Dr. Ellen Stekert
Dr. Ellen Steker is a retired folklorist, performer and educator who is originally from Great Neck, Long Island and now resides in the greater Minneapolis, Minnesota area. In her youth, folk music became the popular genre of the day and Ellen began to learn how to play the guitar and sing. She joined a high school group of friends that would have weekly folk gatherings and started to hone her folk performing skills. After frequenting the popular music scene in Greenwich Village, Ellen was persuaded to record an album of songs she was working on called “Ozark Mountain Folk Songs.”
In college at Cornell University, Ellen’s interests in folklore grew. She began doing fieldwork, collecting folksongs from traditional singers in Upstate New York. On a suggestion from her professor at Cornell, she drove miles each weekend to collect songs from a retired lumberjack in the Western part of New York State. She would eventually make a record of herself performing these songs. After receiving a degree in Philosophy at Cornell, she moved on to further studies of Folklore at Indiana University. There she continued her field work of collecting and exploring in Kentucky and Southern Indiana. She received her Masters at Indiana and eventually earned her Doctorate in Folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.
Her first teaching position was at Wayne State University in Detroit. From there, Ellen took a permanent position at the University of Minnesota where she has a successful 20+ year career as an English professor. During this time she also held the position of President of the American Folklore Society and was pivotal in establishing The Center for the Study of Minnesota Folklife, of which she was appointed Director. That same year, she was named the first ever State Folklorist in the country, by the Governor of Minnesota. With this new title, she created interest in The Folklore Center, doing concerts and lectures throughout the State.
I recently talked and corresponded with Ellen about her ground breaking work and career.
E.S. – Greetings.
R.V.B. – How are you doing today? How is everything going?
E.S. – Things are going as well as anyone could say in this country.
R.V.B. – Nobody is going out here in New York… that’s for sure.
E.S. – I can hear your accent.
R.V.B. – Hahaha. I told you I had one. I have a lawn-guy-land accent.
E.S. – When I was living in Great Neck I could tell the difference between a Bronx and a Brooklyn accent. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – (Haha) How did you enjoy growing up in Great Neck?
E.S. – It was okay. I enjoyed my high school. I used to dislike all the showing off of one’s money. When you went downtown to shop at the A&P, you would see people shopping in mink coats. The big cars were hard to park next to.
R.V.B. – It looks nice downtown by the train station with the Tudor style brick buildings.
E.S. – Yes… I used to meet my dad there every day, when he came back from work in the city.
R.V.B. – It still basically looks the same as back in the day.
E.S. – I haven’t been there in so many years and I’d love to go back, but right now, we can’t go anywhere.
R.V.B. – I noticed in your recent performance video that you were in a nice log cabin setting.
E.S. – That was at my friends up in Grand Marais. That’s a fellow who went to Cornell with me. He got in touch with me years afterwards… after his third divorce. I went up to visit him with his current wife. (Haha)
R.V.B. – It looked like a nice little place.
E.S. – It’s a big place. The logs are huge. I enjoy going up to visit him. In fact I was going to go back in April.
R.V.B. – I see that you are into antiques?
E.S. – Yes… antiques and collectables. I sell them on eBay. I concentrate on old instruments and military things and whatever I can get a hold of… I just love to study what things are.
E.S. - That’s interesting. There’s a store near me where I used to give programs. He’s been wonderful to me. He always encouraged me to sing… which he’s not doing any more. (Hahaha) He and his wife are good people. His store was called “Solid State.” It is now called “SolSta” since there was another company with the previous name.
R.V.B. – I saw something on line with your name associated with the store. I love vinyl. If there’s a little crackle here and there, it doesn’t bother me.
E.S. – I had a huge collection but I sold it. I had moved and decided to downsize. I couldn’t keep that or my research library.
R.V.B. – That’s kind of a shame.
E.S. – That’s okay. The internet is so incredible today… as long as you realize you have to be careful. I also have easy access to the university library. I’m only about 10 minutes away.
R.V.B. – I’m sure you must have had some nice books.
E.S. – I had some wonderful books. I still have some. It was very helpful when I had to do something with my students, who were often plagiarizing. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – What kind of music were you exposed to in your youth?
E.S. – I remember when I was a kid - I had an older brother. We were a Jewish family, though we weren’t practicing… for example we never had pork and education was valued highly. My mother used to play old Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and other lugubrious shellac 78 records for us.
When I was in high school, I started to play the guitar. Both my brother and I had piano lessons… that neither of us liked very much. We finally quit. My brother went away to college five years before I did, so I had his guitar and my father bought me the four volume edition of Vance Randolph’s “Ozark Mountain Folk Songs.” The tunes are very crudely transcribed in that collection. I used to sit down with my guitar and try to figure out the tunes. Then try to put the words to the tunes. It took me a long time to figure out the… tonic… sub-tonic… sub-dominate sequence. By the time I started to record my first record, my brother took up the guitar too. He now plays and sings… not professionally but he’s a good singer with a wonderful voice.
R.V.B. – So you started out from reading out of books. Did you pal around with other people that were doing the same thing?
E.S. – Very good question! I didn’t know anybody until my last year in high school. I used to play this Cowboy Song “He was a big bold man, a desperado from Cripple Creek, way down in Colorado.” I sang that in the high school auditorium with a big audience. It was like a showcase with other acts. That was my first appearance in front of an audience. I remember the Fitzgerald’s were big people on the radio. The wife was in the audience and I thought “Oh, I’m going to be discovered.” I was discovered and discarded at the same time.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha)
E.S. – In my junior year in high school, I was walking out the front door and I saw a guy with a guitar and I said “Hi… I play the guitar too.” He said “Hey… you have to join our group.
We get together every week.” It was Johnny Cohen, who later formed the popular and groundbreaking Old Timey group, The New Lost City Ramblers. He got me going. I played with that group a lot and I learned a great deal from them. There was one guy in that group that had a dobro… nobody was electrified at that time. The dobro used to dominate everybody. When he went off to the john at one point, we all unscrewed the resonator. We had a nice quiet session after that.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha) That sounded like a good breeding ground to learn material.
E.S. – And to learn how to play. I learned how to strum and I modified it to my own strum. John was important in my life, Johnny… I saw him just before he died. I didn’t realize it until I found out on the internet. I think I got an email from his estate. At this age, you watch out for this because all your friends are dying.
