Earth's Mixtape: The Voyager Interstellar Record

In 1977 NASA launched Voyager I and II into the cosmos.  Commissioned to first pass through our solar system and then to space beyond (into which it passed in 1989) the twin crafts were equipped with antennas and detection instruments charged with collecting and transmitting data.  In addition to these astrophysical objectives, the mission's project teams also seriously considered the question: what if extraterrestrial beings encounter the spacecrafts?

In response to this question, the mission assembled a team led by astro-laureate and visionary, Carl Sagan.  The team composed upon an etched golden record, a compilation of life on earth - images of animals, of men and women, buildings, trees - spoken introductions from world leaders, including President Carter - the sounds of whales and birds - and a compilation of music.  Engineers attached the record to the exterior of the crafts along with visual instructions on how to play it via the turntable and stylus also included.

Photo courtesy of the Kennedy Space Center Photo Archive.
http://images.ksc.nasa.gov/photos/1977/captions/KSC-77P-0196.html

In his account of the music's selection Dr. Sagan wrote, "We are feeling creatures.  However our emotional life is more difficult to communicate particularly to beings of different biological make-up.  Music, it seemed to me was at least a credible attempt to convey human emotions."   As a music lover, this is a wonderful notion - that music can both describe our human "placeness" (Earth, and the various regions of it that we inhabit or that inspire us) as well as our humanity itself.

The music the team selected was:

·      Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40

·      Java, court gamelan, "Kinds of Flowers," recorded by Robert Brown. 4:43

·      Senegal, percussion, recorded by Charles Duvelle. 2:08

·      Zaire, Pygmy girls' initiation song, recorded by Colin Turnbull. 0:56

·      Australia, Aborigine songs, "Morning Star" and "Devil Bird," recorded by Sandra LeBrun Holmes. 1:26

·      Mexico, "El Cascabel," performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México. 3:14

·      "Johnny B. Goode," written and performed by Chuck Berry. 2:38

·      New Guinea, men's house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan. 1:20

·      Japan, shakuhachi, "Tsuru No Sugomori" ("Crane's Nest,") performed by Goro Yamaguchi. 4:51

·      Bach, "Gavotte en rondeaux" from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55

·      Mozart, The Magic Flute, Queen of the Night aria, no. 14. Edda Moser, soprano. Bavarian State Opera, Munich, Wolfgang Sawallisch, conductor. 2:55

·      Georgian S.S.R., chorus, "Tchakrulo," collected by Radio Moscow. 2:18

·      Peru, panpipes and drum, collected by Casa de la Cultura, Lima. 0:52

·      "Melancholy Blues," performed by Louis Armstrong and his Hot Seven. 3:05

·      Azerbaijan S.S.R., bagpipes, recorded by Radio Moscow. 2:30

·      Stravinsky, Rite of Spring, Sacrificial Dance, Columbia Symphony Orchestra, Igor Stravinsky, conductor. 4:35

·      Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48

·      Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, First Movement, the Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer, conductor. 7:20

·      Bulgaria, "Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin," sung by Valya Balkanska. 4:59

·      Navajo Indians, Night Chant, recorded by Willard Rhodes. 0:57

·      Holborne, Paueans, Galliards, Almains and Other Short Aeirs, "The Fairie Round," performed by David Munrow and the Early Music Consort of London. 1:17

·      Solomon Islands, panpipes, collected by the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Service. 1:12

·      Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen. 0:38

·      China, ch'in, "Flowing Streams," performed by Kuan P'ing-hu. 7:37

·      India, raga, "Jaat Kahan Ho," sung by Surshri Kesar Bai Kerkar. 3:30

·      "Dark Was the Night," written and performed by Blind Willie Johnson. 3:15

·      Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Opus 130, Cavatina, performed by Budapest String Quartet. 6:37 My book takes particular interest with Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold the Ground," an instrumental, blues-spiritual that ruminates on the windy desolation of the central Texas plains. When thinking on Sagan's record I always wonder what music I'd add to such a project.  Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer" would likely find a way onto the compilation, if for no other reason than to instruct some far off life form on human frivolity and joy.  Terry Riley's "In C" would too - I'm not sure why.... What music would you add?

