Note to readers: next Friday will mark the final installment of “The Imitation Game: A Philosophy of American Popular Music” series—for a while. The posts tend to be long, and readers will probably appreciate some breaks and brevity. “The Imitation Game” will resume later (I began this project during Covid lockdown, and next week’s edition is as far as I got—but there’s much more to add to the history of American musical mimesis).
This week I’m headed to Tulsa, OK?
Birthplace of my mother—whence she claims to derive a strain of Cherokee ancestry (as many non-Indian Americans are wont to do, for various reasons—mostly cultural capital). However Oklahoma is Indian Territory, the final destination of Andrew Jackson’s forced migration, the Trail of Tears. And Tulsa sits on the border between the Creek and Cherokee partitions of that Indian Territory—so who knows?
The University of Tulsa boasts the TU Institute for Bob Dylan Studies, and each year the TU Center for the Humanities hosts the Tulsa Switchyard festival, inviting a range of scholars, writers, artists and musicians to do their thing, and “cross the tracks that once divided our city.”
Tulsa is also home to the Woody Guthrie Center archive, dedicated to the works of the native Okie folkie. In 2016, Bob Dylan sold his archive to the University of Tulsa, now housed in the Bob Dylan Center museum in the city’s Arts District, next to works of the man whom he began his career by imitating.
I’ll be attending and reporting on the likes of Pulitzer winner Art Spiegelman—author of “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal), “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker), one of Variety’s “Banned and Challenged Books Everyone Should Read”—Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1996).
Spiegelman’s spiel includes a panel discussion on “Twenty-First Century Book Bans: A Conversation with PEN America” and “Free Speech on Campus: A Discussion with PEN America and FIRE.”
FIRE—The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, has supplanted the ACLU—which now advocates banning books and posthumously bowdlerizing the feminist expressions of Ruth Bader Ginsberg to include gender-neutral language—as the last institutional protector of Free Speech.
Greil Marcus will be there, speaking on Dylan and film noire.
And Miss Margo Price, whom I’ve never seen but is constantly promoted by Jack White, will be performing.
On a more somber note, the first event begins on May 30th, the anniversary of one of the most horrific racial massacres in American history in 1921. The city’s commercial “Black Wall Street”—uniquely successful at the time compared to other cities—was razed. Planes dropped kerosene bombs. 300 black residents were killed, and 10,000 left homeless.
Trump, you may recall, was forced to reschedule his June 19th campaign rally in Tulsa in 2020—the year the world outside of Texas, and people born on that date (myself), learned the meaning of Juneteenth. The location of this event certainly had as much to do with the uproar as its date.
Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World (2017)
Ever since I read about the Czech composer Anton Dvorak, who came to America to study our music as director of the National Conservatory of Music in NYC from 1892-1895, I’ve wondered about the connection between African-American and Native American music.
Dvorak, whose composed his orchestral From the New World (1893) symphony in honor and imitation of our sounds, advocated for the music of these two demographics as an important part of our musical legacy.
He also noted something I found amazing and have never forgotten since: they’re both based on the pentatonic scale. The simple, five-tone scale that every aspiring rock and blues guitarist is taught as their first fingering exercise.
Rumble goes a long way towards explaining that connection. For one thing, as Toni Morrison fictionalized in Beloved, many escaped slaves found refuge with (the friendlier) Indian tribes. For another, our culture, including Afro-Indigenous culture, is mixed. Omni-American, as Albert Murray put it.
You’ll be surprised to learn from this film how many important American musicians are Indian, or part-indigenous. Robbie Robertson of The Band. Charlie Patton, arguable founder of the blues. Jimi Hendrix. The film is named after Shawnee-Cherokee guitarist Link Wray’s 1958 instrumental masterpiece, “Rumble.”
Trust me, you know it by heart. Listen to the clip in the following article…
The Only Instrumental Record Ever Banned by US Radio:
Guitarist Link Wray belongs in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—if only for recording the most feared guitar instrumental in American music history
Another fine piece from Ted Gioia.
I’d long adored “Rumble,” but knew little of Link Wray’s bio. I knew he acquired that mesmerizing guitar distortion on the track by slicing a hole in the speaker cone of his amp. I didn’t know he fought in Korea, lost a lung there, then went on to inspire everyone from Dylan to Lennon to Townsend to… everyone, before he died in 2005. Or that he was inspired by a black circus performer who taught him bottleneck blues. Nor that “Rumble” was the only instrumental track banned for inciting violence:
“People would pull out their knives and cut each other,” [Wray] admitted in an interview. “I'd take a break and go outside and the police would come and carry 'em all out and I'd go back in and play again.”
Brief article, great companion piece to the film, Rumble. And don’t neglect later, folkier classics like “Fire and Brimstone” and “Falling Rain” on his eponymous 1971 album, Link Wray.
A Century of Censorship:
Matt Farwell's painstaking timeline of over a hundred years of American information suppression, secret bureaucracies, and "anti-disinformation" scares
A guest-post from Matt Taibbi’s Racket News. To save you the trouble of reading it (though I encourage you to if you wish), allow me to point out three dates I found interesting, topics which will resurface later in The Third Ear.
April 1951: Truman establishes the Psychological Strategy Board. They will prove instrumental in funding the 1954 Hollywood production of George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
January 10, 1953: Mary Dublin Keyserling, wife of former Truman economic adviser Leon Keyserling, is cleared after a Loyalty Review Board case was brought against her by McCarthy.
