“The Jefferson County Sound”; old-time fiddle and banjo; blues, and jazz, and the Sacred Harp. Nov. 12 though 14, Birmingham will play host to a wide range of Alabama sounds, performed in a series of downtown venues. It’s all part of a three-day “symposium and expo” hosted by the Alabama Folklife Association, an organization devoted to the homegrown heritages that help make up this state.
The AFA — a Birmingham-based nonprofit and a partner program to the State Council on the Arts — was founded in 1980, its mission to “document, preserve and promote” the state’s cultural traditions. This weekend it pursues that mission with Fall Into Folklife, an event that promises to bring together performers, artists, folklorists, scholars and the general public in an exploration and celebration of Alabama’s community traditions — and, in particular, Alabama’s music.
The event opens Thursday night at the Carver Theater with a stage full of Birmingham blues artists. All day Friday the Birmingham Museum of Art will present talks, panels and demonstrations on a diversity of topics, all with Alabama roots. Friday night the Tutwiler Hotel will host a jam session of local jazz masters, and on Saturday morning the Pepper Place Market will present an expo of original Alabama arts and music. (A full schedule and additional information is available at alabamafolklife.org.)
Meanwhile, all these festivities offer a welcome excuse to delve into the idiosyncrasies, cultural inheritances and living traditions that make Alabama unique.
“What Wondrous Love”: Sacred Song In Alabama
Some of Alabama’s most distinctive musical traditions are expressions of sacred song. One notable example is the state’s heritage of Sacred Harp singing. A presentation in Friday’s symposium will spotlight this rare form of driving, a cappella spiritual song, examining its history and offering a live demonstration by singers steeped in the tradition.
At a Sacred Harp singing, participants sit in a square, arranged by vocal parts (tenor, bass, alto and treble) and sing tunes out of a long rectangular songbook — The Sacred Harp, first published in 1844 — where notes are represented by a series of triangles, ovals, squares and diamonds. A song leader stands in the center of the action, directing the group with swift down-up movements of the hand; every singer has the opportunity to lead a song (with singers all facing each other in the square, there’s no audience, only participants). Many leaders are associated with their favorite hymns, sung year after year after year.
The “Sacred Harp” is the unaccompanied human voice itself, and it’s hard to imagine a song style more capable of filling a room so forcefully with the power of that voice. The music has remained essentially unchanged since it first spread through the South in the middle of the 19th century, but it’s still sung today with a dynamic, living passion by the diverse groups of women and men who continue to carry the tradition forward.
Jefferson County has long been home to another tradition of a cappella sacred song, a significant and influential gospel quartet style known as the “Jefferson County Sound.” The local sound developed largely in African American mining and steel-working camps in the early 20th century and spread with the help of community singing instructors. By the middle of the 1920s there was a fertile culture of local groups, several of them — the Famous Blue Jays, the Dunham Jubilee Singers, the Bessemer Sunset Four and more — gaining success as recording and radio artists.
Touring groups from Jefferson County helped spread the sound further. The local music proved influential to the nation’s gospel trends and also shaped the growth of the doo-wop sound. The Birmingham area continued for decades to boast a great number of these quartets, and many of the original groups remain active today.
Two longstanding quartets, the Pillars of Birmingham and Dot and the Silver Voices, will bring this rich heritage to Pepper Place on Saturday. Both groups have substantial histories. The Silver Voices, an all-female group in a tradition dominated by men, celebrated its 49th anniversary Nov. 8 with hours of singing tributes from other area groups.
The Pillars were founded in 2005, but the collective careers of its singers reveal much deeper roots in the quartet community. The career of the group’s eldest member, Norman “N.B.” Wooding, Jr., who died on Halloween, suggests the depth of the Pillars’ history. Born in 1923, Wooding joined the McMillan Juniors in 1935. Before helping found the Pillars Wooding sang with a variety of groups including the Willing Workers Gospel Group, the Marian Anderson Choral Ensemble, the Kelley Choral Singers, the MacMillan Jubilee Singers, the Birmingham Traveleers and the Moments of Meditation. Wooding also served in World War II, and in the Civil Rights Movement. He worked in the mines of Red Mountain, and for decades hosted a gospel radio show on station WJLD. The Pillars continue the tradition today, and one of its members is Norman Wooding III, a third-generation quartet singer.
The Jefferson County sound is less active today than it was in the middle of the last century. The loss of a singer like Wooding hangs heavy. Still, the performances at the recent anniversary of the Silver Voices gives some indication of the number of quartets still active: besides the Silver Voices, a dozen groups from Birmingham, Bessemer, Brighton and Warrior all lent their voices to the celebration.
“Birmingham Breakdown”: Alabama Blues And Jazz Legacies
Alabama compared to its neighbors goes often unheralded in the story of the blues, but its contributions to that music are notable. Certainly Alabama has been overshadowed to the west by Mississippi and its legendary Delta. To the north, Memphis can claim Beale Street, and to the east there are the Piedmont blues of the Carolinas and Georgia.
