Book of Ancestors: William Levi Dawson

William Levi Dawson, the latest from my Book of Ancestors, a work in progress:

William L Dawson framed

I started the Book of Ancestors a few months ago. It’s divided into three sections — “Family,” “Music,” and “Movement” — and will feature tributes to a range of “ancestors,” both literal and figurative, all from my home state of Alabama. (The “Movement” subtitle refers not only to figures from the Civil Rights Movement, but to a range of social movers whose lives represent numerous sorts of momentum, progress, and positive change.) I plan to be working at this off and on for a good little while, and thought I may as well post occasional developments here.

I made this tribute to Dawson last night while listening to his Negro Folk Symphony and to performances of the Tuskegee University Choir, recorded under his direction. I’d never heard of Dawson until very recently. A few weeks ago I came across this description in the WPA’s Alabama guidebook, first published in the 1930s:

“William Levi Dawson, director of the School of Music and the choir at Tuskegee Institute, is probably the State’s leading contemporary composer. Born in Anniston in 1899, Dawson has written in all forms and won the Rodman Wanamaker contest for composition in 1930 and 1931. Among his works are Negro Folk Symphony No. 1, first performed by the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra in 1934, “Out in the Fields,” and “Ain’-a That Good News,” a cappella choruses, and “Break, Break, Break,” a choral with orchestra. Maude Cuney-Hare, in Negro Musicians and Their Music, estimates that Dawson is the first among “present cultivated Negro composers of whom much may be expected in the way of producing what will be the future American music.”

Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony was a huge deal when it was first performed. It was lauded by Alain Locke, one of the principal architects of the Harlem Renaissance, singled out as both a masterwork in itself and as a harbinger of great things to come. The original Philadelphia audience broke custom by erupting into applause more than once before the first performance was finished; when it was over the crowd called Dawson out for multiple bows. Performances followed at Carnegie Hall, whose crowds were similarly enthusiastic and unrestrained. Listeners across the country tuned in to hear the piece performed live over the radio waves. “One is eager to hear it again and yet again,” cheered a critic for the New York World-Tribune. A review in the New York American newspaper declared it “the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has been so far achieved.” It was 1934, and Dawson was a black man from Alabama; his achievement was an historic one.

In the original program notes, Dawson wrote this:

“This Symphony is based entirely upon Negro folk-music. The themes are taken from what are popularly known as Negro spirituals, and the practiced ear will recognize the recurrence of characteristic themes throughout the composition… . In this composition the composer has employed three themes taken from typical melodies over which he has brooded since childhood, having learned them at his mother’s knee.”

Two years before the symphony’s debut, Dawson had explained his ambitions to a reporter for the Associated Press. “I’ve not tried,” he said, “to imitate Beethoven or Brahams, Franck or Ravel — but to be just myself, a Negro. To me, the finest compliment that could be paid my symphony when it has its premiere is that it unmistakably is not the work of a white man. I want the audience to say: ‘Only a Negro could have written that.”

Regrettably, in the years since its debut, Dawson’s landmark work has faded into obscurity. Dawson remained a respected public figure for years to come, but not for his orchestral compositions: under Dawson’s direction the Tuskegee University Choir gained international renown, touring and broadcasting widely and performing for the likes of Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt. Dawson emerged as an influential choral arranger and composer, and many of his spiritual arrangements have became American staples. He revisited and revised his original symphony several times in the years after its debut, but his attentions no longer centered on orchestral composition. In recent years, a few scholars have wondered over the gradual neglect of Dawson’s symphony and have advocated for its place in the American canon (see, for example, Gwynne Kuhner Brown’s “Whatever Happened to William Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony?” or John Andrew Johnson’s “William Dawson, ‘The New Negro,’ and His Folk Idiom”). While many of Dawson’s choral arrangements are still performed today — his most active lingering legacy — the name William Levi Dawson has been largely, and unjustly, forgotten.

So here he is, in my growing Book of Ancestors.

More to come.

Stay tuned.

William Levi Dawson scan

P. S. Want to see more things like this? Stay in the loop by following the blog: you can sign up on the top, righthand side of this page (or scroll to the bottom, if you’re viewing on a phone) to receive new posts in your email inbox. You can also follow @lostchildradio on Instagram and “like” my book and/or radio show on Facebook. You can also(!!) purchase my book with Alabama jazzman “Doc” Adams online or at your local bookstore. Heartfelt thanks, sincerely, for any / all of the above.

