Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives, Pete Seeger, et al.
The Ballad Operas: The Martins and the Coys
The Alan Lomax Collection: The Concert and Radio Series
Rounder (www.rounder.com)
Hayseed populism has a long pedigree in the U.S. popular cultural imagination: Abe Lincoln, Davy Crockett, Will Rogers, Dogpatch, Minnie Pearl, Mountain Dew, the Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, the Waltons, Hee-Haw, Hootenanny, Prairie Home Companion, and the epic hillbilly blood feud. Beginning with Walker Evans' and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the cultural documentary efforts of the New Deal era projected a spirit of national inclusion, participation, and nobility of purpose that spilled over readily into the war effort. The patriotic call to democratic struggle against a menacing global fascist enemy drew heavily on youthful idealism, which found compelling articulation in the gallantly romantic, politically inspired singing and mass dissemination of folk songs.
Thus emerged the ballad opera, The Martins and the Coys, produced by Alan Lomax and then-wife, writer Elizabeth Lyttleton, for the BBC in 1944, as broadcast to war-weary England. The plot is straightforward enough: Two antagonistic backwoods clans, caught up in the sweep of global history, end their vendetta and join the national struggle to defeat the Axis powers. The pre-McCarthy-era cast included several Popular Front sympathizers, including Will Geer, Woody Guthrie, Burl Ives and Pete Seeger, with other immensely talented folk artists of the day, including Lily May Ledford, Fiddlin' Arthur Smith, Sonny Terry, Hally Wood, "Cisco" Houston and Lomax himself. Lomax understood the radio-borne power of melding cultural stereotypes with popular cultural forms to promote an opportunistic species of social understanding and advance a partisan cause. A rollicking send-up, The Martins and the Coys unleashed a number of brilliantly political folk gems. As Guthrie's "You Better Get Ready" relates,
"You better get ready, 'cause you know you got to fight...
Well, the Devil opened up his big black book-
And he opened up and he took a look-
He read off Adolf Hitler's name
And said, 'Old hell just ain't the same,
Compared to them fascists, hell, I'm tame!"
Guthrie's "All of You Fascists Bound to Lose" borrows the Carter Family's melody, "Cannonball Blues," to buoy a rousing ensemble chorus:
"All of you fascists bound to lose
You're bound to lose, you fascists, bound to lose."
The closing tune, "'Round and 'Round Hitler's Grave," saw Guthrie sharing writing credits with Pete Seeger and the Almanac Singers' Millard Lampell, in a trenchant, boasting prophecy worthy of the tall-tale frontier:
"I'm a-goin' to Berlin, to Mr. Hitler's town.
I'm gonna take my forty-four and blow his playhouse down.
Hey, 'round and 'round Hitler's grave,
'Round and 'round we go,
Gonna lay that poor boy down,
He won't get up no more."
Narrator Ives presides over an aurally engaging radio tale interspersed with some fine renditions of traditional tunes that carry the action forward with unaffected ease, including "Cumberland Mountain Bear Chase," "Black Is the Color," "Nine Hundred Miles," "On Top of Old Smoky," "Smoky Mountain Gals," "Red Rocking Chair," "Dance All Night with a Bottle in Your Hand," "How Many Biscuits Can You Eat?" and "The Turtledove." Seeger contributes "Deliver the Goods," an Almanac Singers "Praise-the-Lord-and-Pass-the-Ammunition" staple, and the anything-but-saintly "When We All Go Marchin' In [to Berlin]."
Hackneyed as all this may strike the reader, the music, cast energy and spontaneous good feeling combine astutely to sublime effect. While the United States yet awaits the coming of its own home-grown Wagner to hammer and forge the folk idiom into the stuff of classical operatic heroism, the vernacular vitality of this critical historical recording reveals the broad appeal of progressive New Deal documentary efforts, and their singular influence on the post-war U.S. folk revival. - Michael Stone
Remarkably, there is a sample of every cut on the CDs at cdroots.com in Real Audio!
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