When the first blues recordings were made in the 1920s and ‘30s, Alabama may simply have lacked a distinctive style of its own, but the limited attention given Alabama by talent scouts in that era likely contributed further to the state’s comparatively low profile: our understandings of the early blues rely heavily on recordings and on the movements — the accidents both of discovery and omission — of those scouts. Moreover, Alabama’s most distinctive blues tradition was pioneered by pianists, boogie-woogie players like Cow Cow Davenport, Pine Top Smith and Walter Roland, but during the blues revival of the ‘60s a preoccupation with the guitar led the first, most influential historians of the blues to marginalize the blues piano, relegating to the sidelines Alabama’s most significant contributions to the blues universe.
Still, Alabama has produced a powerful blues tradition and more than a few standout performers. The first generations of blues players included Birmingham’s powerful blues vocalist, Lucille Bogan; the Bessemer harmonica player Jaybird Coleman; and the Greenville guitarist Ed Bell. From Ariton, Alabama, “Big Mama” Thornton became a star of the Chitlin’ Circuit and an immediate harbinger of rock and roll. In the 1980s guitarist Willie King founded the Freedom Creek Blues Festival in Aliceville, an event now nearing its third decade; and in Bessemer Henry “Gip” Gipson has gained widespread attention as the operator of one of the South’s last-standing backyard juke joints.
The blues lives on today in Alabama, and Fall Into Folklife kicks off with a stage full of contemporary local blues artists: guitarist Clarence “Bluesman” Davis, harmonica master Jock Webb and the endlessly soulful, deep-voiced and dynamic Elnora Spencer.
Birmingham’s jazz heritage, meanwhile, represents another rich vein of tradition, its story rooted in the city’s once-segregated schools. At Industrial (later Parker) High School, a printing instructor and bandmaster named John T. “Fess” Whatley produced legions of musicians who left Birmingham to enter some of the nation’s leading bands. Whatley’s students played with Ellington, Armstrong, Basie and others. One band of local players, the Erskine Hawkins Orchestra, put Ensley’s Tuxedo Junction on the musical map, commemorating their old stomping ground in a national hit. Birmingham musicians Teddy Hill and Joe Guy were important contributors behind the scenes to the development of bebop. The eccentric bandleader Sonny Blount left the Magic City to become Sun Ra, a hero of the avant-garde.
Other players remained in Birmingham to contribute to the local scene, many becoming teachers. Birmingham educators who were also top-notch jazzmen, like Amos Gordon and Frank Adams, passed their passion and training on to new generations.
Perhaps the best way to witness the Birmingham jazz heritage today is to stop by the B.O.S.S. Ultra Bar and Lounge on 20th Street, where every Tuesday night a group of players gather for a jam session led by trumpeter Daniel “Jose” Carr. For Fall Into Folklife, Carr plans to bring that session to the Tutwiler Hotel. Participating musicians include established heroes of the local jazz scene, like trumpeter Bo Berry, the master players improvising alongside a younger generation of up-and-coming instrumentalists.
A Centennial Celebration: Remembering Alan Lomax
Fall Into Folklife celebrates not only Alabama’s culture, but also the efforts of a wide range of scholars, writers, and documentarians to record and preserve that culture. Friday’s symposium will explore the contributions of folklorist Alan Lomax to the preservation of Alabama’s music — a focus timed with the centennial of Lomax’s birth.
Surely no individual ever did more to document and disseminate the traditional music of the American South than did Lomax; and surely no individual has shaped, more than Lomax, the modern image of the folklorist: a kind of cultural curator Lomax presented as a romantic adventurer-collector, lugging a heavy weight of recording apparatus over back roads and onto front porches, into prison yards, back rooms and juke joints, church houses and mountain hollers. Lomax’s work has shaped, whether we acknowledge it or not, many assumptions about America’s musical heritage, particularly the rural blues, a genre to which Lomax was especially drawn. Biographer John Szwed puts it dramatically, but his claim has more to it than hyperbole: “Lomax,” writes Szwed, “was arguably one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century, a man who changed not only how everyone listened to music but even how they viewed America.”
Lomax recorded Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly and helped shape both men’s careers. He recorded hours’ worth of reminiscences by jazz patriarch Jelly Roll Morton, and he made, on a Mississippi porch, the first-ever recordings of Muddy Waters. Following and expanding on work begun by his father (John Lomax, a pioneering scholar himself of American music and culture) he developed the Library of Congress’s Archive of American Folksong, contributing a wealth of recordings from his own extensive trips around the country. He edited anthologies of traditional American song and released numerous commercial albums of downhome music from communities across the country.
His efforts helped fuel the folk music revival of the last century, as city and suburban listeners discovered through his recordings worlds of downhome music they’d never known. In the later years of Lomax’s career he envisioned what he called a “Global Jukebox,” a far-reaching and universally accessible database that would catalogue and cross-reference patterns of speech, music, and dance from all over the world. Such a “jukebox” could introduce to one another the diverse citizens of far-flung geographies, uncovering the beautiful idiosyncrasies of diverse cultural groups — and, at the same time, revealing the universal patterns of expression that make us human.