Baby baby baby baby baby baby baby baby baby baby baby baby baby baby

A year or two ago my family and I watched for the first time together Little Shop of Horrors — easily my favorite musical, and a great movie, too, from director Frank Oz. You may remember there’s a kind of doo-wop Greek chorus in it, inspired by the “girl groups” of the sixties; watching the movie inspired me, later that night, to draw a couple of those original groups. After that I put them aside until this just week, as I scrambled to get together some works for my art show, which opens this(!!) Saturday. I added the Chiffons to the two groups I already had (the Ronettes and the Crystals — I had to throw out a kind of disastrous Supremes, saving them for another project, some other time), and I fashioned them all together into a single tribute. Here’s the week’s progress and final result:

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I’m excited to have my first-ever public showing of my drawings, something I thought I’d never do; I’m only doing it now thanks to the encouragement of some very fine friends. And I’m delighted to show these drawings alongside the photography of Jared Ragland, an artist whose work I very much admire. If you’re in Birmingham, I hope you’ll come to the opening: it’s at The Jaybird this Saturday, August 11, from 7 to 9. We’ll have music provided by djcasequarter (the illustrious Kevin Nutt), and a short set too from Tiny Montgomery. We’ve got the ingredients for a very fine night.

(For more drawings, see this previous post, or this one.)

P.S. Usually I write here about the outsides of empty cardboard boxes — but stay tuned in the next week or two for a post about the insides of this cardboard box, which arrived at our house yesterday — and about whose contents I’m positively giddy.

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P. S., also: For the last thirty days I’ve been posting to Instagram daily photos I’ve taken over the years of boiled peanut stands and boiled peanut signs. Today marked the last day in the series, with this portrait of the artist, a photo taken in Florida a few years back by Susan Shoemaker. To see the whole set — as well as additional drawings not seen on this blog, and posts about my radio show and the roots of American music — check out @lostchildradio. Thanks, everybody.

HOT BOIL PNUTS (& other works in progress)

Three works in progress this week:

1. Fifteen or twenty years ago I started taking pictures of boiled peanut signs on the side of the road. Over the years I’ve developed a pretty sizable collection of these images, and for the rest of this summer (through sometime in early August, when a new school year starts), I’ll be posting one boiled peanut photo a day on Instagram. If you’re an Instagrammer, take a moment to follow @lostchildradio to stay abreast of the progress.

I’m seven days into the series so far. Here’s some of what’s up there already.

2. This week I’ve been trying to reorganize one of the most important sections of my book on Birmingham jazz. A stack of index cards has proven useful. Below is my reshuffling of a chapter on John T. “Fess” Whatley, Birmingham’s extraordinary and influential “Maker of Musicians.” (The notecards might be cryptic to you, but know that they represent progress — at the bottom of today’s post, I’ll post a few paragraphs from this chapter.)

3. Yesterday I was asked to give a talk in Tuscaloosa on the late Sumter County, Alabama, singer Vera Hall. Here is a recording of Vera Hall singing. And here’s Moby’s famous 1999 remix of one of her songs, “Trouble So Hard” (reimagined by Moby as “Natural Blues”). And here are a few illustrations from my talk…

First a drawing I made of Vera Hall:

Not totally finished, but here’s a tribute to other Sumter County singers, part of my “Book of Ancestors” project, described in a recent post:

And here’s Ruby Pickens Tartt, who introduced the singers above to many visiting folklorists and writers, including the father and son John and Alan Lomax. (Anticipating the abundance of T‘s in “Tartt” I got carried away with the letter R and added an unnecessary extra. Oh well; I will try her again another time.)

