Edwin Ford Piper

Paying the Piper: Epilog

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

Those following my June series on my trip to investigate the life of a largely forgotten poet, folk-song collector, and teacher Edwin Ford Piper may wonder why I titled it “Paying the Piper.”  There were a couple of reasons I knew as I started writing the series after returning home after the trip.

The first: I’d be paying attention to Piper when nearly no one else was. That may be a strange choice, though it’s one I’m largely comfortable with. I enjoy looking at places others aren’t, and I love stories that connect seemingly unlike things. So, Piper’s settler family moving to the frontier of Nebraska just after The Civil War, raising a poet-son who educated himself on the plains amid those who stayed, and those who passed through. I being a guitarist who grew up in the folk song revival, I appreciated that he collected the songs that entertained those people, songs that I could run into decades later because of the work of collectors like Piper. Even my search on that elusive question I couldn’t solve had it’s rewards: what of the pervasive Workshop and MFA culture of poetry of the last 70 years arose, perhaps unwittingly, from Piper’s own methods.*

The reason we call it paying  attention implies it has a cost. I could have done more new musical pieces here, ones featuring poets there is more general interest in. The longer posts in June took a lot of work for a small audience. I chose to pay that cost. If you come here for the more known poets and for the musical performances, some of those are already in progress this week.

My wife and I returned home in the evening after my sojourn to the University library in Iowa City. I had a lot of notes, and pages captured but not yet analyzed, and I had ordered a couple of books to help that would arrive in the upcoming week. It was good to have gone on this trip. It was good to be home. Now the second paying.

What was the one thing I was most looking forward to at dawn the next day? Getting on one of my bicycles and moving my old body briskly through the cool morning air. I would ride to a café and have a frittata and a big glass of iced tea, read the newspaper, and think about poetry or music tasks for the upcoming day.

I walked out that next morning to the garage access door, and I found it slightly ajar, unlocked. I opened it. Sometime during my Iowa trip, my family’s bicycles had been stolen.**

I could write a thousand words here on the stolen bikes if I thought there was a readership for that. I lost my old original generation mountain bike. It was the first bike I bought to ride through Minnesota winters back in the early 1980s instead of buying a car. I rode it in snow as planned, and over rough trails in woods — and in a couple of returning trips, in the river valley hills and gravel roads of Iowa where I grew up, With less knobby-tires it worked well to ride around the city too. Over a decade ago it was the bike I attached a trailer bike to, to take my young child for rides. In the last few years it had become my rain bike since it had full length fenders, and it was the one I rode when the place I’d need to lock up was a little more risky. I’d figured, scratched up and faded, outdated in every regard, it didn’t look like anything to steal. But, it was gone, though I tell myself the memories aren’t stolen.

Diamondback Ridge Runner Spring 2013 600

Picture of the OG mountain bike taken a bit over 10 years ago, when it still had the trailer-bike hitch on it.

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20 years ago I decided to replace it, and bought what was then a modern “Hybrid Bike.” It was an aluminum Trek, not the fanciest in their line then, but it had indexed gear shifting and the ability to run thin high-pressure tires that I thought would make the bike nimbler. However, the bike and I just didn’t bond. It never was a joy to ride, even with the 28mm narrow tires that were expected to make it faster and easier rolling. Aluminum frame bikes, particularly the ones from that generation, are known for having a harsh ride, maybe that was it I told myself — but whatever, it just wasn’t any fun. Then a couple of years ago I obtained a set of new wide 50mm tires that didn’t fit the bike they were bought for. I’m not sure why, but I mounted them on the aluminum Trek along with a Brooks Flyer leather saddle (that’s the one with springs). The bike was transformed. The extra tire air volume and the saddle not only made the bike more pleasant to ride, those tires made the bike feel more nimble (and more tolerant of bad street surfaces). In the past year it had become the bike I rode more than any other. It had been some mice and a pumpkin, then a splendid carriage and horses — and now, poof, it was gone.

The bike I was looking forward to ride that morning? A purple REI Randonnee that my wife and I had bought used with the idea that she might want to try longer bike rides at some point. It too was probably 20 years old like the Trek, but it had a smooth riding double-butted steel frame. That touring idea never worked out, but I had modified it over the years with a better set of handlebars, a tweaked stem height, some used “brifters” for indexed shifting (my wife never cared for the bar-end shifters it came with). I ended up riding it on longer rides. It was comfortable, responsive, and I miss it.

Also lost, both my wife’s and my winter “Fat Tire” bikes.

Just inanimate things, but I ride my bikes almost every day for joy and utility, the loss was something like loosing a pet.

All lost as I was in a library studying the life and times of a largely forgotten poet and singer of songs people kept.***

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*I might write more on that Workshop/MFA issue for poets and writers later this summer, but one of the folks who helped guide me on my search S. L. Huang wrote a thoughtful article on the dangers of this paradigm for many writers which I’ll link here.

**I won’t go into the details of how/why the garage was unlocked, though I likely know.

***Besides the thing-grief of these oft-used tools for joy being gone, and the work of trying to nail down details with the Edwin and Janet Piper stories, a large part of my June was taken up replacing the stolen bikes. You’ll meet the replacement bikes later, likely in use.

Paying the Piper chapter 6: bonus library time & the widow Piper has some formidable opinions

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

After my rewarding visit to the Carl Sandburg birthplace, our plan was to return to Iowa City and leave early the next morning to return home. I felt I knew more about the lesser-known early 20th century poet I’d come to find out about, Edwin Ford Piper, and I had had the experience of seeing something of Sandburg’s roots. My wife had gotten to explore several habitats. And I was pleased to find out my old body could still get around walking while carrying a 10 pound bag — even as a shade of the young student I once was.

Every trip is like this for me: enjoyment at the new place, appreciation of the new things experienced — but once the final day arrives, I’m ready and looking forward to returning home. But that evening as we were getting ready for bed, I was making a quick check of Internet things and saw that I’d received a response from S. L. Huang, a writer who had initiated my interest in the idea that Piper had been foundational in the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop method of teaching creative writing students.

Why would I (and plausibly you) care about that? The Iowa Writers’ Workshop was the origin-point of some things that have become pervasive in creative writing: the MFA degree, the workshop method of developing writers and critiquing work in progress, and the practice of literary writers being brought in and paid to be instructors in such programs.