R.V.B. – It’s just a fact of life. You spoke of The New Lost City Ramblers… I spoke to Tom Paley once.
E.S. – I dated him for a while. I liked Tom… he was wonderful. He was a good kind man.
R.V.B. – I had a nice 45 minute talk with him. So you had your club and you were learning how to play. How did your first record come about?
E.S. – I used to go into Greenwich Village a lot and hang around with people. I didn’t go to many places where they performed. I never went to the Washington Square Scene. It was just too crowded. I was borrowing my parent’s car illegally. I only had a learners permit at that time. Off Union Square, there was a little record store run by a fellow named Bob Harris. (I believe he has passed away.) He ran a record label called Stinson Records. They made early 10” very bad quality records. I did my first record for them. I had met a guy named Kenneth Goldstein in the store one day when I was in Harris’ store. I got to know him, his wife and his family. He was very interested in acquiring records, folklore and folksong. (He eventually got his PHD in folklore from the same University I did.) He wanted to record me. He did records for Bob, so I recorded this Stinson Record. That’s how I did my first record. I don’t know how many they cut? I also don’t know if Bob Harris was that happy with it, that I was not happy with it. I think they ran the master tape faster than it should have been. It doesn’t sound like me at all. I was not that fond of it. It was called “Ozark Mountain Folk Songs.” I learned the songs from Vance Randolph. I haven’t had the courage to listen to the record again. (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – What are some of the records that you may have purchased at that time?
E.S. – I bought Lead Belly, John White, Richard Dyer Bennett, Jean Ritchie, Pete Seeger… of course, Woody Guthrie. In fact I met Woody Guthrie. Bob Harris had a room in the back of the store, where he let Woody hang out. I went in there with Johnny Cohen to see and talk to Woody. He didn’t have a guitar and he couldn’t sing for us because he’d broken it over somebody’s head… (Hahaha) the week before in a drunken rage. Shortly thereafter he went into the hospital, and never came out… as you know. It was interesting meeting him. I was not terribly impressed. He seemed like a rambling fellow. I had never been totally impressed with him.
R.V.B. – You mentioned you had a few Jean Ritchie records. She lived around the area of Great Neck also right?
E.S. – Right. I knew Jean pretty well, actually. She lived in Port Washington. I remember I was so jealous of her because Jac Holzman - who runs Elektra – made a record of her and I really wanted Elektra to do a record of me. They only did a couple of cuts that they put on other records. I was jealous of her but I thought she was a wonderful, wonderful musician and a fine singer. It was interesting many years later when I did a great deal of my field work in Kentucky… in a county right near where she was brought up. I played a record she had made after she had been playing professionally for a while for one of my informants. He said “Wow… that sounds just like a Ritchie.” He was listening to was Jean after she had re-learned her earlier folk song singing style. You see, I happened upon a recording she did for the Library of Congress when she was a student at the University of Kentucky. It was “The Twa Sisters,” on one of their Anglo-American ballad records. On it she sings with vibrato… very, very much unlike traditional southern mountain style. I used to tease her that she had to re-learn her own family’s traditional style. And she re-learned it well. I loved what she did on the dulcimer too. It was totally unlike southern mountain traditional music. It was a blend of traditional performance styles with 18th-19th century musical harmonic styles. The harmonies that she did, are totally sophisticated… not that Kentucky isn’t. She applied western “high” harmonic counterpoint to her traditional repertoire. Her dulcimer does a counterpoint to her voice with single notes on the instrument. She was a generous warm person and a fine musician. Her husband George was an awfully nice guy, too. I used to visit them. When I was a student getting my Masters at Indiana University, I got her out there for a concert and she stayed with my roommates and me. I saw her for the last time at Newport.
R.V.B. –You mentioned Richard Dyer-Bennet… you bought these records and are working on your musical craft?
E.S. – He influenced me mostly with his repertoire but in time I think he also influenced my wish to play the guitar better. Now that I’ve lost my voice through the surgery I am applying much that I heard from him to the tunes I would have liked to accompany my singing. I also listened to John Jacob Niles. He was musically eclectic. It was interesting to eventually learn that a lot of the things he said he had recorded or collected from people, he actually wrote. That was a time when it was better to have discovered the gem than to have written it. Now… if you write it it’s a gem and if you discover it… okay??? (Hahaha)
R.V.B. – When you went to college, did music take a back seat for a while?
E.S. – Not when I was an undergraduate. I went to Cornell and there was an aged professor there named Harold Thompson. He taught folksong and folktale courses. Because he had had several strokes, he had to have a graduate assistant each semester to help him. Part of that assistant’s duties were to sing or play recordings that illustrated the songs or tales about which he was lecturing. He couldn’t do this because of his condition. So when his last assistant got his doctorate and moved on from Cornell, he chose me to assist him. I had cut the Stinson record before I entered Cornell. So I ended up getting a graduate assistantship as an undergraduate.
He sent me out on the first collecting expedition I ever did… which terrified me. (Hahaha) He sent me to an old curmudgeon of a lumberjack. You see, one of this ex-lumberjack’s neighbors – a very intelligent farmer’s wife – wrote a letter to Harold Thompson saying "You have to record or save his songs somehow, because he’s just remarkable." Harold couldn’t do that kind of work, field trips, anymore so he sent his assistant, me. So I went up there with my big recorder (in those days) and my little Volkswagen, one of the earliest in the country, and I recorded this man for what turned out to be years and years and years. It was very interesting to me how, within tradition, singers put their own stamp songs. Because of this old lumberjack, I began to realize that there was creativity within tradition… individual creativity. The usual way scholars and others talked about folksongs was that “they were handed down from person to person over generations.” Well, I was interested in the role that the individual singer played within that tradition. I could not believe that songs somehow floated down, super-organically and untouched by human hands, through the ages, without there being any influence on them from the singers or the audiences. I was interested in investigating the creativity of singers and how they were influenced by their cultural context. I also collected for years from one of my Kentucky informants and I wrote my findings up in my doctoral dissertation. It was on the influence of the individual on tradition.
So I did have music in my undergraduate career. It actually started me off on my life’s work.
