Kip Lornell
Kip Lornell is an author/folklorist and professor at George Washington University. Residing in Silver Spring, Maryland, Kip is involved with many music and folklore activities in the greater Washington DC area. He frequently lectures and contributes to projects at institutions such as the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian. In his college years, Kip conducted important field work documenting virtually unknown blues and fiddle musicians in the Carolinas, as well as in his original hometown area of Albany, New York.
His studied at Guilford College, SUNY, Chapel Hill and eventually received his Ph. D at the University of Memphis in 1983. Some of the books he has written/edited and published include: The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, Introducing American Folk Music, Virginia's Blues, Country, & Gospel Records 1902 to 1943, Happy is the Service of the Lord... African-American Sacred Vocal Harmony Quartets in Memphis, The Blues Come to Texas and many others. He received a Grammy for his liner notes on the re-issue of the "Anthology of American Folk Music" CD box set issued by Smithsonian Folkways. Kip started the DC Vernacular Music Archives, which is a multi-genre collection of DC area musicians memorabilia, recorded collections and other important artifacts. I recently spoke to Kip about his career of teaching, preserving, writing and reflecting on the music industry.
R.V.B. - Hi Kip... Robert von Bernewitz from Long Island, New York. How are you today?
K.L. - Hey... I'm doing okay.
R.V.B. - How's things down in the Capitol District? Is it warming up down there?
K.L. - It's 56 degrees now and soon to be in the '60s. If it continues to improve, I plan to go play 18 holes of golf, later today.
R.V.B. - Nice. I play a little golf myself.
K.L. - During nice weather, I try to get out once or twice a week. I've been able to play every month this year. There has always been a day at least in the '50s. If I don't have anything pressing I try to do that when I can.
R.V.B. - It's a classy to spend your day out in the outdoors. Do you watch golf on TV?
K.L. - I do watch a little on Sunday's but this time of year, I'm usually watching college basketball.
R.V.B. - You kind of can't get away from that now.
K.L. - No you cannot. My younger son and I are both graduates of UNC, Chapel Hill so when they beat Duke the other night, I called my youngest daughter who teaches English in South Korea... and went to Duke... to tell her that North Carolina won.
R.V.B. - There's a lot of rich tradition down there for sure.
K.L. - No doubt about it.
R.V.B. - How's Georgetown fairing?
K.L. - They're middle of the pack. The Big East has not been the strongest conference recently.
R.V.B. - Well anyway, Thank you for taking this time with me... I appreciate it. I also appreciate the work that you've done for the music community. You've done a lot of great work for us... from entry level up to experts.
K.L. - Your welcome.
R.V.B. - Where did you grow up?
K.L. - Where did I grow up. That's a loaded question that I ask my students... Where are you from? It depends on what kind of answer you want? For me, the first place I really remember living was Livonia, Michigan... which is a suburb of Detroit. After that we lived in Connecticut. I went to middle school near Hartford, near Bristol, but really in terms of growing up from middle school through high school would be the Capitol District... Albany, New York area.
R.V.B. - I gather you moved a lot due to your mother or fathers job.
K.L. - My dad was a conscientious objector in World War 2... ironically enough. A lot of people though he was in the military because we moved so much. My parents were both social workers. My dad got a job running the Children's Village for Delinquent kids in Redford Township, Michigan. Then he started to work for the City of Hartford in social work. My father then became part of the State of New York social work program at an administrative level. That's how we ended up in Delmar, Albany. I lived there until 1973 until I moved town to Greensboro, North Carolina, to go to college.
R.V.B. - Your life is based around music. When did you realize that you were going to pursue that route?
