Jeff Place and Judy Sacks, October 2012
JS: Jeff, congratulations on this monumental tribute to Woody Guthrie, whom your colleague Robert Santelli rightly terms “America's folk music laureate.” The production is stunning, a visual and aural treat—but more than that, a portrait of a rather complex creative artist. I thought I “knew” Woody Guthrie, but it turns out I really didn't.
What would you say are the special contributions of this project in documenting and celebrating Woody Guthrie?
JP: I tried to encompass Woody's entire career in one place. I try to show other aspects of Woody's life, his being a visual artist and other ways he expressed himself such as in cartoons and drawings. Most people just know him as a songwriter and musician. It was also done as part of the centerpiece of the 2012 100th anniversary of his birth.
JS: Was there something in your Kenyon experience that shaped your career interests?
JP: I grew up with parents interested in the folk music boom in the sixties, and they took me to a lot of shows. I used to go down to the folklife festivals on the National Mall [Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife] and check out all the music going on. When I was at Kenyon College I had a radio show on WKCO radio and one of the niches was a folk music show, so I started playing folk and bluegrass on the air. None of the students listened, but I got lots of phone calls from farmers, possibly because it started at 6:00 a.m. I was also the technical director on a lot of the plays so I found that working at folklife festivals combined my radio and theater tech background. Two of my hobbies at Kenyon turned out to be very important to my career choice, my side activities.
JS: What would Woody make of today's political culture? What kinds of songs do you imagine he would write?
JP: I would imagine Woody would have lots of fodder for songs these days because things haven't changed that much. I purposely put the song “The Jolly Banker” from the Library of Congress sessions on the set because it is so relevant to now. Woody would be right out there with the Occupy movement doing his old songs and reworking them for the present time.
JS: Supporting the rich historical and biographical details of the main text are your expert song annotations. What goes into writing good annotations?
JP: It depends on how strong a story the project has with it. I try to choose projects that have a strong story. I try to pick good song examples; certain ones have a story I can tell in the liner notes—topical songs like Woody's are great for that. The notes should make it easy for the person listening to understand what this is fully and get a lot more out of it. In the case of Woody at 100, I try to expand that with graphics and images to show the story more broadly. Looking at the original lyric sheets of the song while listening takes you back to the time when the inspiration hit and takes you closer to the source.
JS: As I went through the text and music, I continually was struck by Woody's great openness to influences no matter where he found them, whether cowboy songs or the latest ditty on the radio. Woody emerges as someone always developing and restless as an artist and activist. Would you say that this project helps us reconsider what a “folk musician” is and does?
JP: I think the lesson of Woody at 100 is that he would use any method to get his feelings known. He would use poems and cartoons to express what was going on in his world in his time. Certain musicians have always done this with music—trade union workers, civil rights workers, using music as a political tool—but others not. Woody would try to borrow popular melodies so his music was fun to sing to, not just musical journalism. Having the melody known made it easy for people to chime right in.
JS: The book hosts a plethora of exciting visual materials—lyrics, drawings, photos, and the like—from the Ralph Rinzler archives of the Smithsonian. For those who might not recognize his name, could you comment on Ralph as a collector and scholar of this music?
JP: Ralph, who died in 1994, was my old boss and mentor at the Smithsonian. Ralph was passionate about traditional culture and music, and made it his life's work to go out and promote the music and crafts of people who otherwise would never have been known. He amassed a large personal collection of tapes recorded during his lifetime. But he also was a great teacher on how to document folk culture and produce recordings.
JS: Likewise, can you say something about Moe Asch and his crucial role in documenting and promoting folksingers?
JP: Moses Asch used to say he was just the pen with which his artists wrote. He cared much more about what his artists had to say than whether than they were virtuoso performers. Sales were never the main goal of his record company. So he would record Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie when others wouldn't make enough money to make it worth their while. So we have Asch to thank for the thousands of recordings he made from cultures from across the entire planet. I have been fortunate to be sitting in this seat for twenty-six years, to work with all of these materials since his death, and have produced over fifty records and books from his collection.
JS: What are some of your personal favorites on the discs?
JP: “Pastures of Plenty” has always been one of my favorites, a song about migrant workers in the West. One unreleased track I found in the collection in the mid-nineties was a World War II-era song called “What Are We Waiting On?” It was never released until on a CD I put out in 1996.
JS: Anything exciting coming up at Folkways that we should keep an eye (and ear) out for?
JP: I am currently at work on a banjo anthology and a collection of blues songsters. Next I will turn my attention to writing the notes for a seven-CD set of North Carolina collector and musician Bascom Lamar Lunsford. I am also working on a six-CD set of some of the best recordings from the Smithsonian Folklife Festival.
JS: What's the future of archiving as we move more fully into the digital age?
JP: The digital age will make lots of sound recordings easier to get access to. But one should always keep all the analog originals around, because years from now we may find a better way of copying them and want the originals to go back to. Digitalization nowadays (like the MP3 format, for example) loses a lot of content in the process.