As a graduate student, I went to Indiana University. They had the best Folklore program at the time. I didn’t think I would go on because I didn’t know what I would do in terms of a job, but I lucked out and found good jobs all of my life.
R.V.B. – How did you go about recording the Lumberjack?
E.S. – As I said, the lumberjack was the first person I collected from. I realized it would be difficult to meet people and really get into their lives in order to understand the social context of the songs, when you have a superficial relationship with them. And collecting can be, and usually is, intrusive.
R.V.B. - What kind of setting was this? Was it at his house?
E.S. – At his shack actually. The woman he lived with… and everybody in that rural community considered he was living in sin – seemed to be suspicious of me.
He was in his 70’s. He was an outcast in the community. He was very poor. He thought it was wonderful when I would come with my Volkswagen and park in front of his house… by a fence he had constructed along a dirt road. He got the material from the Stueben Glass factory that they had discarded. It was right near where he lived. He lived in Avoca, New York. I would park there and go into the house with my heavy recording machine. He was such a curmudgeon. He would tease me and start to sing the minute I got there and I hadn’t set up the machine yet.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha)
E.S. – Then he would give me a lot of trouble when the tape machine was on. The tapes are full of our verbal skirmishes. At one point he said “Are you making a horse’s ass out of me?” I wasn’t so polite but I didn’t swear. But I said back to him “You’re making a horse’s ass out of ME.” His house was always overheated. It was close quarters and very uncomfortable. Alice – his woman – would be in the room with us and sort of supervise me. I wasn’t there to seduce him. It was rather awkward. I always had this problem with men I was trying to collect from… they’d see this young female graduate student.
R.V.B. – That could be a problem.
E.S. – It really was. In fact I discovered how true it was after Willie – who was the fellow in Kentucky I did field work with – after his wife died during the period I was recording from him. Some of the local people who liked me told me she has been suspicious of my motives. “September – May” marriages were quite common there in those days. But my point is that after his wife passed away, his repertoire totally changed. He didn’t go to off color songs but they were dark. He would sing “Cindy in the wintertime – Cindy in the fall – If it hadn’t been for Cindy there’s be no hell at all.” Get Along Home Cindy should be a nice jolly song. Anyway, back to the initial point, it was hard to collect from Fuzzy… the lumberjack.
R.V.B. – How did your professor like your fieldwork?
E.S. – He liked it very much. I wanted to be a scholar but he wanted me to be a singer… because that’s what women did. He insisted on my coming over to his place to play all my recordings. They were long visits. After each recording session I’d visit and play the session. He’d say “That’s The Two Sisters.” It did help me do the research on the songs.
But field work was kind of like being in another world. I think had I not gone into this field I wouldn’t understand the rest of this country. I didn’t think of myself of a middle class girl from a wealthy suburb of New York even though I had been very privileged. Both of my parents came through a very difficult life. My father made money during the war... legally. I didn’t realize how protected I had been from poverty. My father used to say to me when we were walking in New York “There’s a whole other population you don’t see until after dark.” He never told me much about it but he would give me those clues. I started to bring my friends along with me to record Fuzzy. Not for any reason of protection but because they all enjoyed this kind of adventure… into another world. Fuzzy wouldn’t hold a polite word to anybody. If he didn’t like him, he’d say it.
R.V.B. – Did Fuzzy play an instrument?
E.S. – He sang acapella. He had been a banjo player. At one point I bought him a pint of whiskey. I thought that would kind of loosen him up. His girlfriend was furious with me.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha)
E.S. – I don’t know how many hours I’ve got on tape of him singing drunkenly and off key with the banjo. Actually, I think he had perfect pitch. Every time he sang a song, it would sound the same years later. But that time he played the banjo after I’d brought him whiskey, he was plowed!!! (Haha) He never really was a good banjo player. He’d learned songs acapella.
He was really a part time lumberjack. He would do any kind of work like digging and sorting potatoes in the fields of upstate New York. He would work on contract as a lumberjack. He had a team of horses and did part time work. I guess he had told someone he had been a lumberjack once. When my professor sent me out there I thought I was going to a lumberjack. He didn’t say very much about lumbering. Maybe he knew a lot about it and had been in the deep woods once. I never had a chance to get him to talk about it.
R.V.B. – You went to Indiana. The Folklore program was at an infant stage at that time… correct?
E.S. – Right. Richard Dorson had been asked to take it over from Stith Thompson.
R.V.B. – How was your experience there?
E.S. – He could be a real son-of-a-bitch. He also could be charming. He’s the kind of guy who when he collected things, he zoomed in and zoomed out once he got the material. He was material-oriented. If he collected a famous tale or song, that’s all he cared about. He’d asked the person where he or she learned it and that would be that. The problem is sometimes people would just make up an answer to the question. Fuzzy did that a lot. Oral history is often the reconstruction of life as you perceived it… or you want to be perceived. (That is what I’m doing with you.)
R.V.B. - What kind of field work did you do at that time?
E.S. – That’s how I met Willie Nolan down in Kentucky. I was working at Indiana University and a woman who had written a book called “The Ballad Tree,” named Evelyn Wells, wrote to me because she had read some things I had written. She said “ I see you’re at Indiana… you’re right near where one of my best informants lives… Willie Nolan. I can’t do this (collecting fieldwork) anymore, so why don’t you.” So I went to Willie and met him. He was a wonderful singer and a very cooperative person. He was the opposite of Fuzzy.
R.V.B. – Was he an acapella singer as well?
E.S. – Yes… in the mountain tradition. In my dissertation I pointed out how the personality of the individual affected his or her singing of the songs. The external environment also affected them. I gave them each a TAT test. It’s a personality test done by giving someone a picture and having them tell a story of what happened before and what happened after as well as in the picture. When I gave it to Fuzzy, that’s when I got the “Horse’s ass” comment. (Hahaha)
In the analysis of these two men, it came out that Fuzzy was the more adjusted person in many ways. Willie had a huge amount of rage in him but was more cooperative. It was kind of interesting because I would of never gathered that.
Yes… I went down and did collecting in Kentucky. Willie had migrated up to Southern Indiana. People who do that are called “Briar Hoppers.” There was a huge influx in Southern Indiana of the people from the Southern Mountains because it was difficult to make a living down there. They were disliked by people who lived in Indiana and Ohio. I heard the Ohioans were the first to coin the term “Briar Hopper.”