Little I’d read in the Edwin Ford Piper papers before the Sandburg finale had addressed that element of his life directly, but Huang’s reply said there was more info on this in his widow Janet Piper’s papers which the University special collections also had. I mentioned this to my wife — she was agreeable to leaving at noon instead of dawn for the long drive home, and she would find one more landscape to explore while I made the walk back to the library for a half-day looking at Piper’s wife’s papers.*

By now I already knew the routine in the special collections reading room. The tough part would be that Janet Piper’s collection was larger than her husband’s, and only generally cataloged. I had gone into the husband’s papers knowing at least a few things about him, but all I knew about Janet Piper were references that she thought “politics” had led to her husband’s early and sudden death in 1939 just as the Workshop was getting underway.

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A small portion of Janet Piper’s papers in the University of Iowa collection, but my best guess at what might answer my questions about the beginnings of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

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It’s taken me until the first day of July to read and comprehend what I captured for later perusal in those few last hours at the reading room. Later in June I also read Stephen Wilbers’ 1980 book The Iowa Writers’ Workshop  which aimed to show how that noted program came to be. Wilbers corresponded with Janet Piper while researching his book, duplicating a slightly earlier attempt by Janet W. Wylder to get information from Edwin Ford Piper’s widow. Wylder was attempting a similar book on the Writers’ Workshop that was never completed.**

Janet Piper’s papers include correspondence from these two with her, and a more than 100-page, response that seems to have gone through several revisions and titles, eventually being called “Edwin Ford Piper and the Iowa Workshop: a prehistory.”   It’s likely the best we have on the later adult life of Edwin Piper, who taught at Iowa for more than a generation and encouraged student creative writing throughout that time — right up until his sudden death just as the official Writers’ Workshop was launched. But spoiler alert: his wife’s account doesn’t live up to that promising title.

Since Janet Piper is even lesser-known than her husband, here’s a capsule bio extracted mostly from what I read in her papers and some web research:

Born (family last name: Pressley) in 1902 in Des Moines Iowa. May have moved to eastern Nebraska sometime in her childhood, and eventually attended college there and completed a Masters. She knew other young literary people in Nebraska and was already a poet who had won a couple of awards for her poetry while in that state. Began advanced degree work at the University of Iowa in Iowa City in the 1920s. Her academic work was interrupted by her 1927 marriage to Edwin Ford Piper, one of her professors, and by the following birth of their only child Edwin Ford Piper II in 1928.***  She writes little about the day to day of her marriage other than asides to the considerable duties of motherhood and being a faculty wife. She seems to admire and support her husband in his work and notes increasing change, stress, and conflict at the University then. She had resumed her academic work toward a PhD by the later 1930s — and then in 1939, her husband dies suddenly. She describes completing her final thesis defense in the midst of new widowhood in a disassociated state, flying on under auto-pilot. Various statements, some as corroboration, say this is likely the first PhD granted for a thesis consisting of creative writing.

She leaves Iowa in 1940 and within a couple of years takes up a teaching position at Sam Houston State in Texas, where she taught until retirement. In 1949 she made a suicide attempt by pills and was committed by her 21-year-old son to a facility in Texas, where she later writes she received the kind of coerced treatment, including electro-shock, that was common then. There’s some heartbreaking but formally-stated correspondence in her papers with her son from the early 1950s when they are estranged. She blames him for that mental facility commitment, and she says that he blames her for expecting too much of him as a child and not giving him appropriate attention.**** At her retirement in 1972 it’s written that she has continued to write poetry. She lives until 1997.

The Iowa Writers’ Workshop in their official histories started in 1936 — or it started in 1939 in other accountings. Edwin Piper had been encouraging students creative writing for decades, but the administration was now committed to allowing these efforts to be given academic credit and to become substantive toward degrees, a new concept for American academia. From Wilbers’ book and Janet Piper’s account, Edwin had some level of prominence in the mid-1930s in this now officially academic writers’ program — Wilbers writes it was more over the poetry sub-section while Janet Piper portrays her husband as being increasingly marginalized by the department’s administration, making the department head Norman Foerster a particular villain in the matter.

Yet, in a 1976 letter Wilbers includes in a footnote, a fascinating (but secondary to our story) figure Wilber Schramm recounts that he took over as director in 1939, being drafted into the job because of a pressing need occasioned by Piper’s death. In the Workshop’s official history, Schramm was the first director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but Schramm doesn’t tell it that way.

Alas, from what I’ve been able to find out so far, there’s no solid information about how central Edwin Ford Piper was to instigating those Iowa Writers’ Workshop changes to how literary writing and writers live and work in our century. His career shows he’d long favored working with young writers, but Janet Piper portrays that she and her husband didn’t like some of the leaders making Iowa a pioneer in granting degrees, or their matter of going about it. There’s a cryptic report from the 1930s that Edwin didn’t like how the Workshop was turning into a promotional effort which I cannot completely evaluate. I was at first skeptical at Janet Piper’s constant reference to the malign forces of something she calls “New Humanism” ruining her life, her husband’s life, and literature in general. I knew nothing of that term, but a little research confirms that that was overtly the flag that her chief villain Norman Foerster and some of his allies were flying.*****

For a person like me who likes to know how directional changes happened, to see what turned us from one path to another, it was engrossing to try to chase this down, even if the crossroads turned out to be shrouded in fog. I’ll close by saying I’d like to thank Edwin and Janet Piper. Though they are dead, and they likely never concerned themselves exactly with my questions being formed in the 21st century, their papers gave me a window into their times and challenges. I’d like to thank the folks at the University of Iowa Special Collection section who were always helpful to this old and informal scholar. And thanks to you, rare and curious readers, who granted attention to this 1930s couple caught up in the changes in American literature and this 2020s couple celebrating their anniversary with their particular interests.

Watching my time carefully, just a few minutes before noon I packed up in the library, went down to the street, and swung into the car as my wife pulled up at the entrance curb. We were leaving for home.

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*Coincidence: as I went looking into the beginnings of the Iowa Workshop, she visited the Devonian Fossil Gorge which I later read famed Workshop Director Paul Engle also liked to examine while still a student.

**This double pump seemed to frustrate Janet Piper. She at first thanked Wylder for rekindling her memories of her dead husband and her time with young writers at Iowa. Piper’s response appears to be a version of the around 100-page memoir which includes a long side-discussion of New Humanism. In her following correspondence with Wilbers she’s upset that Wylder had in effect ghosted her, and she wonders why Wilbers doesn’t have the material she sent Wylder. Moderns, remember: this is the era when producing 100 pages meant typing that singular ms. entirely and inhaling correction fluid, not just cutting/pasting and pressing send, or dumping pictures off your phone’s camera roll.

***More notes for Moderns: I can hear the ick factor bursting in your minds. This sort of thing was quite common, even into the years of my youth. Their contemporaries wouldn’t necessarily think this scandalous — or even unusual — though the age difference (56 to 25) here is broader than many of these male prof/female student marriages. That said, everything you object to was still possible despite different mores. Janet Piper’s papers give no indication it wasn’t a happy marriage.