Songs and the Slavery Landscape

Over the past three years one interest has been to connect the music of the American slavery experience with the physical landscape.  Like all such endeavors, the experience gained complexity as it went.  There were spirituals that related the Biblical landscape to the hills, mountains, valleys, rivers, and wilderness of the American south.  Old spirituals like "Go in De Wilderness" express a connectedness to God, a rite of self-determination, and a geo-physical sanctuary away from the hardships of the fields and plantations.  Having hiked and driven through many stretches of the south, these regions of wilderness sit at the periphery of all plantation life.  There are forests, swamps, bayous, hills, and caves that could, for as short as a moment or as long as a winter season, harbor the slave away from their heartbreaking realities.

A cotton field near Greenwood, Mississippi after fall harvest in 2011.  175 years
ago this region was thick hardwood forest and spotted with bayous.  The massive
land-clearing endeavor which rid the lands of nearly all flora and fauna in
order to make way for the southern Cotton Empire was performed using
slave labor.

As music is concerned, the various forms that the slaves adopted, modified - and more often than not - created, serve as the cornerstones of most contemporary American music.  From the boundless, wide fields of the deep south where the burgeoning cotton industry rewarded cruel masters who pushed their slave-labor force to inhuman maximums, came the field holler and field moan.  These forms that found roots in West and Central African musical traditions, expressed the sad reality of a job never done, of loved ones gone forever.  These expressions over the next century transformed into the blues...

Moving northward from the deep south, through the mid-south and former border states, the landscape wrinkles, and the forests deepen.  For slaves there, the experience could often, but not always, be less severe.  Though uncommon, slaves here sometimes bought their own freedom.  Others considered escape.  Souls on the Eastern Shores of Maryland listened for the secret code songs of Harriet Tubman.  Imbedded in the lyrics of her songs were clues indicating her arrival and route.  Elsewhere songs like "Foller de Drinkin' Goud," with origins that remain mysterious, drew secret maps to freedom.

Near my home in Cincinnati, sits the small river town of Ripley.  Today it's a collection of brick buildings and restored homes sitting quietly along a subtle bend in the Ohio river.  150 years ago the town was a key port, the second largest between the river's headwaters in Pittsburgh and terminus at Cairo, Illinois.

The stairs from downtown Ripley to the Rankin Home.

During the 1800s Ripley was the home of John Parker, a slave who'd bought his freedom.  Parker, who owned his own small iron foundry in the town, helped slaves cross the river in his row boat. Once in Ohio, he helped them evade pursuing slave hunters. It was also the home of Reverend John Rankin.  Together with his family, Rankin would shelter escaping slaves in his barn and secret chambers beneath his porch.  The Rankin home sat a top a hill that overlooked the town and the bowing river.  At night the family left a candle in the front window to guide escaping slaves making the climb.



Perhaps the most famous escapee to come through Ripley was a woman her toddler son.  In his autobiography, John Parker called her escape "the most important incident that ever took place at Ripley, during all the years of the activities of the abolition group."  With her son secured across her chest, the woman made her way across the Ohio by hopping across sheets of thin ice as hounds and hunters bellowed at her from the Kentucky side.  She made her way to the Ripley home where she was cared for and provisioned.  Harriet Beecher Stowe named this woman Eliza and her son, Harry in novel Uncle Tom's Cabin.  Having inspired a wealth of songs, especially in the northern states, the novel became pivotal in shaping attitudes about the realities of slavery.  In 1852 Miss M.E. Collier from Boston wrote "Eliza's Flight." (lyrics from http://utc.viriginia.edu/songs/elizasfltf.html)

The ice floating down the stream,
The wintry day is wild,
Hope lights with her underlying gleam,
The Wand'er and her child.

She clasps him closely to her heart,
Her only one-her joy,
For nought but death the two shall part,
The mother and her boy.

She sees the cold and rushing tide,
Her feet bleeding bare,
She lingers not, nor turns aside,
Yet breathes one heartful prayer.

Yet breathes one heartful prayer.

She presses on - she presses on,
Nor heeds the icy flood,
Thus only may her rest be won,
So help her mighty God!

The mother gains the further shore,
Her babe is on her breast,
The race is past, the peril o'er,
One moment is she blessed.

Ripley, Ohio, summer 2013, my daughters along for the ride.
Visible in the very center of the photo is the Rankin House
atop Liberty Hill.  Dozens of slaves on their journey to
freedom passed through the streets of Ripley and up the hill
to the Rankin House where they'd be kept safe and provisioned
for the journey north to Canada.