R.V.B. – Were you able adjust to the lifestyle over there being from the suburbs of New York City?
E.S. – By that time I was old enough to understand. Fuzzy had gotten me used to a lot. I had enough experience in life by that time. I was not surprised when I got down there. I had no problem fitting in. The biggest problem I had was eating. They had very few implements at the table. They would set the table with “courses” as we called them, all at one time. There’d be pie and cake on the table with the fried pork chops. Everything was cooked in oil or lard. I kept getting absolutely smeared with oil from eating with one implement. I had to explain to them that I was not used to eating this way, and it had nothing to do with whether the food was good or bad… it was just different. At one point, one of the women brought me a towel. (Hahaha) Whenever I would go down there – after I passed the test the first time – I got big hugs.
I took Willie down to his old home in Harlan, Kentucky on one of my collecting trips. It was in my little Volkswagen, not a car one often saw in the hills.. I stopped at a roadside restaurant with him to get lunch. I ordered a hamburger and he didn’t really know how to order food… so he ordered a hamburger, too. When it came, he didn’t know how to eat it. That taught me that I constantly had to check my assumptions. I helped him eat the hamburger. I picked it up and he watched me carefully and did the same. He was just a wonderful, good soul.
R.V.B. – Interesting experience.
E.S. – We stayed down there in Kentucky for several days. I eventually bought some land down there. I was welcomed down there… except!!! I had a bad situation that happened also. As much as I had been accepted by people… there were two groups in this community (that was) near a little Pine Mountain School. Pine Mountain School is a place for kids to go to school and was founded by Northern Social Workers. Cecil Sharpe and other collectors had stayed at the school house when collecting, as did the woman who introduced me to Willie by mail. I was staying with the people who lived near the snake handling church down there.. They didn’t like the songs I sang.… I had brought my guitar and the first song they heard me sing was “Frankie and Johnny.” They said “That’s a sinful song. We don’t sing those.” I had to sing “When the Saints Come Marching In” and things like that. The community was divided into two kinds of people, the “The sinners and the Christians." The church people (who I was staying with) were snake-handling Pentecostal folks who believed in singing only “Christian” songs. I learned a lot doing fieldwork.
R.V.B. – It was a Bible belt community?
E.S. - In a way… it was a snake handling church.
I recorded hours and hours of snake handling services… really great stuff. They said “What church do you belong to?” I said “I don’t have a church.” That put me open to being preached at in almost every single sermon. They wouldn’t refer to me by name but they would say things like “There are people who are going to go home and they haven’t been saved yet. They might be in a car crash and they might be doomed for hell.” They would try to hand me a snake or get me to go in for alter call. I would say “I haven’t been saved yet. The spirit hasn’t moved me yet.” I respect their religion. I respected it and I didn’t make any fun of it. My uncle was a photographer and when I got up to New York, he helped me develop some of the film. They took it into Life magazine and they wanted to print it. I said “Only if I can control the captions.” They didn’t want to do that, so I never had them published. The people in Kentucky asked me if I was going to mock them and I said “No, No, no… you clearly believe in what you’re doing.” It was an interesting Pentecostal church. They didn’t believe in doctoring. There were stories and legends about a guy that got bitten by a rattlesnake. He eventually died. They said the flesh just split off his arm. They said “We prayed for him and he went to heaven. That’s the most important thing.” They were truly a throwback - even in the ‘50s - an earlier time. The coal mining industry went in there and ripped up the land. Before that the lumber industry had gone in there and took all the trees off. Then the coal companies came and took the coal, and most of those companies are gone now but the miners are still in there. Those people had nothing and no sense of any future. Their past had been ripped up, too. The kids used to come up to me and say “How do I get out of here?” I used to think “I’ve got money and I can help one or two of them.” What do you do when you do field work like this? Am I also mining things that were theirs, to help me get my degree?” It was a real quandary and it still is, when people do field work. It’s a morally and treacherous row to hoe.
R.V.B. – It is, but you are also sharing a side of humanity that is different than what you are used to.”
E.S. – Yes exactly. It is, if you’re going to be honest in telling the honest problems when you were down there too. I almost got shot out of the woods once. I was in this group down there and this was about my third visit. I had been taking notes on a little old typewriter and they didn’t have any filing system. They didn’t have any way to keep papers so they put them behind pictures. So I put my notes back there from the typewriter. If I’d written them by hand, they’d never could have read them. If I had written them in French, they couldn’t have read them either. One day I was out in the woods hunting groundhogs with a woman who was reputed to be the local prostitute.
These guys drove up, got out of the truck and plodded into the woods where we were. They said to me “Come with us.” I went and sat in the cab of the truck. They said “We know what you’ve been up to.” I thought “Oh my God! What’s this?” Well, the kids had taken my papers out and read them. I had described somebody’s house as having cracks between the logs and flies all over the babies. It was an objective description, but they didn’t like it and they thought I was going to mock them. “We know you’re here to report to the local paper.” I started to cry… and I don’t cry easily. I didn’t think it would hurt. I said “No I’m not… I’m just making notes for myself.” Eventually they let me out and I went home shortly thereafter. I thought I’d never be welcomed again. They drove me back to where I was staying and on both sides of the dirt road, were the people from the whole area looking at me. Some of them yelled at me when I walked down to get into the house. Eventually I went back and again there were the two groups… the sinners, and the people from the church. Fortunately the people from the church liked me more than the sinners. I liked them more also. Eventually I got accepted back into the community. It took a while. It was just a heart wrenching and frightening experience.
R.V.B. – I could imagine.
E.S. – They were there with their guns. I also thought “Oh gosh… there goes my dissertation.” That was a terrible thing to think. It epitomized what the quandary was of collecting.
R.V.B. - When you met Willie Nolan, where did you collect his songs? Did you go to his house?
E.S. – I met Willie and his family in a little shack. It was everything that the stereotypes would depict… living in poverty in southern Indiana. They were just wonderful people; they greeted me with big hugs. They’d spread the table with all the food they could possibly manage. I went back many times because I don’t believe in going in just one or even two times. You want to understand who the person is. It was a totally different culture. You almost have to become acculturated.
