I chose to review the album Classic Bluegrass Vol. 2 from Smithsonian Folkways. This album finished in 2002, it is a compilation of many of the best bluegrass songs that were in the Smithsonian “vault”. The Folkways Project of the Smithsonian started in 1948 by Moses Asch in New York. Asch had been very involved with music as he created his own business with the labels of Asch and Disk. During the 1940’s, he produced several records by people like Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, Woody Guthrie, and Hobart Smith. The first compilation of folk music came about in 1952 with the Harry Smith’s compilation of Anthology of American Folk Music. More records came about when the innovative style of three-finger banjo playing by Earl Scruggs. In 1956, Pete Seeger suggested to Asch to contact this brother in order to make recordings of people who played guitar in the Scruggs’ style in their area. The project resulted in a recording that jumpstarted the career of Mike Seeger, Pete Seeger’s brother. Recordings started to fly off the press and until Asch’s death in 1970, recordings of folk music sky rocketed with thirty-six titles in eight years. The negotiation of these works to be donated to the Smithsonian became the project of Ralph Rinzler in 1987. Thanks to him, there is now the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections. This compilation, along with the first CD, serve as an introduction to the “breadth of bluegrass that exists in the Folkways catalog.”

I really enjoyed all of the songs on this album. However, my favorite songs come from the Mountain Bluegrass Style album. One of the guys in this group went on to become a member of the Foggy Mountain Boys, which I’m sure most of you have heard of from the soundtrack of O Brother Where Art Thou? Another song that I really like is number 11 Back Up and Push. There are no lyrics and the banjos and guitars just keep strumming along at a pretty good tempo. The group, the Friendly City Playboys, played at the 1961Union Grove Fiddler’s Convention. This song is pretty famous and has been recorded by several different groups several times. Number six, Rocky Run sounds very familiar, but I just can’t put my finger on it.

I really like when some of the songs have spoken introductions to them by the artist themselves. It makes the music seem more personal and gives a little more needed background to the songs. I did not realize that there were different types of bluegrass music before listening to this album. After listening to all of these songs, I think that my favorite type is the mountain bluegrass style. I just really like the rolling rhythms of the banjos and guitars and makes me just want to stomp my feet and clap my hands. I really enjoyed this album.

This is in response to the Album Review Project.

I am a Material Girl, Living in a Material World

A couple of weeks ago I went home and decided to go to the Eiteljorg Museum in Downtown Indianapolis. I don’t usually go to this museum, but since I hadn’t been there in such a long time, I felt it necessary to go. I came across the Contemporary collections and found a piece that particularly tickled my fancy. This piece is a canoe made by an Algonquin Indian. The title of the piece is “History in Two Parts”.It is particularly interesting because it is not made out of regular canoe materials. In addition to the normal wood used for canoes it also consists of birch bark, cedar, ash, spruce root & gum, aluminum. In a way, it is blending the new with the old. The Algonquin Indians were famous for their birch bark canoes. They used them to fish and also as a way of transportation. Today, they use cars. Cars are made out of a bunch of different metals, including aluminum. By combining the wood with the aluminum, the craftsman is showing how their culture has adapted to modern day society. These Indians live in Canada, more specifically in southern Quebec and eastern Ontario. They used to use birch bark for their homes as well, but now just build with that material for fun. The move from birch bark to man made materials also shows the struggle that the Indians were going through in order to stop companies from clear cutting their forests. In recent years, this has been a very big problem.

The meaning of this piece of art work goes much deeper than face value. The struggle of the Indians against the rest of North American society has always been a problem. While this canoe is beautiful and very interesting, it shows the huge struggle that Indians went through, and still go though with trying to retain their original identities. Nadia Myre, the craftsman of the boat, is an Algonquin Indian who I am sure understands the meaning of her boat completely. Upon googling her name, I found that she has her own website with past pieces of artwork that she has done. Her pieces are representative of her life and how tribal communities relate to others near where she lives in Canada.

I’ve seen other pieces of art that try to combine the new and the old and convey messages of struggle, but this is the best one I have seen. At first glance, one might not think that it would be significant, but with further investigation, and reading of the name of the piece, all sorts of thoughts start flowing. I find it more interesting that this piece of work does not invoke feelings of dislike towards others, like other pieces I’ve seen. I would be interested to see more of her artwork and see if it is similar in nature to this canoe.

