest NPR Tiny Desk Concert. The recent National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow recorded the award-winning album “When the Soul is Settled: Music of Iraq” with Smithsonian Folkways in 2006.

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#tbt In 1951, Moses Asch was recruited by the American Museum of Natural History to create a soundtrack for their exhibit “Men of the Montaña,” about a group of Peruvian indigenous tribes. However, Asch’s “Peruvian” soundtrack did not contain any sounds actually recorded in Peru! Using cross-cutting and tape splicing, Asch layered recordings of animals in the Bronx Zoo, the rainforest in Panama, crickets in Connecticut, and even a Manhattan bathtub to create a synthetic rainforest soundscape. Read more about the album’s idiosyncratic creation in Craig Eley’s 2012 article in Folkways Magazine, “When It Rains, It Pours: Sounds of a Tropical Rain Forest in America and the Birth of the Science Series.”

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#AlbumCoverTuesday Alfred Frugh provided the minimalist artwork featured on the cover of Bert Williams’ 1981 Folkways release Nobody and Other Songs.

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Southern food and Southern music are close kin, and the Southern Foodways Alliance has brought them together in our November People's Picks Playlist. 

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‪#‎OnThisDay‬ in 1791 American volunteers and Chief Little Turtle of the Miamis had an encounter near Fort Recovery, Ohio. Get Wallace House's interpretation of the story in the song “On the 8th Day of November.”

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‪#‎tbt‬ In 1816 Rene Theophile Hyacinthe Laennec invented the stethoscope so that he could use sound to help better diagnose his patients. In 1955 Folkways released Sounds of Medicine, an indirect homage to his efforts which showcases audio recordings of actual mid-century surgery. The liner notes provide an in-depth take on the novelty of recorded operations and a snapshot of the historical development of sound in medicine.

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#WednesdayLessonPlan With “5,000-year-old Echoes of Humanity: Baalbek, Lebanon,” students will compare and contrast the folk music of Lebanon, sing and play a simple song in Arabic, and dance the national dance called the Dabke.

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#AlbumCoverTuesday Laura Pharis’ 2001 work “Early in the Spring” serves as the cover for Mike Seeger’s 2003 Folkways album True Vine. 

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Learn about the Irish diaspora and its musical repercussions in “Leaving and Being Left Behind: Immigration as a Theme in Irish Music” from the latest issue of Talk Story: Culture in Motion, an online publication from the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage that illuminates cultural traditions with personal storytelling.  The story features a playlist of Irish folk songs from the Folkways catalog.

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Happy Halloween! Listen to this spooky playlist from Smithsonian Folkways Recordings while you get ready for a night of trick or treating. 

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#tbt The July 4, 1964 issue of The New Yorker featured this cartoon spoof of Folkways Records. That recording must be lost in the archives somewhere, but we do have Deirdre Ní Fhlionn’s Irish Traditional Songs.

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#AlbumCoverTuesday For the 1952 Folkways album Religious Music of India, Ronald Clyne used a 16th century Jainist painting on cotton from the Gujarat region of India. 

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‪#‎OnThisDay‬ Sonny Terry would have turned 104. Terry frequently played with blues guitarist Brownie Mcghee and the duo recorded numerous albums for Moses Asch on Folkways records. Listen to the harmonica legend play the traditional folk tune “Shortnin’ Bread” on the 1956 Folkways release, Sonny Terry - Harmonica and Vocal Solos.

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‪#‎SpokenWordSaturday‬ Looking for a good book to read? Listen to Morris Schreiber’s “Some Famous World Novels Examined” from the 1963 Folkways release Understanding and Appreciation of the Novel for some ideas. https://goo.gl/9Xd5DX

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This animated music video by Ben Katchor for "Ich A Mazeldicker Yid" from new release The Brothers Nazaroff: The Happy Prince captures the spirit of the Coney Island boardwalk, complete with kasha knishes and klezmer.  Find more about this “ Yiddish pendant to the Anthology of American Folk Music" here.