K.L. - When I was in high school, I became interested in American vernacular music. Mark Tucker (who wrote a lot about Duke Ellington) and I were very close friends in high school. He ended up in a similar role, more as a musician/scholar... getting his degree in musicology... teaching at Columbia University and focusing more on jazz. He concentrated on Duke Ellington and Thelonius Monk. He and I were listening to Mississippi John Hurt and boogie woogie piano players. I got interested to see what might be around the Albany area in the early 1970's. I graduated from high school in 71. I started to look around for old time blues musicians. I was inspired by Paul Oliver's Story of the Blues and was listening to Yazoo blues reissues. I ended up finding enough folks. Delmar is five miles from downtown Albany. There was a Black section of Albany, by Pearl Street where I located approximately a dozen musicians. They had followed the great migration from the Piedmont (Georgia, Virginia and North Carolina) up through Philadelphia, New York and up in Albany, and other places. I did field recordings of enough musicians to put out a couple of albums on Flyright Records which was Bruce Bastin's label. I was doing a blues show on WRPI, (The Albany radio station) which was a significant force. It was a 10,000 watt station and covered the entire Capitol District. After I graduated from high school, I worked for a couple of years as an orderly at Albany Medical Center. I like to remind my daughters that I pioneered the gap year in 1971. Virtually nobody was doing that at that time. "I'm gonna graduate high school and stay out of school for a while and travel... and do other things before I go to college." That's exactly what I did between 71 and 73. It's much more common place now, but not at the time. I decided I wanted to go down to North Carolina and do field research... looking for blues and other kinds of musicians. I decided I wanted to go to a smaller school.
At that time Davidson was not a coed school, it was single sex. I decided Guilford College was the right choice, in terms of size... politically leaning left with the Quakers down there. It was in the right spot with the field work that I wanted to do. That, and I wanted to play varsity tennis in college, which I did. I worked the radio station. I spent two years of undergraduate time there at Guilford College doing all of those things. I started becoming more interested in black fiddle and banjo players. They seemed more under-researched. I stayed there for two years and then transferred the credits to Empire State, which is part of the SUNY system... where you essentially create your own undergraduate degree. I put all my credits that I accumulated in to a portfolio and received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
I believe I was the youngest person ever to receive an NEH grant (Fall 1972). That was to go down to Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia with Pete Lowry to do field work recordings. Pete and I took off for about two months. At the time I was an orderly, I walked in to Albany Med and said " I have an NEH research grant and I'd like to take a leave of absence." They looked at me and said "We don't have any protocol for this. We don't have orderly's with high school educations saying they have Federal research grants! We don't know what to do with you." (Hahaha) They said "You have to resign but we guarantee that we'll rehire you when you come back." That's what I did and in the meantime I was applying to undergraduate schools. That's how I ended up at Guilford. I liked the weather better than Albany. When I finished up in the spring of 75, I went directly over to Chapel Hill to study Folklore. I wanted to continue doing field work around there. I figured if I took a wide range of classes in music, American studies and cultural geography it would be the right combination for me. I was at Chapel Hill for almost exactly a calendar year... the summer of 75 through the summer of 76. That's when I did my thesis on black fiddle and banjo playing. it ended up being a chapter in a book that Duke University Press published a couple of years later.
R.V.B. - When you went into the field to search these players out, did you just pick a general area and ask questions around town or did you have a plan?
K.L. - I was just going back and forth. I had a girlfriend at the time in Durham. It was a little over an hour away. I would hit the country roads and at general stores, tell them who I was and what I was looking for.
R.V.B. - Just basically knock on the door?
K.L. - Yea that's right. I now teach these methods so to speak. I tell the students at George Washington that a lot of field work is just good luck and being at the right place at the right time... being persistent and knowing what you're looking for.
R.V.B. - So it is still possible to go into rural areas and find undiscovered people?
K.L. - I have not done it in a long time. I came up to Washington DC in November of 88 to do a Post Doc' at the Smithsonian... working with Tony Seeger. I just got off the phone with Tony because he and I are working on a six hour set of programs for Great Courses and Smithsonian Enterprises, on American music. I came up to DC in November of 88 and wound up doing two books out of that Post Doc'. One was the Leadbelly biography with Charles Wolfe. I was sitting in the Smithsonian Folkways office one day talking to Charles. You know, I've got this bust of LeadBelly sitting right in front of me. "I wonder why nobody has ever written a biography of Leadbelly before?" He said "Gee... maybe we should do that." Two months later we had a proposal done and a contract in hand with Harper Collins to do that.
R.V.B. - I have the book sitting right in front of me.