Lomax was only the most famous in a family of influential folklorists. As a teenager he’d joined his father on his own recording trips through the South. From the late 1970s into the early ‘90s Alan’s sister, Bess Lomax Hawes, worked as director of the National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk Arts Program, and through her efforts traditional culture found a place under the umbrella of public arts agencies. It was, indeed, under the leadership of Hawes that state-sponsored organizations across the country began to develop folklife programs like the AFA. Both Alan and Bess were participants in the AFA’s founding meeting in 1980, an event that connected the work of local folklorists to a broader national movement. This weekend’s symposium looks back at the Lomaxes’ work in Alabama, putting that work in the broader context of the traditions that family helped preserve.
“Trouble So Hard”: The Lomaxes In Alabama
The great majority of the field recording conducted in Alabama by both John and Alan Lomax took place in Sumter County in the town of Livingston. There the Lomaxes encountered local folklorist Ruby Pickens Tartt, who served as a guide to local singers and storytellers. In 1937 she introduced John Lomax to Vera Hall, a woman of whom the elder Lomax later wrote, “had the loveliest voice I had ever recorded.” Hall’s repertoire of song — most of it spiritual song (she for the most part resisted the temptation to sing “worldly” songs) — was seemingly unending.
First John and then Alan Lomax recorded Hall on several occasions; Alan used interviews with Hall as the basis for his 1959 book, The Rainbow Sign. In 1999 electronica musician Moby built a hit recording around a generous sample of “Trouble So Hard,” a song Hall recorded for Alan four decades previous; embellished by electronic beats and an infectious dance groove, Hall’s anthem gained an unexpected second life as Moby’s “Natural Blues,” the unlikely and soulful backdrop to so many campus fraternity parties, ecstasy-fueled raves, and workaday suburban commutes.
In Livingston Lomax sought out also fiddlers George Fields and Albert Hammond and found a special treasure in Emma Hammond, Albert‘s wife, herself a banjo picker. In the town of Fyffe Lomax recorded the 56th annual convention of the United Sacred Harp Musical Association, and the recordings—the first to capture the powerful Sacred Harp sound in full stereo—are a stirring and profound testament to that tradition.
For its symposium, the AFA will use Lomax’s work in Alabama as the jumping-off point for a number of presentations. Daisybelle Thomas-Quinney—a Sumter County storyteller, educator, activist and minister—will perform as Vera Hall herself, enacting on stage Hall’s story, spirit, and legacy of song. Joyce Cauthen—a former director of the AFA, and a chronicler of Alabama’s fiddle heritage—will discuss Lomax’s recordings of Fields and the Hammonds; fiddlers Jim Cauthen and Jim Holland will perform the tunes from Livingston, with Holland also reproducing some of Emma Hammond’s banjo repertoire and style. Finally, Tom Piazza, author of Alan Lomax’s Southern Journey, will share his own reflections on Lomax’s legacy and its meaning for this state.
More Than Music
Fall Into Folklife celebrates more of Alabama than its music alone. Friday’s symposium will include discussion of quilting and pottery in Alabama, plus a look at the state’s ghost stories. Robert Thrower, a community leader in the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, will discuss that group’s traditional medicine practices. At Pepper Place on Saturday instrument makers from Homewood Music will demonstrate their craft, and Birmingham’s Bib and Tucker Sew-Op will host a sewing session for their March Quilts project: an ongoing series of gatherings addressing themes of civil rights and social justice through quilt-making and discussion.
According to Mary Allison Haynie, director of the AFA and organizer of the festival, the weekend is a chance to learn about and learn from the many individuals who through the years have helped preserve and further the state’s heritage. It’s also, she says, a chance to encounter local and traditional artists who haven’t yet gotten the recognition they deserve.
Even, indeed, in their own hometown, many of the musicians and traditions outlined above have remained beneath the radar — and Fall Into Folklife offers one opportunity to help correct that oversight. We hear often these days of Birmingham’s resurgence; the glory of the local has become a constant rallying cry. We ought, then, to slow down, look around, and hold up the local legacies that have been here all along, shaping the city’s and the state’s culture and identity and offering a rich inheritance and roadmap for the future.
If you’ve never heard Elnora Spencer belt out the blues or listened to Jock Webb’s harmonica growl; if you’ve never sat in on one of our city’s jazz jams and heard Bo Berry blow, or danced to the lively strains of a local fiddler, never heard a longstanding quartet of local gospel voices lift up their infectious holy anthems — then it’s time, at last, you get caught up.
Burgin Mathews is host of THE LOST CHILD, a “downhome roots music” radio hour, airing Saturday mornings and Tuesday nights on Birmingham Mountain Radio (facebook.com/lostchildradio). With local music hero Dr. Frank Adams he is the co-author of Doc: The Story of a Birmingham Jazz Man (University of Alabama Press, 2012), and he’s at work as we speak on a book-length history of Birmingham’s jazz community. He teaches classes in English, Creative Writing, and Film at Spain Park High School.