I went down many times over many, many years. Willie really got to like me. His wife did too but she was actually jealous of me. It was a normal thing. I was in a courtship situation when I was asking him to sing, but I didn’t realize it until many years afterwards.
He was one of the two informants that I wrote about in my dissertation. He was one of the best singers I’ve ever heard.
R.V.B. – Was your dissertation ever published anywhere?
E.S. – No. I could never get it together because I gave each of my informants TAT tests… The Thematic Apperception Test. It’s a test psychologists used to give people to get a general idea of their personality. To my mind publishing the findings would have been a violation of privacy. Dorson wasn’t encouraging me… nobody was encouraging me… except Edward “Sandy” Ives. It was really the first in-depth study of informants that was done to see how the singer affected the tradition… as opposed to tradition super-organically filtering down magically on the heads of the singers.
I figured out what the songs meant in the lives of the people and the person who sang them. The problem of getting it published, to me ethically, was to try to explain that I was not psychoanalyzing them. I had actually given them this test and would have actually had to publish this test as well. That to me was a violation of privacy. I could never get around that conundrum.
R.V.B. – I can understand that.
E.S. – People just publish things. They think that they own them now. Not always… some people are much more sensitive than that. Maybe now I could do it… they’re dead. Their families are still around listening to the tapes I made of them. (Haha) My dissertation is “published” like many dissertations are, in microfilm. The title is called “Two Voices of Tradition.” (Ellen pulls out the document and read’s) ”Two voices of tradition - The influences of personality and collecting environment upon the songs of two traditional folk singers.” The date was 1965.
R.V.B. – I see… right in the heart of the ‘60s.
E.S. – I got my Doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, but I finished my dissertation during the first year I was teaching – at Wayne State University, in Detroit.
R.V.B. – Were you still practicing your own music at this time?
E.S. – The guy that was the head of the program in Indiana University, where I got my Masters degree, was Richard Dorson; he just absolutely hated folk singers. He called us all “Popularizers.” I was a good student but he made it as hard for me as he could. So I left Indiana University to finish my Doctorate in Philadelphia at the University of Pennsylvania where they actually had a better folklore program for students like me, who were working in the area of folksong.
R.V.B. – Didn’t The New Lost City Ramblers have that same problem?
E.S. – I don’t know. Tell me about that.
R.V.B. – They were popularizers because they were city people doing traditional music.
E.S. – They had studied the idiom so well, that they could be creative in it. They could learn a song and sing it within the aesthetic parameters of Old Time, Country and Bluegrass. They were not imitating anybody. They were emulating and practicing the aesthetics of the group. Mike Seeger had been down to the mountains… John had been there too, and I’m not sure about Tom. Mike did study the traditions that he had been around.
R.V.B. – I’m just saying there were a certain amount of people who thought they were doing a service to the tradition and another group of people who didn’t think so.
E.S. – You’re absolutely right. There were people who thought of themselves as purists.
R.V.B. – So you were going through a similar situation.
E.S. – Yes… but Dorson was not that sophisticated. He was just a snob. He was one of the lesser students at Harvard. If somebody else would have been the head of the program at that time one of the things I never articulated but really fault him for was, even though he was a charming man and could raise money, he never took the intellectual steps that put folklore into the academic curriculum. A subject that should have been respected like ethnography is in Europe. He was sort of laughed at by most people in the academy. He was very, very harsh on women and people who had been performers. I got my Masters there. I went to the University of Pennsylvania, which had better folksong scholars. They only had a couple of folksong scholars at Indiana. I was there for four years. I should of gotten my PHD by that time but it was too unpleasant. Do you know who Joe Hickerson is?
R.V.B. – Yes. I did a telephone interview with him. He was with the Library of Congress.
E.S. – Right… yes. He’s retired and now out in Oregon. I liked Joe very, very much and sang in a group with him. He is a great musician.
R.V.B. – He did a lot of good work at the library also.
E.S. – Yes.
R.V.B. – There’s not a lot of funding going on right now.
E.S. – I did continue to play music. I did some tours and things. It was easier to do it when I was not at Indiana.
R.V.B. – Tell me about some of your live performances. Did you share the stage with anyone noteworthy?
E.S. – Reverend Gary Davis was at Swarthmore with me. Pete did a lot of these things too. I stopped singing when I began to teach at the university. Even though I was hired at Wayne State - which was the first place I taught - before I came to the University of Minnesota. When I came to Minnesota, I was actually given a better offer by Brown, in Rhode Island. I turned them down and I shouldn’t have. I thought “I want to go out canoeing in upstate Minnesota.” But I came here and I got post-polio syndrome. I really couldn’t move and I stopped doing very much publishing too. They offered me a position at Brown as a full professor with tenure. You don’t get that offer very often.
But getting back to the question, my first recordings were in 1953. It was back when 10” lp records were the standard and 12" lp’s were just coming out.
R.V.B. - What was the time period of the record you did on Riverside??? “Traditional American Love Songs.” you did that with Milt Okun.
E.S. – 1958, I was just starting at Indiana. Yes… good old Milt. He has passed away. It was a lot of fun making that record. I was not used to going into a studio and having to do things over about 20 times. It was nice to have people doing the recording… instead of me having to do it. Milt’s vocal range was not quite compatible with mine, or I wasn’t compatible with him. I had to sing two to three notes higher that I usually did. It really stretched my voice… but that was my natural voice. I realized I had been singing lower that I should have been. Milt was wonderful and very patient. He was a little but too schmaltzy as a singer for my taste… (Haha) but I enjoyed working with him very much. We used to go to Chinese restaurants in the village. He said “This is the best Jewish Chinese restaurant in New York. The waiter will tell you what to order.”
R.V.B. – (Hahaha)
E.S. – (Haha) I used to joke with people that the picture on the cover was not me because Milt was so ugly that they could not possibly put both of us on the cover. (Haha) That was a terrible thing to say. I’m not fond of the cover.
R.V.B. – Any other recording highlights?