K.L. - Simultaneously, I was working on a text book called Introduction to American Folk Music. They were published about four months from one another in the winter/spring of 92/93. That was the same time as our first daughter was born. So my days of doing field work was put on hold. For the Leadbelly book... I had the flexibility of going to Shreveport for research because I wasn't teaching full time. Charles could not leave Middle Tennessee State because he was teaching full time. In addition to interviews, from people like you would expect like Pete Seeger, I nosed around northeastern Texas and northwestern Louisiana and had a lot of success doing fieldwork... tracking down really good information about him.
R.V.B. - He lived around Washington DC for a while correct?
K.L. - He did. He lived in the District for 6 to 9 months during World War 2, hence the song Bourgeois Blues.
R.V.B. - Is it still a bourgeois town? Hahaha
K.L. - It's increasingly bourgeois with another wave of gentrification in the last five years. It's been fascinating to watch DC over the last 30 years. Kim and I lived on Capitol Hill until about 13 years ago. We moved to Silver Spring, MD because we needed better public schools and a bigger house for us and the kids. In the last five to eight years in particular, gentrification issues as they relate to all kinds of matters, including musical matters have been really profound in Washington DC. It's really been a major issue.
R.V.B. - The programs that they have on the mall have been very beneficial to the people.
K.L. - Yes. If you're talking about the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife. I've worked on the festival a half dozen times over the last 35 years. This year it's not going to happen. Largely because of the government shutdown. It just totally botched up everything. There's some money issues, too. So what's going to happen this year, is they're going to have a three or four day music oriented thing at the last weekend in June. They're planning to re-up what they wanted to do on a larger more typical scale for next year. One of the things that they're doing next year, is music related to struggle and also Washington DC. I have been consulting with them about Washington D.C. material.
R.V.B. - I see you founded the DC Vernacular Music Archives. Can you tell me what that is about?
K.L. - It seemed to me that the major issue that you run into with archives is they tend to be genre orientated. You've got the jazz archives at Rutgers and at Tulane. You have the Country Music Hall of Fame. But there really hasn't been a focused regional or citywide archive, that tries to cover the waterfront. You look at what happens around Washington DC... The Library of Congress has a mandate to cover the entire country. There's the UDC jazz archive which focuses on Washington DC, but it is largely jazz. There is a big interest around Washington in punk and to some degree go-go. What struck me what that you really need someplace where you can find all of these things. The public library has done a very good job of gathering punk material. What we do at the DC Vernacular Music Archives (at GWU) is try to be encompassing. They have all the go-go stuff that Charles Stephenson and I did for that book. My book on DC bluegrass is coming out this summer for Oxford. They will be getting all of my bluegrass material. I've got 18 transcribed interviews. I got lots of photographs and flyers. I've slowly been encouraging some of the other folks to do the same with their bluegrass stuff. There's a ton of material on that. We also have all of the material from WAMA. (Washington Area Music Association) We have their business records... flyers. I would hope that at some point, there would be other regions, perhaps larger that the District of Columbia and DMV (District of Maryland and Virginia) If you think of outside the Beltway maybe up to Baltimore... that there would be other music archives that would focus on a more specific geographical area. That's why I started the DC Vernacular Music Archives.
R.V.B. - Bluegrass music seems to be making a tremendous impact on the youth of today. Why do you suppose that the genre is thriving and expanding?
K.L. - I don't necessarily agree with you. Maybe I have a different perspective on how important bluegrass has been around here. When I talk to my students at George Washington in the spring semester of 2019... I'm teaching a class called “Introduction to Ethnomusicology: Music as Culture.” I get a lot of students over the years... especially this class that just has general interest in music. Very few of them have an interest in bluegrass.
R.V.B. - Interesting. I find up here even in Brooklyn, there is a thriving bluegrass community.
K.L. - There absolutely are communities, focused on bluegrass, with younger people in them, however, if we were having this conversation... going back with our Professor Peabody machine to 1985 for example... we would be having a very different conversation. I would utterly be agreeing with you that the influence of bluegrass... especially in more younger people was profoundly important. In 1985 around Washington DC, you not only had the beginning flowering of punk and you had go-go at its height... but I don't know if you follow National Public Radio stations at all?