Here’s, lastly, what Vera looks like on the big screen:

Thanks for reading. Finally, if you’re curious to read some of the Fess Whatley chapter outlined above, here are a few quick paragraphs. My book explores the ways in which Birmingham’s black community, through much of the 20th century, fostered an overlooked but significant jazz tradition. The schoolteacher-bandleader John T. “Fess” Whatley was at the heart of this culture, sending scores of his pupils and band members out into the larger worlds of jazz. A previous chapter describes Fess Whatley’s own musical roots and his rise to prominence in Birmingham’s segregated school system; the chapter outlined above delves deeper into his story, exploring the unique nature of his influence and the creation of his larger-than-life persona. Here’s an excerpt:

…

Whatley’s corporal reprimands were legendary. Fess would count off a tune, recalled trumpeter Amos Gordon, “One, two, three, four”—and “if you didn’t come in, he’d crack you across the head with a stick.” J. L. Lowe, perhaps the most avid of all Whatley’s admirers, remembered the ritual of Fess’s rappings: “He hit me three times a day,” Lowe said. “One was to start me off, the second lick was if there was a mistake, and the third lick meant ‘that’s enough.’” Fess was known even to strike his students on stage, mid-concert, if they’d played a wrong note. In the town of Gadsden, about sixty miles east of Birmingham, trumpeter Tommy Stewart experienced Whatley’s disciplinary style when his mother arranged for a private lesson. “My mama knew that I needed to have some contact with him,” Stewart said, “because that was the man who had developed so many [musicians] already. When I first came in, he hit me on my knuckles—I hadn’t even played. He said, ‘I know, Mr. Stewart, I’m going to have to get you for something, so hold your hand out.’ Bap! He hit me on the knuckles and told me to start playing.”

Other Whatley stories were embedded in Stewart’s family history. Years ago, Stewart’s grandfather had started a community band and, the story goes, “they got Fess to come down here once a month to help develop the band. When Fess walked in, he said, ‘I want to hear some music. I don’t want any mistakes’—and pulled out his .45!” Whatley kept the gun visible on the table throughout the rehearsal. “He carried a .45 with him all the time,’ Stewart laughed. “Never shot nobody, but he always kept everybody intimidated.”

In Fess Whatley’s band, explained Sammy Lowe, “everything was done in a businesslike way.” For starters, everyone in the band had his jobs: “One guy would set up the music stands, another would put the music out—and by the way, each fellow had to keep his book in numerical order or risk a fine—other members would help the drummer set up, and so on down the line.” Most importantly: “According to Fess, there was no excuse … I repeat: no excuse but death … to be late.” For Whatley, time was everything. Gigs began—and, just as important, no matter how well the night was going, no matter how eager the audience, gigs ended—on the precise minute advertised: with a bit of “Home Sweet Home” Fess and the band signaled the end of each evening’s performance, ushering dancers out the door and back to their sweet homes. Tardiness was the greatest sin, a preoccupation remembered by all Fess Whatley’s players: for every sixty seconds a player arrived late, he’d incur a separate fine. “One night,” remembered Sammy Lowe, “we were to leave for a gig at 7:00 P.M. At exactly 7:00 PM Fess said, ‘Let’s ride.’ We started off just in time to see a band member rushing around the corner. Fess kept on driving, refusing to wait for him. That night Fess fined him for being fifteen seconds late.”

Years after Fess’s death, his old students and disciples still referred to what they called “Whatley Time”: that strict adherence to the clock the bandsman had ingrained in his musicians. “If I had an appointment with the devil himself,” he’d told them, “I’d get there fifteen minutes early—to find out what in hell he wanted!” Fess seemed even to move with the built-in timing of a human metronome. “Even the way he walked,” said J. L. Lowe: “it was with rhythm in his mind. One, two, three, four. It was always like that with him.” Like a lot of Whatley’s musicians, J. L.’s brother Sammy insisted late in life that the Whatley training instilled in him an unbending sense of punctuality: after a long and prolific career he could count on one hand the number of times he’d arrived anyplace late. For the Lowes and others, Whatley Time, reinforced by knuckle-raps and fines, became an instinct.

…

Okay; all for now. More later. Happy Saturday to you.

Evolution of a cardboard box (Pt. 2)

Back in April, I started drawing on a big, empty cardboard box, and I promised to share the results here as they unfolded, posting occasional updates until I could share the fully finished outcome. (Here’s the original post, where you can see where I started and read my reasons for posting the progress.) There haven’t been any updates since then, because for about two months I didn’t touch the box again. So it goes.

For better and/or worse, this is the way I do tend to operate: it’s usually the way I draw pictures, and the way I write. I get two-thirds or three-quarters the way through something and then get stuck and put it aside — sometimes for a few years at a time. If I’m lucky, I’ll eventually come back to whatever it is and finish it. There’s something worthwhile, of course, in letting things gestate or simmer, but on the whole I wish I had the discipline to push things through to their end more quickly. Ah, well. I guess we all do the best we can, however we can.

