Any Mummers Allowed?, and: From Sagebrush to Steppe, and: The Radio Ballads: Thirty Years of Conflict (review)

How often have you found yourself in your car listening to the radio and having become so mesmerized by what you hear that you sit idling at your destination? Marketers for National Public Radio fundraising campaigns call this a “driveway moment.” In these moments, listeners’ minds are completely at work, envisioning a scene through the suggestion of sound. This is what a good radio documentary can do. While the genre of the radio documentary is a familiar one, folklorists and ethnomusicologists have only recently begun using it with any frequency, as recording and production technology become cheaper and easier to use. For scholars, radio documentary offers unprecedented opportunities to combine field research with outreach. As a pedagogical tool, it can open up discussion on topics ranging from fieldwork methods to representation and ethics, applied research, and public-sector work. In addition, the radio documentary is one of the most accessible ways for a wide audience to hear field recordings.

Using auditory tools such as field recording, testimony from experts, and well-written narration, radio documentarians can inform their audiences, evoking a cultural world and provoking thoughtful reflection. Like film producers, radio producers must address issues of form, representation, and audience. The literature on documentary film shows that ethnographic cinema has not been able to escape the postmodern distress about representation. It is common to ask, for example, whether a film is more about the filmmaker than the people being filmed. The same question might be asked of radio documentaries, especially given the often conversational nature of radio production. A producer needs to decide whether to be a character in the documentary or to remain behind the scenes. With regard to audience, a radio documentary seeks to evoke a world— through a mélange of field recordings, interviews, music, and ambient sound—that is not so alien as to be incomprehensible but is surely somewhat different from daily experience. As the documentary is being constructed, more questions arise: Will there be narration? Can the sound speak for itself? And if that sound is intended to speak for itself, will the audience grasp the producer’s meaning? After all, listeners have as profound an effect on shaping the piece as does the sound material itself. Producers must anticipate the audience’s familiarity with the subject being explored, by aiming to teach and expose the audience to ideas without assuming too much or too little prior knowledge. Mediation and representation, as well as the ethics of editing, are all considerations in the documentary process. They are the same considerations that presenters face at festivals and with which public folklorists struggle when moderating cultural interactions. With all these issues at play, producing a documentary for radio is not an easy task.

Any Mummers Allowed? is an exploration of mumming traditions in Newfoundland, Canada, and other parts of the world, such as Ireland, England, and Philadelphia. The documentary, produced by award-winning independent producer Chris Brookes and aired on Canada’s public broadcast network (CBC), follows a standard pattern for documentaries by introducing an unfamiliar situation (in this case, mumming) and then trying to understand how an “ancient” tradition could have survived into the twenty-first century. Brookes himself is not a stranger to...