R.V.B. - I absolutely do. I rarely listen to commercial radio.
K.L. - Just imagine this. You probably listen to WNYC correct?
R.V.B. - I do when I'm on the Western side of town. Out here on Long Island, I pick up WPKN in Bridgeport, WSHU Sacred Heart and WUSB Stony Brook University.
K.L. - Got you! Think of WAMU, which was one of the founders of what became National Public Radio in 1969/70. In the early 1980's they had 40 hours a week of bluegrass programming. Now they have zero!
R.V.B. - That's not good.
K.L. - No! It signals a profound change in Public Radio and in general, signals a shift in interest around Washington DC. I could identify for you 25 to 30 clubs in the DMV that had bluegrass on a weekly if not more often basis. Today... maybe half a dozen. So it really has shifted. Now that doesn't mean there isn't interest in bluegrass among younger people but really not around here at least, it is not as profound and significant as it once was.
R.V.B. - Do you think the blues is heading the same way?
K.L. - Yeah... pretty much. With my students, there's always a few that have interest in grass roots, American music... always! I have a really interesting collection of them this spring. There's a student from Colombia... who came up through Miami. A couple of students from China... South Korea. Some are more Americanized than others. All of them share at least one commonality, that is American popular music primarily is orientated towards hip hop. Not surprisingly.
R.V.B. - I can understand that.
K.L. - They're interested. They find what I present to them in terms of the earlier vernacular music and the development of the recording industry and just try to imagining a world before the digital world. There was the baseball game of the week... The football game of the week. They're so used to having everything at their fingertips digitally. They can't imagine a world being so much more limited.
R.V.B. - Things have changed in the way people have followed music also. Musicians had to develop a following by playing live to get a record deal. Today it goes by how many hits you get on line.
K.L. - That's progress. But it also clutters up the ability for people and the curation of things. Sometimes students will come up to me and say they found it on the internet. "I'm sorry... it's wrong. It's just factually incorrect." (Haha) They say "This happened in 1962." "I'm telling you it didn't happen in 1962. It happened in October of 1959!!!" There's a lot of things you have to be careful about while using the internet for research. That doesn't mean that there is not good information out there. Most students will listen to Pandora and Spotify but if they're interested in something just a little different, it will never lead them to something that's literally unknown to them. A lot of what I do with my classes is invite people to listen to different worlds of music... whether it's in the United States of elsewhere... that they might not get through their normal channels.
R.V.B. - That's one good thing that college radio brings is diversity.
K.L. - It does. Washington DC is stunningly devoid of college radio. The New York metropolitan area has many options. Around here, there is literally no college radio stations.
R.V.B. - That's a shame.
K.L. - When I first moved up here I said "Where are they?" Georgetown had a station decades ago... long gone. The University of Maryland has a 10 watt station. WAMU is not student run. It hasn't been since the 1960's. GW... no! the University of District of Columbia had a 10,000 watt alt jazz station. That is now CSPAN radio. So you do not find that here the same way you find it in Boston or New York... for example.
R.V.B. - I notice it's getting harder and harder to find classical music on the radio as well.
K.L. - Yes. That is correct. That's another place where DC is different. WETA FM has been classical for decades. They tried the talk format for a while but now their back to all classical music. It's a 50,000 watt station. That's a bit of an anomaly because you are correct. It is harder to find classical music on the radio now.
R.V.B. - We have Sacred Heart University up here. We can't pull in the NYC classical stations out here in Suffolk County. The Anthology of American Folk Music was a very important American release in that it basically lit a fire of the folk revival era. How did you enjoy working on the reissue of it.
K.L. - I thought it was a significant thing to do because it was in fact such a landmark recording. Harry Smith and Moe Ashe collaborated on that back in the 1950's. It needed re-contextualisation... reinterpreting. We worked on that piece around 20 years ago now. That was 1997.
R.V.B. - Where is the time going?
