Folk Music from Wisconsin (review)

Folk Music from Wisconsin, once available only as an LP in a plain but durable record jacket stuffed with a stapled typescript, is now in a far more attractive package, thanks to the American Folklife Center's joint venture with Rounder Records to reissue titles from the old Folk Music of the United States series of the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress. The twenty-one tracks, remastered for excellent sound, are culled from the 1940s field recordings of Helene Stratman-Thomas, a faculty member in the School of Music at the University of Wisconsin. With the exception of two pages devoted to credits and a historical sketch of the Archive of Folk Culture, the text of the thirty-eight-page booklet faithfully reproduces Stratman-Thomas's fine original notes, including the places and dates of recordings, performers' biographies, comparative discussions of songs and tunes, song lyrics, references, and a bibliography. The new booklet adds eleven photographs, most of them portraits of performers made during Stratman-Thomas's 1941 and 1946 forays around Wisconsin.

In keeping with the high degree of cultural pluralism that has characterized Wisconsin since the early nineteenth century, Stratman-Thomas did fieldwork with nearly thirty ethnic groups, recording Ho-Chunk morning songs, Luxembourger immigrant ballads, Walloon dance tunes, Swiss yodels, French singing games, Polish highlander fiddling, and much more—over seven hundred performances altogether. This production, however, includes "only ballads and songs in the English tongue" (p. 1), an indication of both the antiforeign, assimilationist ideology dominating American public culture and the prevailing Anglophile orientation of American folksong scholarship at the time of its initial release. Regrettable limitations aside, we hear fine versions of nine ballads concerning tarrying nobles ("Lord Lovel," Child 75), Irish robbers ("Brennan on the Moor," Laws L7), suffering sweethearts ("Charming Beauty Bright," Laws M6, and "The Drowsy Sleeper," Laws M4), faithful lovers ("The Lake of Ponchartrain," Laws H9), valiant cowboys ("Billy Vanero," Laws B6), snake-bit farmhands ("Springfield Mountain," Laws G16), disaster victims ("Milwaukee Fire," Laws G15), and contesting lumberjacks ("Little Brown Bulls," Laws C16). The last two, as well as Eben Rexford's composition, "The Ride of Paul Venarez" (the source of "Billy Vanero"), originated in Wisconsin. Lyric folksongs include a children's singing game ("Pompey is Dead") and a fox hunter's ditty ("How Happy is the Sportsman"); the Irish "Shule Aroon"; two celebrations of lumber camps and woods workers ("Shantyman's Life," "The Bold McIntyres"); a harvesters' anthem ("The Cranberry Song"); and a cante-fable spread by traveling shills for Hamlin's Wizard Oil ("Reuben Wright and Phoebe Brown").

The foregoing sixteen performances, seven by women and nine by men, are all unaccompanied, with the exception of Luther Royce's guitar-backed rendition of "Billy Vanero." Royce's twangy, rather than crooning, emulation of singing cowboys like Jules Verne Allen is paralleled in its vernacular culture orientation by Hamilton Lobdell's Wizard Oil campiness. The other singers rely variously on the folk styles of Cornish, English, Irish, and Welsh immigrants; Yankees and Yorkers; and the "Kentucks" who settled in northern Wisconsin in the 1890s. The haunting lilt of Antigo's Pearl Jacobs Borusky, a "Kentuck" from a singing family, and the Irish-derived woods singing of Rhinelander's Emery DeNoyer are particularly stellar. They may also be heard singing "The Rich Old Farmer" and "The Little Brown Bulls," respectively, on Anglo American Ballads (Rounder 1511).

Pearl Jacobs Borusky's marriage into an extended Polish family and the acquisition of Irish American performance mannerisms by the French Canadian DeNoyer hint at the broader linguistic and cultural diversity of vocal styles and songs prevailing in Wisconsin in the 1940s. Although we hear none of that diversity on Folk Music from Wisconsin, we are treated to five highly creolized "lumber camp" tunes performed by Iva and Otto Rindlisbacher of Rice Lake. The children of Swiss German immigrants, the Rindlisbachers were adept players of Swiss...