One reason progress is slow is that I always take up and get distracted by other projects in the meantime — so, to show how this one box has evolved, here’s, first, a bit of what’s been evolving alongside and taking me away from my original box. For a couple of upcoming radio shows I decided to make a couple of unusually large radio advertisements, also on cardboard, which will appear around town over the next couple of weeks. Next week on the radio I’ll be spotlighting Leadbelly’s last sessions, from 1948; a week after that, I’ll be playing Woody Guthrie’s Library of Congress recordings, from 1940. So, while listening to all those recordings, trying to narrow down the playlists, I made these:

Meanwhile, I’ve begun a larger project I’m calling my “Book of Ancestors”: a series of tributes to various change-makers, icons, and half-forgotten heroes from my home state of Alabama, all made up out of historic photos, handwritten text, and stately thrift-store frames. There will be more than a hundred of these when I’m done; so far I’ve got a good dozen or so. There’s an entire sub-section-in-progress featuring the women of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. For example, Irene West:

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Poor Glory! She lives in a house full of cardboard boxes, half-covered in Sharpie drawings, stacked against the walls alongside piles of clunky brown thrift-store frames. Her patience and encouragement are remarkable. I am lucky.

But back to the real point of this post: last weekend I did at last make some progress on my box, X-acto knifing it into its separate segments and adding some color and words — and a little birdie (there are so many little birds in Roscoe Holcomb songs!) and some star stickers like you used to get in second or third grade. I think Peetie Wheatstraw is probably as done as he’ll get; there’s a little text left to add to Roscoe Holcomb, but I went ahead and put him aside for now. Los Pinguinos del Norte are still where I left them last, with half a Pinguino and 3.5 Pinguinos to go. So, wish me luck and stay tuned.

While working on all these pieces of cardboard, I came upon a great little article in the Sunday New York Times: “Thinking About the Box,” a tribute to the endless potentials of the cardboard box. The author, Alexandra Lange (whose book, The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids, came out earlier this month) begins by citing several recent high-profile appropriations of the good old cardboard box — by the likes of Google, Wal-Mart, and Nintendo. Lange explains cardboard’s enduring appeal like this: “These 21st-century storytellers turned to cardboard,” she writes, “for the same reasons that children have long preferred the box to the toy that came in it: cardboard is light and strong, easy to put up, quick to come down and, perhaps most important, inexpensive enough for experimenting. Cardboard constructions can be crushed, painted, recycled and stuck back together. Cardboard furniture can be adjusted as children grow, and cardboard creations become more sophisticated as children gain skills: It is as malleable as the body and mind.” To all that I say only amen. Lange goes on to explain how the cardboard box became a fixture in the imagination of the American child, “an avatar of inspiration, no charging required.” It’s a short read well worth your while:

FullSizeRender-1 Of course, as an art supply cardboard also has these obvious benefits: there’s plenty of it to be found, for free, and you can mess around with and draw on it without creating more waste in the world. In short, you have nothing to lose. My friend Lillis Taylor, one of my favorite artists (please check out her March Quilts project and her non-profit sew-op, Bib & Tucker), likes to quote these lines from Howard Finster, and his words seem relevant here — and relevant, really, to anyone interested in making new things out of old things:

“I took the pieces you threw away

And put them together by night and day
Washed by rain and dried by sun
A million pieces all in one.”

And that, too, reminds me of this: how just this week an unexpected email from a stranger brought me happily back to an old friend, Ernest Mostella, who used to carve these extraordinary homemade fiddles out of chunks of longleaf pine. He was in his nineties when I met him some twenty years ago, and he whittled the pieces down with a chainsaw, pieced it all together with carpenter’s glue (sometimes he made his own glue out of sawdust and egg yolks), and strung it up with thick, ropey twine. I’m reminded I need to pick up a project I started, all those years ago, to document his fiddles and his voice and his story, and I look forward to digging back into it all very soon. As usual (see above), I got distracted, but this too will get done.

Finally, also, while I’m at it, this: I’m so happy to have stumbled at last upon #drawgandhi, a practice in progress by Birmingham’s own Glenny Brock. You should check it out on Instagram, and see Glenny’s talk, “What I Learned By Drawing Gandhi.”