****Whatever led Janet Piper to her suicide attempt isn’t spelled out in what I’ve read. The number of stressors and level of endurance it would take to be a single mom, a widow, a rare woman/academic in an era when that was even tougher than today, and while society is in the transition from the Great Depression to a World War — all that might batter anyone’s defenses. Similarly, I can only imagine a 21-year-old son having their only parent, their mother, trying to kill herself and being put in a position to try to decide what to do about that. I don’t know the particulars of Texas law at that time, but authorities themselves might be pressing for civil commitment. I’m not suited to be a novelist, but reading in Janet Piper’s papers on this matter I thought “There’s a novel.”

*****Let me resist trying to give an outline of New Humanism. Like a number of Fugitives, New Criticism proponents, and neo-Thomists that followed this movement and somewhat evolved from it, they tended toward political conservatism, and in the 1930s many were, at the least, permissive of fascist authoritarians, which some (including JP) might lay to them being already authoritarian in aesthetics. Janet Piper speaks distressingly of fascist Iowa professors in that era, even names some. Janet Piper’s papers that I’ve read don’t tell me exactly what Edwin Piper thought of this. Though a Chaucer specialist carrying that interest into a project completed at the end of his life, Edwin’s papers don’t demonstrate a pervasive appeal to timeless classical truths, and his folksong fascination would likely oppose a tight highbrow/middlebrow/lowbrow outlook. I can’t say for sure what Edwin Piper’s politics were, but his widow seems left/liberal in the 1970s and makes no mention that they disagreed on politics back in the 30s. Janet Piper’s summary that “politics” led to her husband’s early death leads to the question: what level of politics? In her mind it appears university politics and civic politics were indivisible.

When asked about this era in the 1970s. Janet Piper continually wants to talk about what she views as more than a cultural tendency or scheme, and more at an active, effective, powerful conspiracy originated by New Humanism. At times she’s detailed and footnoted with her charges, at other times vague and implying great harms in a broader and fuzzier way. More than once in her papers she refers to Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Conrad Aiken as the heads of a secret cabal advancing evil work — and I can’t quite “read” if I should take those expressions as satiric exaggerations. In a letter from Robert Hillyer, he agrees with her that she’s not a crank, using that word as if it had been applied to Janet. In what I read she spends less time than my curiosity would like expounding what she prefers in literary or cultural theory rather than what she damns.

It would take more study and knowledge to fully understand or evaluate that element in Janet Piper’s later writing. This element, often present in what I read, shows a life of great reading and learning exceeding my own, evidence of great energy for a person roughly my age — and likely at times I can’t quite measure, effective moments of literary criticism and insight.

Paying the Piper chapter 5: Carl Sandburg’s “Gone”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

I think there’s a misapprehension of Carl Sandburg’s poetry: that it’s simple, prosy work: that it says what it says, hearty single-minded messages with some decorative metaphor. Tastes differ, and mine may not be a guide to anyone else, but I sometimes don’t find him so. As I continue trying different things during the summer with this multipart personal story, I’ll return to our regular stuff at the end today with an example of Sandburg mysterioso.

The finale of my June trip to Iowa City to see what I could find out about an even more under-considered Midwestern 20th century poet, Edwin Ford Piper, was planned to be a visit to Galesburg Illinois, a small city just east across the Mississippi river where Sandburg was born. Piper and Sandburg compare easily. Both born in the American Midwest a couple of decades after the Civil War, both part of early 20th Century literary movements we no longer take as much notice of. Both were attracted to a broad swath of memorized vernacular music that would be called “Folk Music.” They knew each other, even shared stage programs. Sandburg’s 1927 music collection The American Songbag  established what American folk music would be for my mid-century generation,* and from examining Piper’s papers I could see his definition paralleled Sandburg’s. Piper was one of the contributors to American Songbag.**

Sandburg's blurb of Piper 600

Poet Sandburg blurbing  poet Edwin Ford Piper. I also saw a note from Sandburg thanking Piper for songs used in Songbag, but don’t have a picture of that.

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We arrived at Galesburg early for the 1 P.M.-opening of the Sandburg birthplace site. We wandered the wondering-what-it’ll-become-in-the-21st-century business district with its building facades still showing a variety of past decades abandoned styles left to fade, and browsed a charming small bookstore there. We were going to have an early lunch somewhere, and decided to just get sandwiches and go eat them in the small area behind the birthplace on benches by the Remembrance Rock there.

The rock is an unremarkable bolder, utterly plain and unshaped as a design choice.***  Sandburg and his beloved wife and partner’s ashes are buried under it. The lawn it sits on behind the house is circled by bushes and a few trees, and rather than any sense of a park, it reminded me of the backyard of the house where I grew up in Iowa. One thing the photos I have seen of the rock didn’t show: a ring of irregular, small, flat, stones that circle it, each engraved with a line from a Sandburg poem. If one wished, one could ceremoniously walk from flat grounded rock to rock stepping with your foot-soles on his words, which it seemed to me to be what one of Sandburg’s models Whitman has commanded — and so I did. There’s a nice bust of Sandburg on a stand there too, but to my sense of the place, walking his words was more meaningful. I’d told my wife that Sandburg’s father was a railroad blacksmith, and she figured that the neighborhood might have been handy for rail workers. After our lunch, she took a little stroll while I waited, and she came back to report that just over a rise a block away was the railroad line.

Sandburg When will man know Bird Poop 600

…but then all the birds know is to poop on poetry-engraved rocks, same as any other.

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One of the site’s staff members arrived ahead of opening time to do a little yard work, and when that time arrived, he changed tasks to welcoming and serving as a guide for about 30 older folks in an adult learning program who arrived from Peoria in two small busses. Beside the birthplace (our host preferred to not call it a house, but a railroad worker’s hut) there was another small, somewhat rundown house next door that served as the site’s offices and a small room of memorabilia backed with an illustrated wall timeline of Sandburg’s life. Behind the two houses was a garage that has been turned into a cozy theater space where they host musical acts in homage to that part of Sandburg’s heritage.

My wife and I plus the 30 others overwhelmed the birthplace site’s capacity. Resourcefully the staff divided the group into two, and after watching a short video on Sandburg our half got to walk through the birthplace hut or house. If you are familiar with the modern tiny house movement, the floorplan and the maximal utilization of it would strike a resonance. Outhouse, no plumbing or running water, it’s decorated in late 19th century Swedish immigrant homey style, but a couple, a young child, and a baby would have been a tight fit, much less our troop of visitors. I recall visiting a reconstructed Lincoln birthplace cabin as a child, and though the Sandburg birthplace is wood-frame construction, not a log cabin, the square footage and amenities might have struck Lincoln biographer Sandburg as similar.