K.L. - Tell me about it. If you know... let me know. What was kind of floated around was if we had been able to do the expanded version including the tracks that Harry Smith didn't include, but wanted to, on the original American Anthology of Folk music. I think Jack White put out the tracks that Harry Smith wanted to put out, but didn't. Smithsonian Folkways couldn't do that because of licensing issues. You would of had to deal with Sony BMG. Trying to deal with them can be time consuming and problematic at best. So having that back in print with the expanded version would of been preferable but our release of the original version brought a lot of interest back to it. It ended up being a very good seller yet again.
R.V.B. - There is another book that just recently came out where you resurrected the unfinished book of Paul Oliver and Mac McCormick. I believe Mac said the geographic distance between them was part of the issue on why they never finished it, as well as communication issues through the mail.
K.L. - I would to love to know what Mac said about that. If I had known that you'd interviewed Mac about that a few years ago. I would of been fascinated about what he had to say. He was not forthcoming when Alan approached him on that. Essentially, it's pretty clear from looking at the Paul Oliver end of the correspondence. The book is essentially 900 pages long. Even though there are only 450 pages, there are two columns on each page. It is monstrously long. Paul and Mac worked on that from about 59 to 71/72. There were a lot of logistical things to overcome. There are scores and scores of aerogram's, that went back and forth. It's astonishing what they were able to do over that roughly 13 year period. A lot of it is Mac's field work. There was some of Oliver's field work. Most of the writing is Paul's. I think they philosophically realized that they really couldn't finish the book per say. There's a skeleton chapter about Houston, as it related to Don Robey in the 1950s. Mac, especially being right there in Houston at that time, was thinking this was two popular and wasn't really interested in that scene. Paul thought it was really important. That was a point in which they disagreed. Paul said "You can't overlook this part of the blues tradition in Houston. That's just one example of a disagreement they had. They essentially agreed to disagree in 1974. Paul was hoping on a few occasions that they could get together and maybe edit it down or maybe make it a two volume book. They couldn't quite agree on what the title should be. It never really got acrimonious to any extant.
R.V.B. - I guess your task was to go through all the letters. Did you edit it down at all?
K.L. - The book is their uncompleted manuscript. The only thing that we did... and the biggest thing that we did was: Paul had left his footnotes in an idiosyncratic and abbreviated form. It took us many, many, many days to figure those things out. I know that sounds trivial but it's not. We did some very light editing where we saw errors in names. Essentially what you're getting is the manuscript as it sat at Paul's in 1974. I first heard about the manuscript in 1975! He engaged Alan to try to finish the manuscript. I know Alan well... he got a hold of me and said "Take a look at this and tell me what you think?" We both agreed... you can't finish it! The manuscript has to be published as it was, with careful annotations. Alan wrote an essay that basically explained how this came to be. Then he and I co-authored an essay explaining how this fits in to blues scholarship and its importance. Those are two very long essays. We essentially left the manuscript as it was, as it sat there since 1974. It was just chock full of fascinating stuff.
R.V.B. - I can imagine although Mac didn't easily give up information at times.
K.L. - It is all from Paul. All of the letters and back story has been digitized and is at the Documentary Arts Archives in Dallas. If scholars want to investigate some things that are not in the book, that will eventually become available. There's a trove of material there as well. The essays explained very well about how these guys worked together. It's probably the most important blues book that has come out in years. We are very please to finally sheppard it through its release.
R.V.B. - As I said, I have some interesting conversations with Mac. I caught him in a good mood a few nights.
K.L. - I visited him in 1990 to talk to him about Leadbelly, he was happy to tell me some stories. He said "All of my Leadbelly stuff is in one of my Mexican radio stations. I asked some people many years later that confirmed he had partial interests in some radio stations in Mexico. "It is possible that what he told you is absolutely true." I never saw what he did with Leadbelly. However, when I stumbled across Leadbelly's daughter, she pulled out a card... "This white guy came to see me many years ago." It was a fucking card from Mac McCormick. It must have been from the early 1960's. East Texas is a long way from Houston. From Houston to the Oklahoma border is about 350 miles with no interstate. How the fuck he ever found her, I have no clue.
R.V.B. - He was a driven and amazing guy. When he had a lead he went for it.