E.S. – Kenny Goldstein recorded the lumberjack record. He kept saying “You sound too sweet! Sound like a lumberjack.” It’s the worst vocal production I’ve ever had. I’m trying to sound much too harsh. He said “That was great. That was great.” I’m not happy about that record but it’s the most available one that there is. I did one for the Cornell Recording Society… “Ballads of Careless Love.” I did concerts all over the place. By the time I got further on in my studies I used to think “Oh I’m not that great a singer.” In 1956 or so I was making a TV performance with New Lost City Ramblers, Jean Ritchie and Dave Sears – it was for a program called “Camera One”… I remember I bumped into a bunch of guys in the elevator, who were leaving one of the sessions. They said “Join us… we need a female singer.” I said “No… I’ve got to go back and finish my Ph.D.” So I did. Those were the Tarriers. Aside from not going to Brown, That was my other mistake. (Haha) I do think I was a far better mind than singer.
R.V.B. - What is the story behind the Cornell album “Ballads of a Careless Love?”
E.S. – I used to have a radio program at Cornell. I believe it was every Wednesday. I forget the name of it. And I used to lead “sings” there. (Which is one reason I was elected class president in my freshman year… people just generally knew me.) WBVR were the station’s call letters. They approached me and said “Do you want to do an album?” I said “Sure.” So they put me in a one room studio and we did two short sessions, I think. It was done mostly on first takes. It’s a nice 10” album. Howie Mitchell, who was also a student folk singer and a wonderful photographer took the picture on the cover.
R.V.B. – Your radio program was a folk music program?
E.S. – Yes. At that time, I was assisting Harold Thompson in the Folksong course… which was affectionately called by people who took it “A Gut Course”. It was also called, affectionately, “Stamping and Stomping.” Thompson tended to favor husky football players (who used to sit in the back and read newspapers). I was furious. (haha) I got to sing and do the illustrations for what he was talking about. I was pretty well known on campus for being a singer.
When I was in Detroit, I was playing a gig at a place called “The Retort.” Bob Dylan was giving a concert at The Masonic auditorium there. This was about 1964. He came into my gig with all of his body guards. He liked what I did. He said “I want you to come home with me.” I said “No… I have to teach tomorrow.”
R.V.B. – Well that’s exciting!
E.S. – It was kind of exciting. It was kind of flattering on one hand but I was tired.
R.V.B. – I read something about Peter, Paul and Mary.
E.S. – I went to college with Peter Yarrow. He was a year behind me.. I think he had sort of a crush on me I could be flattering myself when I say that. Talk about Schmaltzy… he sang like Bing Crosby, and I didn’t think he was very good. He took over the job of assisting Thompson after I left. At Cornell I used to sing a great deal. I used to lead sings in the basement of one of the dorms, Risley Hall.… weekly. I didn’t know Paul but I knew Mary a bit. I was in Grad school when they got together and I thought “With a name like that, they’re never going to make it.” So much for my predictions.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha) What about your interactions with Pete Seeger?
E.S. – I knew Pete fairly well. He knew me when I was an undergraduate at Cornell. I used to help him get his performances there. I’d sing at the hoots he led in New York. I never did a major concert with him. He mentioned me several times in his column in Sing Out. I was never a major performer in New York, but I was known by most of the singers who hung around Izzy Young’s store, “The Folk Center” I think it was called..
R.V.B. - Well known enough that I knew about you.
E.S. – I guess I’m getting better known as I get older.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha) What did you think about the popularity of folk music after the Kingston Trio hit it big with Tom Dooley?
E.S. – I was at Indiana at the time and I was singing with a quartet… with Joe Hickerson and guys named Bill Black and Bruce Buckley. We actually sounded pretty good. After one of our rehearsals Bruce said “Have you heard the Kingston Trio’s rendition of Tom Dooley?” I had not heard it yet. Then I heard it and I thought “Yuk!!” They were ok but the “pop song” upbeat performance of it was antithetical to the song’s story or the original way it had been sung to the folksong collector, Frank Warner. As I kept listening to them over time, they’d make fun of the songs in a sense. That irritated me! I did not like them. In my wonderfully mellow old age I’m just as judgmental, but I now look at them as an example of a transition… taking music from one genre and putting it into a popular genre. In those days the popular genre was pretty moon-june-ish’. The songs were not complex.
R.V.B. – It seemed to be very popular in the college community. After they hit, everyone was singing folk music.
E.S. – Yes… people did start to sing a lot. I was one academic generation before that big wave. Although I must say that the wave helped me get through graduate school. That’s when I did my concert tours. I would do them with lecture demonstrations. What I used to do was explain what traditional singing style was. I would play examples from the singers I collected from. At the end of the lecture/concert I would play a recording of Tom Dooley as sung by traditional singers, and then I would play the Kingston Trio rendition. The audience would always laugh at the Kingston Trio because they were so sappy by comparison to the traditional performance, and because the Trio made fun of the song in a way.
R.V.B. – A couple of other groups followed in their footsteps and did the same thing… like the Chad Mitchell Trio.
E.S. – In the ‘50s and ‘60s. it was always a question of “Do you want to make money and be popular, or do you want to do what you think we should do?” The “we” in that sentence were the “folk music purists,” mostly the city kids who hung out in The Village. It was a false dichotomy that took years to soften and on which to get some perspective.
R.V.B. – I think you have a very nice voice.
E.S. – Thank you… that’s nice of you.
R.V.B. – You have a unique sounding voice. It seems to me that you have perfect pitch.
E.S. – I used to be able to hit notes really well. As I got older and stopped singing for a long time when I was here at the University of Minnesota, it got more difficult. And then, recently, I had an operation that took out one of my vocal cords, so I can’t sing anymore, although I’m trying to develop a new voice. I liked my voice, but I couldn’t get much out of it that was expressive. It was a pretty, young voice. I think I was right… I think I had a better mind than a voice. (Haha) With a group, it would have been easier to have “made it.”
R.V.B. – What pieces of your work that you produced are you proud of?
E.S. - I like my musicality but it gets repetitious and I didn’t learn how to change That. For example, The Winnsboro Blues… I don’t sing blues emulating the Black musical tradition in America, but I would introduce it by saying “When I was a kid they said white people can’t sing blues, and women shouldn’t sing them either.” (Barbara Dane hadn’t hit the scene yet.) By the time I began singing it, I was able to say say “Here’s an example of what I call “an Old White Ladies Suburban blues, or an ‘Owls’ blues, for short.” The guitar arrangement is more “bluesy” than the vocal production.
R.V.B. – (Hahaha)
E.S. – I try to remove people from the assumption of how it should sound.