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Sandburg’s birthplace: house, hut, cabin. This side shows the smallness best I think.

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Perhaps because of the touring group’s visit, there was a special performance by a singer-guitarist whose name I didn’t catch, who did a short re-creation of Sandburg singing and talking about his life. I enjoyed that effort. Before leaving, I asked one of the leaders of the visiting group, an old professor, who had some years on your old guy reporter here, what Sandburg biography he’d recommend. He cited Penelope Niven’s bio, and I bought it at the site’s store.

No one hides the fact Carl Sandburg might not have much direct memory of the birthplace as his family moved to another Galesburg house while he was only a toddler****  But the link to his parents and the choice of it for a burial place (which was I believe his doing) speaks to the meaning to him. Unlike the larger house and goat farm where Sandburg spent his post-WWII life until he died that is a National Parks Service site, the birthplace is run by the State of Illinois and some local spirit and volunteerism. Sandburg retained throughout his life a fondness for Galesburg, never hid his roots there, and Galesburg was also the place where he attended college after his stint in the Army, though he never completed a degree.

Which brings me to today’s new musical piece, a setting of a Sandburg poem about someone who apparently left town wiping the dust off their shoes at the city limits. In his collections Sandburg called the poem “Gone,” but the main character’s name sticks in some memories, so it also gets called by the first line, or by the character’s name that appears in that line: “Everybody loved Chick Lorimer in our town.” Here’s a link to the text of the poem.

I promised mystery in this one. There are things left out, and various implications some of which complicate, some of which conflict, are left open. Can we even take that opening statement at face value? Not now, certainly not in 1916 could it be said that we all love “a wild girl” with a dream “she wants.” Some might, many would not. Wildness and dream-holding create envy, often a lot of it.

Is Chick Lorimer someone that everyone in town has marked as special, marked for greater things — someone so preeminent in their youth where that envy would be tamped down? If so, why the sudden leaving, with no one knowing where or why? Does a recognized prodigy, much loved, leave a place without saying goodbye? That would be a rare story.

Perhaps the “everyone” is a casual overstatement, referring only to a small group of friends who shared ideas? Later the poem seems to refer to larger numbers however.

Is she not actually loved by much of the town, and “loved” in a narrow, sexual, sense by many men? The “Dancer, singer, and laughing passionate lover” line could give testimony to that thought. That line is followed by two specific but puzzling lines, and their very specificity says we should pay attention to them. “Were there ten men or a hundred hunting Chick?” “Hunting” is a word choice, though we do say we hunt for the lost all the time without thinking of hunting as in wild game. Why the specific range, “ten or a hundred?” If this noteworthy young person is gone, no other info, that’s a missing person. Have they come to harm, are they being hunted for something they’re suspected of doing wrong? Why can’t they say, between 10 and 100 for the number of hunters? This hunt seems secretive from that wide range: 10 might be a small matter, 100 a greater one — but even 100 would be small if this is a universally beloved light of a town, unless it’s a very small town. It seems significant that the poem’s speaker can’t give a better estimate. And that’s followed by another stat: “five men or fifty with aching hearts.” The numbers are still widely separated, but they’re also halved from the number of hunters.

To perform this, I felt I had to have some plot in mind as I sang it. In my mind, Chick is a free-spirited libertine, and to a large degree that “loved” means no-strings sex. Chick likely left because she wanted something more, or because the disapproval of her “loving” everybody was getting intolerable. The maybe just five “aching heart” men thought they were, or could be, her significant partner.*****

How bohemian was poet Sandburg’s experience early in the 20th century? When he first moved to Chicago he lived in what was in effect a free-thinkers commune run by a strange guy, Parker Sercombe.  From my reading, “Free Love” was just as much a topic in bohemian culture in the early 1900s as it was in the 1960s.

But maybe I’m wrong, and maybe your reading is different. It could be that Chick is like “Chuck” Sandburg (the name he used then) wanting to see the world, wanting to follow their dream. Sandburg had bicycled around Illinois, rode trains legally and illegally to other parts of the US, and he’d already been to Puerto Rico in the Army by the time he wrote this. Chick could be his anima. Sandburg never felt entirely alienated from his hometown or family however. He came back through town, wrote letters to his family, and so on. And if you want to see his beginnings and his decided final place to remember him, one goes to Galesburg.

To hear my performance of “Gone” AKA “Chick Lorimer”  you can use the audio player below. Do you feel nobody knows where the audio player has gone?  This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*If you never cared about the post WWII folk revival for whatever reason, I will point out that Rock’n’Roll became self-aware artistic and literary-flavored “Rock Music” in the later 60s because folk revival musicians transferred their backgrounds into bands with electric instruments after The Beatles, electric Blues bands, and “Dylan goes electric” emerged to take over college and post-graduate audiences in the US. Over in the UK, the folk revival to Rock pipeline was supplied by “Skiffle” — an American jug-band folk revival style that swept UK youth in the 50s, merging with a peculiar British Trad Jazz revival that often featured the Blues element of pre-WWII Jazz.

**Piper’s wife, in her own papers collection at the University of Iowa library, claims that Piper’s contributions were greater than Sandburg credits in Songbag. Possible, I suppose, though the nature of Piper’s song collecting revealed by my examination of his papers shows a collaborative effort with collectors sharing with each other freely. Piper’s unpublished collection, like Sandburg’s published one, wasn’t done with a sense of ownership of songs.

****The family didn’t get sudden wealth, it supplemented the railroad wages by renting out rooms in the succeeding houses, and the children worked to add to the family income as they grew older.

*****For a fuller story fleshed out from the short poem’s details, there’s this 50 minute early 1960s TV episode from the Route 66 series which uses the poem idea as its central motif and title, with the leading man reciting Sandburg’s poem 2/3 of the way in. This linked version has hokey colorization of the series fine B&W photography, but it is easily viewable.

Paying the Piper chapter 4: “I heard my mother sing this ca. 1876”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today is Juneteenth, a holiday coming into greater recognition as a celebration of the ending of America’s race-based chattel slavery. Why this date? I repeatedly warned you that I can’t tell a story simply and briefly, but for this holiday I have an excuse.

Slavery began in the American British colonies somewhat haphazardly, but by the time we became an independent country we had lots of laws, customs, and beliefs to entrench it. As it often is with the mechanics of oppression, the structures to hold it up took work to maintain, and by the 1850s there was great worry between slaveholders that it would collapse. In the 1860 election, Lincoln won, and even though he’d stated a politician’s compromise middle ground on the slavery issue, his party included enough abolitionists that most powerful slave-holders were ready to press their states to rebel and set up their own government. Civil war ensued.