The Urban Pulse

Often a landscape's sounds influence its music.  It's well documented how the early Sun Records artists derived their chugging rhythms from the clack of passing rail cars.  Think Johnny Cash, Elvis, Roy Orbison, or Carl Perkins who more often used the guitar as an instrument of rhythm rather than one of melody.  If you delve further into the American songbook, you can find pieces like Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold the Ground" - a sparse, blues adaptation of a 1700s hymn.  Likely due to Johnson's blindness, the piece evokes the sounds of unimpeded wind and rolling pastoral prairies of the rural, Central Texas landscape where he was from.

Central Texas, March 2012

for a fresh take on fusion jazz/funk, try On the Corner
Columbia Records, 1971

But what about cities?  Would it be sensory overload to process their sonic chaos into something resembling a musical experience?  Miles Davis' oft-panned On the Corner album deconvolutes the sounds of traffic, the scrapes of steel and concrete, the urge of the urban sidewalk into a vital pulse.  Though Davis plays very little on the album, it's successful in transforming city sounds into a throbbing, insistent groove - reflective of the dynamic times in late 1960s-early 1970s Harlem (a region noted for dynamic times)  - involving a highly mobilized political and social culture, high style, and heroin. It's one of my favorite works by Davis.

DNA on DNA No More Records, 2004

Farther down the island, the late 1970s sonic art form called No-Wave emerged out of Manhattan's lower east side.  Differentiating itself from the punk music scene that was happening in the same neighborhoods at roughly the same time, No-Wave artists seemed to be responding to urban aesthetics rather than challenging socio-cultural norms.  DNA, one of the scene's better known groups, recorded "Grapefruit" a piece that culls the drones, grumbles, and squeals of the city.  Amid skewed time signatures, the guitars' atonal noises become pitched subway brakes, the trapped, droning echoes of diesel trucks, the voices of the passing crowds whose collective din resemble a continuous, indiscernible mumble.

ESG: A South Bronx Story, (Universal Sound, 2000) is a
strong compilation, but for the band's best recording
check out Come Away With Me, Fire Records, 1983

By far my favorite story of urban music is the story of ESG from the projects of South Bronx.  A band composed of the Scroggins sisters equipped with instruments paid for by their mother as a means to divert them from the vices of the streets below, ESG (Emerald, Sapphire, Gold - each sister's birthstone) is a gumbo of polyrhythm and minimal funk.  If you've heard any Hip-Hop over the past 20 years, chances are you've heard their music sampled countless times.  I spoke with Renee Scroggins last year about ESG's music and its deep connection to South Bronx.  While I'll push off the nut and bolts of the interview (and her enchanting stories therein) onto the book, I will briefly relay a magical story she conveyed.

- It began in the summer when she was a girl.  Their apartment had no air conditioning, so at night she and her sisters slept with the windows open.  From the park many floors below, the sounds of the street musicians reached up into their window.  The instruments they played were plastic tubs, spoons, and coke bottles.  Each summer night Renee was treated to this concert as she drifted off to sleep.  She acknowledged the beautiful sensation of the rhythms breathing into her dream space.  What came out, years later with the care and support of their mother, was the singular and infectious sound of ESG.

Renee, Valerie, Marie Scroggins
photo courtesy of Renee Scroggins

Spontaneous songs.

In March 1965, Pete Seeger, already known as a folk music troubadour - a people's songster, took a break from the 50 mile March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama in order to transcribe some of the amazing music he'd heard.  A fellow-marcher, one far more acquainted with the unifying power of improvised music, playfully chastised him, "Don't you know you can't write down the words to a freedom song."

The Edmund Pettus Bridge which crosses the Alabama River at Selma, Alabama.  The site of the March 7, 1965 "Bloody Sunday" incident. 

The Marchers had embarked on their journey on March 21st, exactly two weeks after police in Selma beat and gassed African Americans peacefully demonstrating against the murder of 26-year old activist, Jimmy Lee Jackson by an Alabama State Trooper.  "Bloody Sunday," as the incident  came to be known gained national exposure, igniting a national consciousness to the brutal realities of the segregated south.  For the many who'd been injured in the violence, it was the plight of Rev. James Reeb that propelled consciousness into action.  Reeb, who'd been beaten badly on the bridge, was refused care at Selma's Hospital and was therefore sent to one in far away Birmingham.  On March 11, 1965 he died of his injuries.