R.V.B. – I liked your version of Good Night Irene in the video you sent me.
E.S. – Oh really? Interesting… I was just fooling around with it. I never figured out an arrangement for it.
R.V.B. – I was watching your right hand and your technique was a little unorthodox… almost like a Carter scratch.
E.S. – I don’t know what I have developed now since I can’t sing, all I can do is play the guitar. I have developed ways of playing that have parallel harmonies and all manner of things I never thought I could do.
R.V.B. – I stumbled across a picture of a wonderful gathering in 2006, of you, John Cohen…
E.S. – Johnny and I went to high school together. Johnny came into Minneapolis to celebrate his book and have a showing of his pictures. He published a book called “Young Bob: John Cohen’s early photographs of Bob Dylan.” The pictures were from Greenwich Village. He talked about the collecting… he talked about Greenwich Village. He invited me to come along to the opening of the show and to later events related to the show because we hadn’t seen each other for years and he knew I had been there, too, when he had taken the photos. We had a party with Marcia and Jon Pankake and others.I was never really a participant in the folksong groups here in The Cities until I was trying to make a comeback as a singer of folksongs. That was before this past year when I had surgery that paralyzed one of my vocal chords and I could not sing any longer.
R.V.B. – It looks like people in the photos were singing songs and having a good time.
E.S. – Yes. It was the first time I had sung in a long time. I was a little rusty but it was fun.
R.V.B. – How was your experience at the American Folklore Society?
E.S. – I was elected President of the American Folklore Society in 1976. I used to love giving papers at the annual meetings. I never used to sing very much there… because of Dorson. I used to go to every single meeting. I enjoyed it. I knew and enjoyed just about everybody in the organization. It was a place to try out new ideas and see what people were doing and working on.
R.V.B. – What are some of the rewarding experiences as an educator sharing your experiences with your students?
E.S. – I didn’t share that many of my personal professional friendships and dislikes with my students… except when I occasionally slipped and made snide comments about Joan Baez. (Haha) I probably could of gotten myself sued upside down and downside up. I told them about how the traditional singers I collected from sounded and… how the singers looked. I retired in ‘99. That’s a long time ago. In those days I had to fight with my department to get audio and visual aides so that I could teach what was essentially a performed art. My department was still in the Dark Ages and had absolutely no audio visual equipment. Until I arrived they treated songs as though they were poems and other verbal traditions as though they were written “literature.” Of course that has finally changed and classrooms today are finally equipped with multi-media technology so that it can be used where it fits the subject matter. After much hasseling and explaining I finally put together a cart that at least had sound equipment for records, tapes and CDs. It was a heavy bulky thing that included large speakers. Every time I had a class it had to be schlepped into the lecture room. Mind you, I was teaching from a wheel chair for a good deal of my time at the University because of my post-polio.
One of the things that happened to me when I came here – and it was an unfortunate thing – was that the “Feminists” at the U of MN in the English Department, where I was housed as a folklorist, decided that I wasn’t an “appropriate feminist.” - It is unfortunately the mark of the early stages of most radical movements that they are intolerant of people who do not toe the line of their dogma. (I think that’s a mixed metaphor, but who cares.)
The group heading the feminist movement at U of M were “Lesbian feminists” – not that they were all lesbian, but they believed in a world where one’s sexuality should not be a mark against them if they loved people of the same sex. This group was mostly focused on lesbian women’s rights.
One of the people who was the “star” of this group of feminists, most of whom were in my department, wanted to be promoted to the rank of Full Professor. Unfortunately she is a very weak scholar, and part of what one needed to be promoted to the rank of Full Professor then was to have a book published. She had been turned down for promotion before, when there were professors in the department who disliked not only her scholarship but her sexual preference, so naturally, she felt that they had turned her down previously because of her sexuality.
Well, one of the first meetings I had in the department was one where she came up for promotion. To be promoted, one had to be voted on by the group in the department who had the rank to which you wished to step up to. In this case it was the full professors of the department. (The professorial ranks are assistant professor, associate, and full – that’s as high a one could go in the department.)
I had been hired as a full professor with tenure and so I met with the full professors to review this woman’s qualifications for that rank. There was only one other woman full professor in the department at the time. It was a large department and, ironically, they called the voting group “The appropriate body.” This woman had secretly sought me out when I was being interviewed for the position at Minnesota to ask me if I would vote for her for promotion if I were hired since she was being persecuted because she was lesbian. I said then if that were the case I certainly would vote for her – but it proved to be quite the opposite. It was not her sexuality for which she had been turned down.
We each had reviewed this woman’s publications and to my disappointment, I saw that she was not only an unabashed egotist, but also a very poor scholar. She claimed her publications were “the first that dealt with….” Let’s say, “father molestation of a daughter who later became lesbian.” Well, her claims were simply not true. Her her writings, including her new book,were hardly scholarship. They dealt with lesbian issues about which she simply claimed authority without presenting earlier work that substantiated that claim or which showed justifiable reasons for it.
Her book was badly researched, badly written, and lacked a clear thesis. It was a rambling and basically poor work to qualify for any professorial rank. She felt, however, that she deserved promotion. She had become a sort of “diva” in the feminist group at the U of MN and she had gained a good deal of political power in the university. Some of the male members of our “appropriate body” did not have the nerve to say anything negative about her poor scholarship or writing. They didn’t want to be considered homophobic. I had hardly said anything at the promotion meeting, but at one point, when her book was brought up for discussion, I asked a question -- who published her book? It turned out that she had had the book published by a “vanity press,” "that is, a press that did not do peer reviews of scholarship. Such presses are paid by the author to publish a book.”
Unfortunately it also sealed my fate in the department and with the feminists throughout the university from then on. One can’t defend oneself against rumors that are spread by angry colleagues when you are new to a place and don’t have a track record or colleagues there who have known you for a while to to support your reputation.
In universities it is assumed that everything that goes on in meetings of “appropriate bodies” is confidential. At other universities this is a time-honored rule. I could not believe that my professorial colleagues at Minnesota would violate that rule. Well, I was naive. The next day when I visited the department office to get my mail, I was ostentatiously shunned by anyone who had an affiliation with the feminists.