K.L. - Yeah except she (Panthea Boyd King) never left that area and he never traveled that way as far as I know. He did almost everything in southeast Texas. I just don't understand how that connection was ever made. She didn't know. We also talked about the Robert Johnson manuscript.
R.V.B. - I was told not to talk about it but I asked him anyway and got a lot of fascinating information from him. He did a lot of great field detective work.
K.L. - What's actually sitting there is utterly unknown.
R.V.B. - I saw a story on line about how two New York Times reporters allegedly stole some information from him and published it without his consent. I guess his papers are under the ownership of his daughter?
K.L. - Yes. One thing that we did was send her the final manuscript with the essays before it got published. We didn't want to get into a hassle with her. Through various attorney's, she had a chance to look at it and signed off on it. She said "I'm okay with this." We thought that was important to do.
R.V.B. - Very nice. I'm glad the public gets to see it now. How do you feel about teaching students? Are you passing on your information like the cliché of passing on the torch?
K.L. - I'm really lucky to have a half time, long term position at GW. I'm lucky because I'm teaching when I want to teach. I'm teaching what I want to teach. I have small classes and I'm left alone to teach those classes how I want. I absolutely bring my experiences into the classroom, both formally and informally. People are interested because it's just so different than what they're used to. But there's always a small minority of folks that are interested because it's more than just different. One student last year in the Ethno class... who was a good old time banjo player and did an internship at Smithsonian Folkways, may go one to do more research in grass roots music. The students will go on field trips when we can... to churches. The kids in the “Jazz in American Cultural History “ class have to do some research in archives, either in DC or Smithsonian. The kids in the Ethno class have to go out and do some field work, locally. So I get them out of the classroom and get them to learn about stuff that's not necessarily in books. I think that's important. I think the kids appreciate that.
R.V.B. - How do you feel about your place in ethnomusicology. What are you proud of in your career up to this point?
K.L. - The things that I'm most pleased with over the years is documenting and getting to know people. Documenting their musical lives and musical culture that otherwise might have been overlooked. Starting in Albany in the early 1970's, with musicians there... continuing on through Memphis and the Gospel Quartet. That was the first book that anybody had ever published on black gospel quartet's... as important as that genre had been. Moving on and looking at go-go... with Charles. There are so many things that one could do that have been overlooked. The pop music stuff while not covering every avenue in terms of books and articles. Thinking that as many books that have been written about bluegrass, Starting in 1980 people said. Washington DC is the bluegrass capitol of the world. People talk about writing books. It's actually sitting down and doing it. Looking back to almost 50 years ago now, to what I've been able to accomplish in terms of meeting people, documenting them, and something I have in front of me right now, on the wall is a plaque that I got from the black gospel community from Memphis in 1983. I did a series of public programs and an album of contemporary stuff. They, along with banjo players, go-go musicians, some of Leadbelly's family were pleased that somebody thought that their music was important enough to be studied and appear in a book or on a phonograph record. These community based music's... which is essentially what I have been studying, I think are important in people's lives. That's the things that I really gravitated towards over the years. I think that's probably been the most important contribution.
R.V.B. - It sounds like it. The music community appreciates the effort. What's your current project?
K.L. - I just got an email from Oxford about lining up the image's and the corresponding captions in the bluegrass book. I'm always working on two or three books. The next one I have a contract with the University of Tennessee Press to do a reader of Charles Wolfe's writings. I'm thinking about helping a gentleman around who has more than enough material to write a biography of Buzz Busby. He was a rally interesting, eccentric and vitally important musician in the bluegrass scene of Washington DC. There is a gentleman Tom who runs a music and records company that has more than enough information on and I may help him write a book on Buzz Busby. we're jointly giving a talk to my co-editor from The Music of Multicultural America, who is up from William and Mary doing a symposium. She and I are swapping off doing talks in our classes. I'm also planning to do a book like I did on Shreveport... getting together out of print, interesting pieces on vernacular music around Washington DC.
R.V.B. - Sounds like some nice projects. Thank you for taking this time with me.
K.L. - No problem. Have a nice day.
Interview conducted by Robert von Bernewitz
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