Which didn’t free the slaves — at least not yet.

Of course the enslaved had been freeing themselves, when they could, all along. Armed rebellions hadn’t worked for more than moments, but the brave, lucky, and skilled might successfully flee at least from the slave-holding states if not to Canada where US law couldn’t touch them.*  But it wasn’t easy traveling all that far.

Once the war started in 1861, some enslaved people recognized they could try a shorter route: just make it to the Union troop’s camps, and a good many did just that, which created an awkward situation. You see: nothing had ended slavery’s legal framework, Lincoln still maintained he wasn’t doing that (if only because a few slave-holding states and slaveholders remained on the Union side). He just wanted to put down the rebellion.**  Law still said the slaves were property.

Someone on the Union side came up with a peculiar idea. If the enslaved were legally property, they could be confiscated during wartime like a cannon, horse, ship or other enemy property could be. Dehumanizing language? Sure, but escaping past the Union lines meant an increasing chance that they wouldn’t be taken back.

Eventually, Lincoln supersized that freedom, by declaring that all the enslaved in the states in rebellion were free. This, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued at the beginning of 1863. American slaves elsewhere? Nope, not in the Proclamation. Slave owners in places under Confederate rebel control? Not gonna listen to Lincoln’s order. In April of 1865 Robert E. Lee surrendered the bulk of Confederate troops, but that still didn’t mean all enslaved were free, and the legal matter wasn’t consolidated until December of that year with the adaptation of the 13th Amendment.

A couple chapters back I talked about how slow by modern standards communication could be in the mid-19th and early 20th century. Well, it was slower yet when not everyone was on-board with the news. Juneteenth, with an absurdity that is so often a part of America’s racial history, celebrates when Union troops got over to Texas in June of 1865 to announce that the war had been over for over a month and the enslaved in Confederate Texas were no longer legally slaves.

When I left off I was (more or less) talking about folk songs and the songs collected in the American Midwest before WWI by poet Edwin Ford Piper. I’ve also already mentioned that folk songs aren’t unchanging, and aren’t pure. While going through the yellowing paper in Piper’s archives, I came upon this song, handwritten in his own handwriting. He has the title as “The Little Octoroon.”   Things aren’t going to get simple here readers. I can’t be simple.

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The song as Edwin Ford Piper heard it from his mother

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Octoroon is a largely obsolete word, derived from a lot of rigmarole regarding how Black someone was. It means 1/8th (octo=8) Afro-American. In general, the mumbo-jumbo legal biochemistry in American history regularly said it didn’t make much difference. Half, quarter, sixteenth — hell, for those who had trouble with fractions it was sometimes written down as: 1% Black, you’re legally Black.

An octoroon may not look  Black. I can still recall when I was 14 or so, and having grown up in a tiny rural Iowa town. An Afro-American man who was a civil-rights activist was to visit my church camp. He arrives. Wait — that man’s Black? I remember in my naivete looking at his summer hands and forearms. The man had freckles people!

So why does this song, which is clearly a song from the Union and Abolitionist side make some point about the child being an octoroon? This will get weird: it was possible to be an abolitionist and  a white supremacist thinking Afro-American’s inferior. Yes, you could be smart and ignorant at the same time! If you’re trying to end chattel slavery, and you’re counting votes or troops, you might not care to make a sticking point about this, ugly as it is. Those with pseudo-scientific beliefs such as an octoroon is “nearly a white person” might have stirrings of respect. (Ugh!) And then at the unconscious, illogical level, there’s the factor of that person looking much like me, so maybe they  should have rights like me. Even if it’s a song (something with no visual element) those factors may have entered into its composition.***

While there are no notes I saw in the archive that Piper knew this, this song does have a composer: George F. Root.  Root didn’t quite reach Stephen Foster or Dan Emmett level of 19th century American songwriter fame, but he had his “hits” such as they were in the pre-recording era. During the Civil War period and based out of Chicago, he specialized in songs for the Union side.

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The sheet music from George F. Root’s music publishing firm. When Piper remembers his mother singing this tune, it would have been only 10-years-old.

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Did Piper’s mother learn this from someone else? Was there sheet music in a piano bench for this, unknown to the 5-year-old Piper? In the quiet library archive, I visualized two white people, a mother and child, in rural frontier Nebraska sharing this song. The differences in the printed song from the one Piper wrote down from his mother’s singing say this isn’t likely a handwritten copy from sheet music.****

Here’s my conclusion, which I hope I’ve demonstrated even though I’ve trimmed parts of this piece back: Juneteenth is the most complicated American legal holiday.  The only simple thing about the holiday is that it stands for freedom and the lifting of oppression. Taken at its whole, though messy and with calculated delay, that makes it a favorite of a person like me, who still cries and wonders at how simple truths and rights take so long to be established. The song I’m performing today, its path and turning into a folk song, isn’t that complicated — but yes, the path of American freedom is.

You can hear my performance of Root’s “The Little Octoroon”  with the audio player below. No player? This highlighted link is an alternate.

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*In 1850 a Fugitive Slave Act was passed that required northern state governments, not just the federal government to return enslaved people who reached northern states. Some cities and states wouldn’t comply (there’s this Minnesota case for one example).

Piper’s mother was in Canada near the US border in this era. It’s possible that fugitive slaves might have crossed over into her region. I also note that Piper says she was singing it in 1876, perhaps because that’s the border of Edwin Ford Piper’s memory, but I read the date and think about it being the year Reconstruction largely ended and new de-jure laws and customs greatly restricted Afro-American citizenship.

**No, Nicki Haley, slavery was the cause of the Civil War, even though many liked to parse Lincoln’s compromise and coalition statements of this time to make it sound like it wasn’t. The flaw in that framing? Lincoln didn’t start the war, the South did, and they were explicit in proclaiming why they did it.

***There’s another song using this terminology that this Project has already presented: Longfellow’s scathing pre-Civil War poem “The Quadroon Girl.”   In Longfellow’s poem the situation leading to that poem’s mixed-race child is laid out: feudal concubinage and/or rape by slaveholders. For making a speech implying the same, Longfellow’s friend, US Senator Charles Sumner was beaten to within an inch of his life on the floor of congress.

****The biggest difference: the printed song’s title calls out the chorus — it’s officially “Glory, Glory, The Little Octoroon.”   I only sang the martial chorus twice in my performance because I was more drawn to the bravery and sacrifice told in the verses. We have two holidays that say soldiers made us free, but it’s not only soldiers.