My goose was cooked before I had showed that I could be a good colleague and the rest of my days teaching here were decidedly uncomfortable for me in my Department. There is simply no way of disproving rumors and they did a good job of spreading them about me. I was never invited into the feminist studies group, etc. But I loved my students and I loved my work, so I stayed here. Also, I developed a case of post-polio syndrome after I arrived so it would have been difficult for me to move anywhere. I probably should have taken the offer from Brown University, which was made at the same time the U of MN made theirs. And Brown is actually a better school and had made me a better offer than the U of MN.
I’ve always been a loner, so for years I went my own way as the only folklorist at U of MN. It took me years to realize what had been happening and why I could not develop friendships with colleagues. I just went into my own cocoon and worked with my classes.
I was one of the first State folklorists in the country, here in Minnesota. I got legislation passed to establish a Center for the Study of Minnesota Folklife. I became the director of it. Plus in that same year, I became the President of the American Folklore Society. I didn’t have a secretary so it was pretty rough. I burned out that year.
R.V.B. – That’s something to be very proud of.
E.S. – Well I guess I am. The Folklife Center was all too much because I had to raise all the money for it… it was not subsidized. They asked me why a New Yorker wanted to be the State Folklorist of Minnesota. I said “It’s easy when you’re from out of state to see how things are different. I didn’t go to Brown University, I came here because I like this State.” They passed the legislation establishing the Folklife Center. I was lucky because I had a friend from Cornell who was one of the legislators who sponsored the bill. That’s the way you have to do things in this world unfortunately.
R.V.B. – You’ve got to know somebody.
E.S. – Absolutely
R.V.B. – What did you do in Berkley? How long were you there?
E.S. – I was there for a year. Alan Dundes - who was the head of the folklore program there - was going on sabbatical. We had gone to graduate school together he knew my work. So he asked me to take over the program for him for a year.
R.V.B. – How did you like California?
E.S. – It was fun. I loved California, and when I went back to Minnesota, I left California inch by the inch. I went to every place I could go there. I visited all the folk singers there. That’s how I met Malvina Reynolds.
R.V.B. - You had mentioned Mariposa and Newport. Did you go to those festivals?
E.S. – I went to Mariposa with Malvina Reynolds. I accompanied her there… not as guitarist but just as a person. I refused to accompany here on the guitar because she had too many good chord progressions that I could not follow and she never wanted to take time rehearsing. People think of her as a simple singer/songwriter. She was originally a jazz musician, fiddle player, as a kid. I went to Newport with Sarah Ogan Gunning… who I collected from in Detroit. She was from the southern mountains. She was Aunt Molly Jackson’s half sister… Jim Garland’s sister. She married a man named Ogan, who was a coal miner in Appalachia. He died from black lung. One of her babies died of black lung and she began to write and sing songs of protest. The most well know of hers is I Am a Girl of Constant Sorrow. It was a well known hymn by the title of “I am a Man of Constant Sorrow”. She had moved up to Detroit and married a man who was a metal polisher. I met here up there with a very well known folklorist named Archie Green. He was a wonderful guy… bright and articulate.
R.V.B. – I gather you spent some time with him.
E.S. – I spent a lot of time at meetings and conferences with him. I went to visit him when I was in San Francisco, teaching at Berkley. I went with him to meet Sarah and he charmed her and inspired her to return to singing. He would charm anybody. I was left with Sara, who wanted to continue to sing. So for about six years, I collected from Sara Gunning in Detroit. I’ve done nothing with those tapes yet.
I’m looking for a repository for my collection. I became a good friend of hers and helped her work with the people who wanted her to perform at festivals and so forth. I didn’t act as her agent but I would help her with anything she wanted me to do. I went with her to Newport. She was an accapela singer. Newport was fun… that was 1964. It was the year before Dylan went electric.
R.V.B. – Did you go to some of the workshops there at the festival?
E.S. – I think I did some. I saw Hedy West there… I saw Jean Ritchie there. They were people I knew well and it was great meeting my old friends. I thanked the people of Newport for helping me go. There’s a picture of me in the folksong fan magazine Sing Out. I’m sitting on a bench in front of the place where we were all staying. Glen Ohrlin was on one side of me – he was a cowboy singer who was on the Newport program that year – and Jimmy Driftwood on the other side… the May 1965 issue. It’s a good picture by Dave Gahr. I also took took some really good pictures there. I have a wonderful picture of Mississippi John Hurt and Elizabeth Cotton. Both of them are laughing their heads off.
R.V.B. – That sounds precious.
E.S. – It’s a wonderful picture. It’s slightly better than Dave Gahr’s photo. He was a great photographer. I did participate in workshops. I talked at a topical song one… about collecting.
R.V.B. – You’re holding a workshop with me right now and I’m the collector. (Haha)
E.S. – That’s right (Haha)
R.V.B. – Was Mariposa a similar festival?
E.S. – Yes. There was no group place where we stayed. We had a motel room. People were more scattered. Malvina was off hobnobbing with old pals and I was off looking at boats. We were roaming around or napping. (Haha)
R.V.B. – The material that you have collected… do you plan on giving it to a university?
E.S. – I’m looking for somebody who will help me finance a couple of years of my life. Now that I’m not singing, I’d be really ripe for a grant. I need financial help organizing my notes and getting my tapes digitalized. They’re wonderful tapes. They go back to the ‘50s when I started to collect. I would like the music and the notes to go together in a package. I don’t mind showing that Fuzzy called me an “asshole” in one of my collecting sessions. I’m holding out to get a grant. Today everything is upside down so who knows.
R.V.B. – I saw pictures of you hiking. Is that something that you enjoyed doing?
E.S. – I just loved camping. Especially when I learned I could backpack even with one leg. It was just a freedom for me because you were away from everything… unlike what happens today when you can take your cell phone. You were away from everything and you had everything you needed to exist for a week or two. I love nature and the views were wonderful at the places I went. I did a lot of backpacking. There are some places I couldn’t go. I was really sorry when I was traveling with Malvina up to a place called Hornby Island… off of Vancouver. We went to go visit some of her friends. I discovered a place called the West Coast Trail. Unfortunately right in the middle of it, it has a log crossing. It was a very narrow log. I knew I never could do it. But it was wonderful up to that point.
R.V.B. – Thank you very much for sharing your story with me.
E.S. – Thank you Robert.
Interview conducted by Robert von Bernewitz
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