This is in response to the Material Culture (object) project.

Architectural Wonders

Dog trot cabins are very similar to log cabins. These houses were first introduced in Arkansas in the first 250 years of early Pioneer life. These differ from log cabins in that they are separate sections with a doorway in the middle. The house really just consists of two rooms. Larger dog trot homes have 4 rooms, with two on each side of the door. The house is symmetrical with a continuous roof over the entire thing. No one is completely sure as to why dog trot cabins came into existence, but there is one theory that the one continuous hallway was a very primitive form of air conditioning. Because the winters brought lots of drafts into the house because of this, cultural geographers do not accept this theory. I am not sure that I agree with this theory either, I just think they built the houses this way because it was simple and easy to reproduce.

In an article by William Ferris, who wrote an article entitled, The Dog Trot: A Regional Home and Its Builder, he explores one specific dog trot home built by the father of Richard Foster in Mississippi. Ferris writes that, “Both the structure of individual buildings and their configuration on Foster’s farm reflects the builder’s plan as he “worked it out in his mind””(4) His work is very specific to the region, more specifically the south. The article comes with a blueprint of the home so it is much easier to imagine what the house really looked like. Now that I have read this article and seen the blueprints of the house, I understand the idea of the air conditioning hallways now. Even in the article, Foster says that, “This is the plan he laid out. Said he put a hall in there so the air would circulate through and make it cool”(6). It is interesting now to read that because it definitely makes the theory true, because at least one person followed that design. He planned the interior furnishings to go with this design. Very much planning was put into his because that is what he loved to do.

Dog trot cabins do not really exist today because if people have kept these homes, then they have probably renovated the house with more rooms, therefore, no longer making it a true dog trot cabin. Upon more research, I found out that the dog trot cabin was a form of Cracker Farmhouses. These were just a style of shelter found in Georgia and Florida, but spread through the south and turning into different forms, like the dog trot house.

Ferris, William. The Dog Trot: A Regional Home and Its Builder . Perspecta, Vol. 17. (1980), pp. 66-73.

This is in response to the Architecture Project.

When I grow up, I want to be an artist

Last night I went to the SOFA gallery end of semester show. There were many pieces up to look at including photography, jewelry, ceramics, and even original stationary. The show as amazing and even had an auction for the jewelry and surprisingly enough, a lot of the stuff was being bought and the prices were not that cheap. While I did not speak directly to someone who was showing in the art show, I went to the art show who is an art student here at IU. She concentrates on ceramics for her major and was very helpful with all of our questions. One exhibit at the art show was a series of hanging busts and heads. She explained that for one of the heads, it would take approximately 20 hours to do (and that was one of the small ones). She told us that they had to be hollow in order for the clay to actually dry enough to be fired and also they would be extremely heavy. We talked for a couple of minutes about clay but then resumed walking around the exhibit admiring all of the art. After we left and went back to our friend’s apartment, we started to talk more about clay. She described all of the techniques of firing the clay. I did not realize there was more than one type of kiln (there are electric mini ones, large ones, and brick ones). We also talked about the different types of heating there are (I only remember one kind, and that was the use of small cones that melt and unhook so that the temperature does not need to be constantly checked). I used to take ceramics at art camp a long time ago and was always curious as to how long ceramic pieces needed to be in the kiln. I was very surprised when she said that a normal piece takes about 1.5 to 2 days. For some reason I always thought that they took at most a couple hours. She did however say that there is a technique that only two hours because the heat is so intense, but in order to do this, the artist has to make sure their piece is perfectly made otherwise it would crack, or worse burst. After she said that something could burst in the kiln, I asked if she had every had any pieces burst. She gave a thankful sigh NO, but had has pieces crack because even if the piece looks perfect without any imperfections before it goes into the kiln, the process of the firing brings out any imperfections . She said she has a piece right now that has a funny mark on it because of the firing, but is going to attempt glaze it in order to mask it. As a final question to her being why she chose to do ceramics, she simply said, “Because I like to shape and touch things. Ceramics is the easiest field to do that because you are working directly with your hands.” Well said.