I followed Piper’s transcription for the words, not the printed lyrics, honoring the chain of transmission to me rather than accuracy. I also modified Root’s tune and chords to suit my tastes and tendencies. I could not help but think of these things as I sang this: first, the mother, her family heritage caught in that sexual exploitation making the choice to stay and face the slave hunters and their dogs to assure her child’s escape. We never find out if she and the daughter will be reunited, or even if she survives. Then next I think of those pursuers who to the degree they are portrayed in the song would be gaslight villains — but in history they would be real people doing great evil, who could be thinking they were serving justice. And then lastly, the final-verse gunner who cares for the child, though he’s more the Horatio of the story, with the mother being the tragic hero. I ask you not to skip over the villain characters. It’s fine if you empathize with the gunner, but some great dangers in one’s life (and often to other lives) are those middle souls, like the slavecatcher pursuers, who have a system that tells them they are arduously, justly, doing right.

Paying the Piper chapter 3: Paper or Song?

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

While researching my questions about Edwin Ford Piper in his archives at the University of Iowa Special Collections Library, did other things occur to me? Yes, a few things did. I’ve warned you, I never seem to be able to tell stories simply.

I tapped this thought on my laptop computer during the first day with the yellowing paper newspaper clippings, cursive correspondence, and paperclipped notes on scraps of paper surrounding me: “Paper or Song?”

I hoped that would be enough to remind me of what occurred off to the side as I worked my way through this somewhat random archive containing the folk songs Piper had collected around the American Midwest early in the 20th century, often from rural settings.

Given the high cost of the more or less instant communication in my rural youth, I easily recognized Piper’s world of correspondence, little journals, and newspapers of the region. If my mid-20th Century had long-distance phone calls, or I suppose telegrams (I never sent the latter, but a couple appear in Piper’s files), long-distance calls were an expensive thing, something you saved for emergencies or life events for the most part. As in Piper’s days, tasks like exchanging folk songs or literary networking was something you might engage in with pen in hand like some medieval monk or courtier.

Bing Crosby Says Folk Songs are Goodies

We’ll bring in Carl Sandburg, and Carl’s birthplace where I saw this blurbed edition of his landmark folk song collection later.

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That information’s travel was slow: what one found in one small town might appear days later in the mailbox of another town, but it had persistence. It opened the possibility of staying around longer than the electronic instants we exchange now on little glowing rectangles. This document I’m entering into a computer gets saved to a solid-state device, and backed up to another — but who would care after I’m gone or know how to access if they did? This blog, widely public as it is today, exists more or less at the mercy of my monthly payment from my no-profit enterprise.

In summary: slow communication in Piper’s time, but a chance it’s kept long. Fast, facile communication now wizzes past in a flying timeline and disappears.

How much did Piper save? I can’t tell, we only have what we have, not what we don’t. In my last day at the Special Collections I read an in-passing comment from his wife written decades after Piper’s sudden death, telling which professor took over his position and classes and of the two of them going to Edwin Piper’s office and cleaning out the stuff there for his successor. Piper was not Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg then or now, but someone saved some things that could be held in hand so I could go on my time travel trip into the boxes in the library Special Collections.

Still, there’s nothing about paper that assures eternal. Beyond paper, Piper seems to have done good work, good things for others. As a professor there’s the legacy of his students and perhaps their students, and so on outward. The unarchived of us will have that too, with no library boxes, indexes, or perhaps even attribution.

But then this occurred to me, there’s something else, an archival format with a potential longer shelf life: songs. It was partly a folk song archive I had come to look at, and I’ve had an interest in folk song since I was a teenager. Therefore, I already knew many of the songs I came upon in Piper’s archive, at least in a version I could recognize were related to his. I’ve heard them sung, sung them myself. Some of them are old, some of them had Child folk song collection numbers since they were British Isles songs that had emigrated to North America and remained to be passed from one singer to another through time. Ford wanted to write them down, but at least at first it was said he just wanted to learn of them to sing them. Singing — that’s an instant, ephemeral communication — but at least for some songs, sometimes, there’s a lasting component that persists.

A folk song for this post? Here’s a song better known from the 1960s folk revival where its haunting supernatural elements started attracting singers in the British Isles, “Reynardine.”   While there are older songs with a like-named character, the version we know today descends from a song collected or recast in the first decade of the 20th century in northern Ireland around the time Piper was collecting his songs in the American Midwest.  You can read more about this at this earlier post, but here it is simply as a song to pass through your ears via the audio player below, or this backup link.

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Paying the Piper chapter two: time travel, wagon trains in space, & folk song

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

The walk across town to the University of Iowa main library turned out to be no problem, even in the heat. I walked into the modern lobby of the facility decked out with LCD screen-signage, a set of computer carrels, and airy windows. I used handy lockers with touch-screen set-your-own-combination lock panels there to store my bag and hat.*  The library is one of those amended buildings, representing different eras in décor as it was added to over time or remodeled — so it was almost a theme-park-ride effect as I walked further into the main entryway to reach an old elevator with a flickering florescent fixture that took me up to the third floor with dark wood trim that reminded me of the libraries of my mid-century youth.

The special collections staff set me up on a placard-numbered plain table in the reading room. It took only a few minutes for my selected boxes from the Edwin Ford Piper collection to be delivered by cart. Looking around the reading room as I waited, there were filled bookshelves, a globe, a couple of busts,** and a few framed posters. Curiously, there were life-sized carboard standups of 20th Century Star Trek actors in their character costumes in a couple of corners. Why? Generalized nerd culture? LaVar Burton’s following enlistment in Reading Rainbow? I momentarily thought, at the commencement of my time-travel by library collections, that the original Roddenberry Star Trek concept was travel to “seek out new life and new civilizations.” They called it Star Trek,  not the second-word choice of the later movie franchise Star Wars,  nor something referencing a technology-based science fiction premise. Pitching to SF resistant TV programmers, Roddenberry famously described his show it “Wagon Train in space.”

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Transporter or time machine: archive boxes in the University of Iowa Special Collections Reading Room.

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I don’t know how Piper’s parents came to rural Nebraska. His mother’s family (Ford) emigrated from Ireland first to Canada around 1810. The Ford brothers who emigrated were stone masons. His father’s line had settled in Massachusetts from 17th century, near-Pilgrim times. Piper’s mother was born in rural south-west Ontario and his parents were married there in Zorra township in 1848. The parents moved to Auburn Nebraska in 1869 where Piper was born in 1871. The 1869 date means it was likely by wagon, as that date predates railroads there.