January 22, 1953: Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is published, one of what would become a long series of artistic/metaphorical commentaries on dangerously controversial topics. It’s rumored that the character of Elizabeth Proctor is based in part on Mary Keyserling.
The important thing to note here is that:
President Truman’s government approved of George Orwell’s 1945 allegory against Soviet communism, Animal Farm, and went so far as funding its Hollywood production.
The wife of Truman’s economic advisor was subjected to McCarthyite inquisition, and may have inspired a central character in Arthur Miller’s 1953 allegory against anti-communist hysteria—his 1953 play The Crucible.
In The Crucible, Elizabeth Proctor is the wife of John Proctor. John Proctor has an affair with a young woman, who goes on to blame her transgressions on witchcraft, leveling accusations at most of the women in Salem, including Elizabeth Proctor.
When John Proctor is compelled by his inquisitors to denounce witchcraft, and admit to the reality of sorcery, he refuses. He is hanged, rather than lie and falsely denounce his wife and others as “witches.”
On June 21, 1956, Arthur Miller became John Proctor. Life imitating art, because Miller’s art imitated life.
Just as Mary Keyserling, the wife of Truman’s advisor and possible inspiration for Miller’s Elizabeth Proctor, was called to testify before McCarthy, Arthur Miller was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee and asked to “name names” of communists. This summons was in no small part due to the anti-McCarthy subtext of his controversial play.
Miller refused, was charged with contempt of Congress and a jail sentence, which was later overturned, only after the McCarthyite spell was at long last broken with the famous words of Joseph Welch, “Have you no decency, Sir?”
Meanwhile, earlier in England…
The Fifth Column Podcast: “Members Only # 165 - In Memoriam”
George Orwell was having trouble finding a publisher for his allegory of Soviet communism, Animal Farm. Which a few years later, Truman would be promoting via Hollywood.
In 1944, a member of the U.K.’s Ministry of Information was visiting several of Orwell’s potential publishers warning them not to buy the book. “Do not publish this book,” as Michael Moynihan tells the story on The Fifth Column.
He goes on to recount how in 1991, the Soviet Archives opened up. They revealed that the Minister of Information warning Orwell’s publishers not to publish Animal Farm was a man named Peter Smollett. Smollett was an alias, and he was a Soviet spy assigned to the Ministry of Information’s Soviet Division in the United Kingdom. In the U.K.’s Soviet Division, designed to keep tabs on Soviet propaganda and infiltration, he effectively suppressed the publication of Orwell’s anti-Soviet Animal Farm.
In an unpublished introduction to Animal Farm, Moynihan mentions, Orwell wrote that: “The intellectual class of this country is completely under the spell of the Soviet Union.” I suppose he was right, and that would include England’s Ministry of Information, and the spies therein.
Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were Orwell’s last published works, both allegories of Soviet totalitarianism. The dystopia described in Nineteen Eighty-Four is invoked frequently these days, as a representation of where we’re headed, along with the adjective “Orwellian,” to describe where we are.
Orwell, as Moynihan mentions, is often called “prophetic” by the media, to describe twenty-first century America—but in his estimation this is misguided. Orwell was describing the Soviet Union exactly as he saw it at the time.
Years later, as Matt Welch mentions on the podcast, in other countries in the Eastern Bloc, communism-dominated audiences of Radio Free Europe would listen to translated narrations of Orwell’s communism books and marvel at his ability to analyze the totalitarian nature of their state, without having lived there himself.
Orwell was a democratic socialist for life. Along with Earnest Hemingway, he fought alongside the Soviet-backed Republicans against Franco’s Fascists in the Spanish Civil War. Yet also like Hemingway, in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell describes how he became disillusioned as the atrocities and hypocrisies of the communists began to rival those of the fascists in Spain. Homage to Catalonia was also difficult to publish, because in the face of fascism, no one wanted to acknowledge the problems of communism.
Orwell wrote many essays before, during, and after the WWII years. “Politics and the English Language” (1946), has become a sort of style-guide among writers seeking concise use of the English language. Political orthodoxy, according to Orwell in this essay, was leading to the “ugly and inaccurate” debasement of the English language, “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
I’m sure you can muster a few recent examples of politicized speech, where a single noun once sufficed, that now requires a of string of euphemistic nonsense words to name the same subject.
“Politics and the English Language” remains popular among certain circles for this reason.
One Fifth Column commentator notes that in one of Orwell’s essays—in 1944, when there were actual fascists in Italy, Germany and Spain—Orwell complained that even the word “fascist” had been mis-and-overused to the point of meaninglessness. What would he think of the word today? Or, Moynihan wonders, the word “Orwellian?”
I suppose the moral between Taibbi’s article and this podcast is that Soviet communism, American anti-communist hysteria, and Anglo-American sympathies towards either of these ideological extremes were equally warped during this tumultuous era.
And sometimes, we need fiction to describe reality accurately.
When the language of non-fiction and newspeak is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
I mentioned the Fifth Column guys last week—but forgot to disclose that one of the journalists on the show, Kmele Foster, is working on an interview piece with legendary music producer Steve Albini. Look forward to that.
The Fifth Column podcast is a paid subscription, but offers half-listens and previews without payent. I believe you can hear most of what’s described above for free, beginning around the 15 minute mark.
A WHOLE LOTTA TINA TURNER
November 26, 1939 - May 24, 2023
And finally, since tomorrow’s Memorial Day, a short piece in memory of Tina Turner, from The Nelson George Mixtape.
Rest in Peace among the Goddesses of Soul.