I had never seen her work before, so she took us to her apartment after our little chat. The living room was filled with all of her work, mostly of bowls, but there were some extremely interesting pieces. She and her roommate have a bar with supports sticking out at floor level, and she created ceramic feet to cover the supports. She also made a huge hand holding a heart that is actually an urn. It was quite creepy, but very cool that she could make all of this cool stuff. I find it so interesting that with my major, at most a couple people would read my papers and give me comments. But an art major has hundreds of people looking at their stuff, constantly judging them. I would love to have something to show for my major like art majors do!

This is in response to the Material Culture (Artist/Craftsperson) project.

Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song

I will be reviewing the Woody Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song from the Library of Congress collection for this entry. The exhibition highlights the letters that Guthrie and the Archive of American Folk Song wrote in the 1940’s-1950’s to the Library of Congress. There are also several other parts including a page about the “Life and Times of Woody Guthrie” written by Mark Allan Jackson. He essentially writes a timeline of his life starting from his birth in Oklahoma to his search for more work in California to going to New York to play Jeeter Lester in Tobacco Road, and finally to his death in 1952 because of Huntington’s Disease which his mother also had. The page has loads of information with some really interesting pictures, but I think that with a little bit more of an interactive twist, it would have held my attention longer. The long lines of text made me think it was more like a newspaper or some other printed publication and didn’t hold my attention for long.

The next page is a more in depth timeline with no explanations to events, just dates and specifically what happened. This would be very useful for someone writing a report or researching Woody Guthrie because they can get straight facts without having to sift through other information.

With more look at the site, this exhibition would be perfect for someone doing a research paper. There are straight facts with lots of information and nothing getting in the way of finding that information. For someone just wanting to learn about Woody Guthrie, this could be a bit boring and make them want to go to another site. Upon looking at the “About the Collection” page, it says that one can access all of the songs for Woody Guthrie, but they are on a different site. I would think that it would be beneficial to everyone if the songs were on this specific site, or even a direct link to the other one. I’m not going to say that this exhibition is bad because there is so much information and pictures that it cannot be bad. But I will say that a lot can be done to make it more approachable to a broader range of people. Maybe something as simple as not putting as much text on one page because it becomes very hard to read after a certain point. I think I would very much enjoy this exhibition if I had a specific intent to get something deeper out of the exhibition, like research for a paper. One thing that this site does do for me is make me more interested in researching his songs and listening to them. The addition of letting the reader of the site look at the specific letters that Woody wrote to the Library of congress is quite amazing and something that I will take a further look into at a later time.

This is in response to the Web Exhibition Review Project.

The Nutcracker

The definition of a ritual is that “they are repeated, habitual actions, but they are more purposeful than custom; rituals are frequently highly organized and controlled, often meant to indicate or announce membership in a group.”(Sims and Stephens 95) A ritual that I recently went to that some people may not think of as one is the Nutcracker ballet. I thought about it as a ritual because as I looked around and saw all of the families there, they definitely have specific things they do to get ready for the show; whether it would be to eat a special dinner before the show, or to get dressed in their very best Christmas clothes. As a person who had never been to the Nutcracker before, I was almost equally amazed at the way the lobby was decorated as the sets for the show. So much time and effort goes in each year to making the lobby of the MAC look like a winter wonderland just for this specific show. As I looked around the lobby I kept thinking that this goes on all over the world. The Nutcracker is the quintessential Christmas thing to do and every place that shows it probably dresses their lobbies up “to the nines”. I felt so out of place wearing my sweater and jeans because I did not realize that it was such a big deal to dress up in my best clothes. Nevertheless, we found our way to our seats in the second balcony and sat down next to a young girl and her grandmother. The young girl was dressed very nicely and was playing with her ballet Barbie doll. I asked the girl if she was excited and she replied with, “yes, now I know Christmas is soon!”

The entire show was amazing and I am very glad that I have had the chance to experience this ritual. To me, it is not a ritual, and probably never will be, but it is amazing that it means so much to so many different people. The show is definitely highly organized and controlled, even though it is not very frequent. It does indicate membership in a group because most, not all, of the people that go to the show every year are Christian. Even though it was my first time going to the show, and I didn’t understand all of the rituals and experiences surrounding the show, I had a very good time. I thought it was about time to see the Nutcracker and seeing it at the MAC was a great experience. It gave me a new outlook on what exactly the Nutcracker is. Now I will not just think of it as a ballet, but a whole experience that really gives kids something to look forward to.

THis is in response to the Ritual, Festival, and Celebration project.