I know no particulars about why the Ford brothers emigrated to Canada. 1810 preceded the infamous Irish famine years a generation later. My guess (by inference) is that the Fords were Anglo-Irish protestants. I don’t know why Piper’s father was in a non-descript rural area of Canada either.***

It’s hard for me to judge his parent’s economic status. Piper speaks briefly in papers in the archive about his father being a rancher who raised livestock and that the barb wire that titled Edwin’s poetry collection came to Nebraska with homesteading post-Civil War farmers who tended crop-fields cordoned off with that fencing, causing his father to move his livestock grazing farther west to Alma Nebraska (southwest of Kearney) and then Box Elder, which is more than halfway to Colorado. In a short biographic note Piper prepared and found in the archives he says he “rode in the movers wagon.” In the same note he says he had “broken sod and raised corn to sell at ten cents a bushel; I have paid three percent a month interest.” Since he went to Omaha and university there when he came of age and was an academic the rest of his life, this would indicate that his family wasn’t exclusively a cattleman or other livestock operation.

In talking about places and names I found in the archives, I get ahead of myself, it’s just clear that the young Piper was a traveling man coming from a traveling heritage. When we speak nowadays about the Midwest as “the heartland” or casually assign it as a homogenous place in stasis we miss that it was (even its rural areas) just as much an immigration site as the tenements of New York City — there was just more space between farms or towns.

In effect I was another immigrant in the library archives. I was eagerly opening the contents brought to the table from first box and on, lifting out folders from inside them and examining the mix of handwritten letters and notes, typewritten pages, fragile yellow newsprint clippings, and occasional whole publications. The libraries abstract of the contents, and the Piper collection’s mixed filing, meant that I never knew what I’d find “over the next hill.” I had been concerned if I could keep my focus on this task for a full workday. I could. Easily. I was back in the era which The Parlando Project so often refers to, the first quarter of the 20th century when Modernism emerged. I’ll look at Modernism later in this series, but the folk songs are things the travelers carried with them from the past. Same quarter-century, Janus like, looking forward and backward.

As the collection abstract promised, the folk music collection materials were considerable. Many of them have marginal notes or material showing either they came from other collectors or that they had appeared in versions in other contemporary published collections. Some of these notes are from a 1934 run through of Piper’s folk song materials by a graduate student who cataloged and categorized the material while Piper was still alive, though his organization is not reflected in the current filing in the archive boxes. That student, Harold Daniel Peterson, no doubt using Piper as an informant, says that Piper first collected the songs to sing himself, that WWI interrupted Piper’s personal collecting, and that post-WWI, his students at Iowa contributed songs their families and locals knew. Correspondence and marginal notes with associated names show that Piper seems to have assembled or participated in an informal network of other folk song collectors. Piper also mentions the Journal of American Folklore multiple times, and that publication and society started in 1888.

There’s a number of files dealing with hobo songs (some with notes presumably by Piper about the particular hobo who shared the song) and articles about hobo culture, Hobos were migratory workers who often hopped trains to move from place to place.

Coincidences can move me, even if I realize I’m the one making chance meaningful. The very last folder in the last box I went through in my days examining the Piper archive folk song collection contained a version of “Jack of Diamonds”  a traditional song with a variant that also goes by the name of a commonly included verse: “Rye Whiskey.”  Long-time readers here may recall that I was told by uncles that “Rye Whiskey”  was a favorite song of my great-grandfather, after whom I am named. In my time travel during this June trip I wasn’t just traveling to the time of Modernism’s emergence, I remembered at that moment opening that folder that I was traveling back to that man’s, a common laborer’s, time too. When investigating something else years back, I was taught that folk culture isn’t uncomplicatedly pure, always the result of children learning songs from the old folks on the porch of an isolated cabin. I recorded a performance with music of a plausible theory of how my great-grandfather might have come to fancy and appreciate that song. You can hear that performance with the audio player below, or with this highlighted link if that player isn’t visible to you.

To be continued…

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*As is now common in special collections, there are rules about what you can bring into the reading rooms. Alas, theft has been a problem in such places, so bags (much less spill-risk food or drink) are not allowed. I noted the University’s rules also restricted paper notebooks and outside writing instruments.

**Of who? I never left my focus to find out, but the human form amputated to a head and shoulders is already concentrating on the life of the mind. The Piper Archive papers mesmerized me, time passed rapidly as I tried to take in as much as I could. The first day I had packed a bagel in my shoulder bag, necessarily left in the downstairs library locker in case I needed to take a lunch break outside of the Special Collections Reading Room. I ate that bagel in the evening back at my room.

***This basic genealogical detail is from a typewritten sheet titled “Notes on Family History” with some pencil annotations in Piper’s handwriting in the archives. It also says that he was “the tenth child in a family of eleven children” and gives the date of Edwin Ford Piper’s own later marriage to Janet Pressley in Iowa City as 1927.

Paying the Piper chapter 1

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Very often I find myself unable to tell a story simply. While I find internal joy in expanding complexity there is a painful element too. Even when under the spell of things I’ve experienced and learned, I retain enough self-awareness to see what effect my expression has on others, the burden of strangeness. Then the reach between the teller and the listener becomes haphazard, unstable — pile it too high and it tiresomely topples — and so in some break for breath partway in, I realize I’ve dumped a cluttered mass of thought debris on a listener, long past any interest.

Perhaps this is why I’m attracted to lyric poetry, constrained as it is to moments, often held tight within the stiff glass bottles of forms.

Here’s a personal story that’ll go many places coming from the place I find myself in this June. It starts, I’ll guess, earlier this year when I came upon a poem, “The Last Antelope,”  a striking, empathetic account of the end of an animal’s life and wildness after settlers captured it. Edwin Ford Piper was the author, and there were only scattered bits of information to be found about him. Scattered and bits do not constrain my curiosity — if the bits were great distances apart, the space between them could hold a lot of things: born 1871 in rural Nebraska, parents part of early European-origin settlement there. Largely self-educated in a land of necessary child-farmhand-so-never-more-than-half-year schools, still goes on to university in Omaha studying literature with a specialization in Chaucer, and then to the University of Iowa where as a professor he helped establish the idea of teaching and granting degrees in creative writing.

The modern convention of a university as patronage for artists, and the rise of the credentialed MFA-holding poet is not without controversy — but isn’t it odd, this man who taught himself in a small town on the fluid boundary between the 19th Century Wild West and the 20th Century staid Midwest took that journey.

In the middle of this, the same man had a compulsion to collect songs ordinary people brought with them while journeying, the words and music carried in the light baggage of memory. He wrote down songs his relatives and townsfolk knew by heart. He asked others to send him more by mail. He paid particular attention to the songs of those on the move: hobos, cowboys, and other traveling workers. Did this connect with his literary poetry? There are no recordings of Piper reading his poetry, but accounts say he declaimed it with a musical lilt — perhaps like the surviving recordings of Yeats, or maybe like the more bombastic Vachel Lindsay — and at times he would break into full song. His students took to calling him “The Singing Professor.”