That’s all for now, friends. Everybody, go make something.

Peace.

P. S. If you like this sort of thing, you can support the endeavor by doing any of the following: follow this blog by signing up on the righthand side of this page (you’ll get about 2 posts a month in your email inbox); follow @lostchildradio on Instagram; or “like” my book and/or radio show on Facebook. You can purchase my book with Alabama jazzman “Doc” Adams online or at your local bookstore. Heartfelt thanks, sincerely, for any / all of the above.

Evolution of a cardboard box (Part 1)

The Saturday before last I stopped at Crestwood Coffee for a cup of caffeine and an empty cardboard box. For a few years they’ve been supplying me with these great big boxes that their coffee cups come in, and I’ve been drawing pictures on the boxes. I spent much of the day that followed at The Jaybird (open Saturdays, 11 to 4!), seeing what I could do with this latest swath of cardboard.

Leaving The Jaybird, I grabbed some barbecue from Saw’s and headed up to Camp McDowell for the Alabama Folk School‘s concert that night: an evening of singing from China and Mary Ann Pettway, two of the celebrated Gee’s Bend quilters, plus a showcase from a stageful of bluegrass greats, including Tony Trischka(!!) and others. Back in my room, I got back to work on my box, moving back and forth between drawings of Peetie Wheatstraw, Roscoe Holcomb, and Los Penguinos del Norte.

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Yesterday and today I got in a little more time with the drawings, mostly with Roscoe. I thought I’d post the work in progress here; I’ll post some more updates once I have them, and then the finished things.

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The impetus to share these unfinished creations comes in large part from spending time with the writings of Austin Kleon (I much recommend his newspaper blackout poetry), who tirelessly advocates that you show your work — that you take people behind the scenes, sharing not just your finished products but the messy, private process itself, that you become a documentarian of what you do, keeping track of and exposing for others the vulnerable, daily ins and outs of how you go about making things. Kleon says you should share something small every day, creating some form of “daily dispatch.” Not only does this challenge open up your process to others; it frees you to think in modest, accessible chunks, rather than having you bank on some impossibly ambitious opus to come. “A good daily dispatch,” writes Kleon, “is like getting all the DVD extras before a movie comes out — you get to watch deleted scenes and listen to director’s commentary while the movie is being made.”

I don’t intend to do this every day; I don’t think anyone’s that interested, and other things anyway encroach on my time, all the time. But this blog, really, was inspired by Kleon’s challenge: I created this site for the sake of sharing the process behind whatever I’m working on. These are the DVD extras — but, more than that, the real purpose of these posts is to keep me accountable and working.

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Here’s something Kurt Vonnegut, quoting an old professor, wrote in his book Timequake and repeated on at least a few other occasions:

“Artists … are people who say, ‘I can’t fix my country or my state or my city, or even my marriage. But by golly, I can make this square of canvas, or this eight-and-a-half-by-eleven piece of paper, or this lump of clay, or these twelve bars of music, exactly what they ought to be!'”

I’ve always liked that. Nevermind that these words are delivered by someone (the professor) who’d in the fullness of time swallow potassium cyanide and die. Life, and people, are complicated. It’s still a fair definition of the artist — even if I could never entirely relate. Rarely if ever have I gotten a sheet of paper, either by way of my words or my drawings, to become what I think it should be. Certainly I can’t control the chaos of the world around me, but most of the time I can’t control, either, a small white sheet of typing paper — or the surface of an empty cardboard box.

(I have a feeling, of course, that the same was true for Vonnegut — perhaps once or twice in his life he managed to wrangle his empty pages into exactly the thing he wanted. But whatever the failures, I imagine the process — and the clunky products at the end — must have been, for him, worthwhile.)

So! We beat on, boats against the current. And! This afternoon, when I could have been doing something less fun, I listened to lots and lots of Roscoe Holcomb, and I fell more deeply in love with — and became more acutely attuned to — his music.

And, this: I made a cardboard box on its way to the garbage much more interesting than it otherwise would have been. Because drawing on a cardboard box — drawing anything! — can always, only, make it better, whatever happens to it next.

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And, so: onward!

Share your work. Stay tuned. See you next time.

Peace.

Burgin

P.S. The italicized phrases a few paragraphs above are chapter headings or subheadings from Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work.