On March 21st under the protection of National Guard troops, a group of over 7,000 including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, Pete Seeger, and a duo of Rabbis made their way east over the bridge and onto the long, rural road of route 80 to the State Capitol Building in Montgomery.  On that day, above the jeers of angry white onlookers and the grumble of troop transports, rang the songs of the marchers. Some we know well today.  "We Shall Overcome," the ubiquitous theme of the larger Civil Rights Movement stirred the hearts of the marchers.  "Governor Wallace" a song "written" by James Orange (the very man whose arrest the slain Jimmy Lee Jackson was protesting when he was shot) was most likely improvised either on or surrounding the March to Montgomery.

"Governor Wallace, oh yeah,

You can never jail us all,

Governor Wallace, oh yeah,

Segregation is bound to fall." (Orange, 1965)

Route 80 between Selma and Montgomery

 The songs began spontaneously, without introduction or fanfare.  A "leader," which essentially amounted to anyone hammy enough to sound their voice amid the masses, would begin with a verse.  Should it sound agreeable to those marching beside the leader, a response would be sung out.  In the case of "Governor Wallace" that's likely the origin of the "Oh yeah" phrases.  The call and response is a musical form that may be traced back to West Africa and is a touchpoint for the blues and jazz music.

The marchers updated popular songs of the day.  "Get Your Rights Jack" was a melodically reverent take on Ray Charles' 1960 recording of Percy Mayfield's of "Hit the Road Jack."  And of course most prevalent and by most accounts, most stirring (according to the landmark recording Voices of the Civil Rights Movement) were the Black Spirituals.  Preserved from the days of slavery, spirituals like "We Shall Not Be Moved," "Jacob's Ladder," "Go Tell it On the Mountain," and "Wade in the Water,"connected the Civil Rights Movement with both a three hundred year plight and their ancestral homes in Africa.

Looking upon the landscape and countryside of route 80 today, lush in the new spring, rural and tranquil, it takes time to imagine the massive, musical experience.  From a distance their voices must have seemed a deep, unified chant; their melodies would have hummed unarticulated like crickets.  Their heads would have moved slowly up and down with their gait.  Their bodies would have cast a single, thick shadow obscuring their true number.

When they reached Montgomery, there were over 20,000 marchers.  They walked to the gradual, marble stairs of the State House and continued to sing.

Alabama State Capitol, April 2013

Alabama State Capitol, March 25, 1965

Photo courtesy of the National Park Service, 

Lowndes Interpretive  Center, Lowndes, Alabama

Check out Voices of the Civil Rights Movement

 Welcome to my blog!

Here, we'll explore the American landscape from a largely musical perspective.  Keep in mind, however this will not be much of a travel-log or a dashboard-side guide to accompany your GPS.  Music after all is an art form and places have a tendency to transform under the forces of time.

Before delving any further into this blog I'd encourage you to think of the places in your world where you make music.  Could it be beside your child's crib where you sing them lullabies?  Or at in your Grandparent's living room where you tap happily on their piano?  Consider how those places will transform as the years progress.  Your memories both of the music you made and the places where you made it will merge with your imagination.  Perhaps when you hear a series of atonal piano notes, you'll conjure the warm colors, textures, and smells of your Grandparent's home.  Or when you hear the first verse of "You Are My Sunshine" you'll recall your child's shadowy, peaceful nursery filled with soft quilts and baby powder.  The nursery is painted now and the crib is in the garage.  Your child is a teenager.  The power of songs and music however can ignite our memories and imagination.  It makes places sacred.  When we do this on a collective level, we can assemble a songbook of music that remembers and re-imagines all places in all times.

This blog and furthermore my next book convey just a few tiny pieces of this notion.  It explores the transformation of slave spirituals into the blues of the Mississippi Delta, the expression of urban angst and regionalism in Hip-Hop, the songs of Native Americans as their landscapes forever changed, the incendiary musical legacy of sweet home Chicago, the sprawling soundtracks of the great western deserts....  Is the tunnel in the photograph above haunted by the ghost of John Henry, one of America's greatest heroes of folk song?  Let's try to find out.

Also in the spirit of interaction, I invite you to comment.  Music and places after all belongs to all of us.