Since this Project is “Where Music and Words Meet” you can see why I’d be attracted. And I’m a small-Midwestern-town boy, though without degrees. But did that seem strange then, to mesh high culture and the songs remembered by old women and rude mechanicals?

Piper was born just west of the Missouri River in Nebraska — and in Illinois, just to the east of the Mississippi River and less than a decade later, Carl Sandburg was born to an immigrant railway blacksmith who signed his name with an X. Iowa, the state where I was born in the middle of the next century, and Minnesota, the state where I’ve lived the longest, sit in a delta between those two tremendous rivers. Sandburg too mixed the latest in Modernist poetry with folk songs he collected and sang. Did Piper influence Sandburg? Did Sandburg influence Piper? Or are they the same genus of plant, raised in the same climate, but in separate plots? Questions.

Answers fork like river systems. Even with little information being readily available on Piper, I was already in flood stage. And here’s how much my wife loves me: for our 20th anniversary she agreed to go on a road trip with me to Iowa City and Sandburg’s home-town of Galesburg. My scenery in Iowa City? An archive of Piper’s papers* held in the university library there. Our grand museum of the arts of poetry and song to visit on the trip: a railway worker’s shack in a small rust-belt city, a town worn-out but still running like a paint-shedding Oldsmobile.

Two considerations worried me as I thought about this trip, one for my wife and one for myself. For my wife, I worried if there’d be something rewarding for her to do while I enthused at the library. She was able to solve that one easily, locating nature reserves, parks, and trails within an hour’s drive. I often tell her that she’s a nymph, and I complement her on how seriously she takes her job to supervise the plants and animals when she returns with soggy hiking boots from her hikes with pictures of landscapes, mushrooms, wildflowers, birds, and other critters. I love her pictures and stories on return (her stories briefer and better organized) — but my old joints ache just thinking about hiking for hours.

For myself I worried about my old-ager endurance. The library was two-thirds of a mile from where we’d stay. I’d need to hoof it with my laptop bag back and forth, which would have been a trifle in my youth, but nowadays longer term standing and walking is troublesome. I considered taking a bicycle with me, which would have made the library to-and-from easy, but a lot of hotel/AirBnB places don’t have any good places to lock up overnight, and on further consideration I thought that a bike would just be one more thing to worry about, taking my focus away from the trip’s main goals. And then I worried too about spending full days at the library’s special collections reading room. Because my time was limited, and to minimize the walking, I planned no break for lunch. I’d need to keep my focus and energy up, something that I have not been consistently able to do this year even with all the comforts of home.

On average I bike at least once every day in my normal routine, often in the morning. In the past two years I’ve not been a longer distance bicyclist, but 30-50 miles a week easily exceeds those 150 minutes exercise recommendations, and it lets me get to a café for morning breakfast and handle a lot of routine shopping and other trips. I ride year-round. In 2016 I bought my first 21st Century winter bike with studded tires; and in 2019 I upgraded the winter season bicycle to a Fat Bike with monstrous 4.5-inch-wide tires that handled ice and snow with the challenging ice ruts and potholes that my city’s current “We’ll get to all the streets in 3 days after the snow stops” plowing regime supplies. My overall stamina for the walk wasn’t my worry so much as how well my joints and stiff back would take the more load-bearing walk.** And to make it through the day I’d planned, there’d be no old-man’s afternoon nap either.

Pay the Piper Chapter 1 800
Piper, once a “poet of considerable distinction.” A later version of his collection Barb Wire. My Iowa City view, and yes the guitar got some use. Example breakfast.***

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The first day we arrived at Iowa city was hot and very humid, so I put on my best hot weather clothing. Spouse-nymph headed off at dawn for her day’s supervisory encounter with nature, and I planned a big breakfast fuel-up. I’m a “eat little meat” kind of guy, but for good or ill I take the lacto-ovo part of my lesser meat diet seriously, so I’m a big frittata, omelet, hash, scrambler kind of guy most mornings. I note that I eat like an old-time farmer, despite never farming, but the good thing about this higher fat/protein kind of meal is that it can hold me until supper, and that was my plan.

I put on my best hot weather clothes, slung my bag over my shoulder, and headed for the university’s main library building for my encounter with poet-professor Piper’s papers.

Thus ends Chapter One.

Here’s a musical performance I put together in March of Piper’s “The Last Antelope.”   You can play it with the audio player you should see below. No player?  This highlighted link is another way to hear it.

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*When I arrived at the library archives will-call desk, I asked them to pick Piper’s Papers. The librarian suggested puckishly that I was nearly reconstructing the old tongue-twister folk-rhyme, Roud Folk Song index 19745.

**Local papers/forums are full of folks who bemoan bike lanes in my city, often remarking that “not everyone is young and fit.” Despite that, most bicyclists I meet and see on my city’s streets aren’t of the MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra) variety — and I’m maybe 1.5 letters of that acronym. I joke with my wife that as my joints get older, a bicycle is becoming a “fore-and-aft wheelchair” for me, allowing me increased mobility and beneficial low-impact movement for the old joints.

***That’s a St. Paul Sandwich: egg foo young on sourdough with lettuce, tomato slices and mayo. Near as anyone knows, my Twin City of St. Paul has no tradition regarding it, and no restaurant there serves it now. Its origin is something of mystery.

Reading Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

I spent much of today reading through Carl Sandburg’s landmark 1927 folk song collection American Songbag,  all 500-plus-pages of it. It’s not the first time I’ve looked into the book, and indeed I’ve paged through it or jumped to songs I was interested in before. But next month I’m planning a trip to Sandburg’s boyhood home in Illinois and to Iowa City where I will be taking a look at some papers relating to early 20th century poet and professor Edwin Ford Piper who was one of the sources of folk song material used in Sanburg’s anthology.*  So, looking at the book in full seemed a good grounding for this trip.

I’ve made the case before here, such as this post from a year ago, that besides being a somewhat deemphasized Modernist poet these days, Sandburg is a primary model for the American Folk Music Revival, which eventually produced in the second half of the 20th century several genres of popular and semi-popular music.**  Here’s the matrix that Sandburg built in the 1920s, a hundred years ago:

  • American folk music can be appreciated like art music
  • It will be associated with literary poetry
  • It expresses, or can be adapted to express or accompany, progressive/left-wing causes
  • It’s multi-ethnic, and the contribution of Afro-Americans will be substantially acknowledged
  • Humor and funny stories will be part of its presentation

Sandburg was including segments of folk music performance as part of poetry readings before American Songbag.  AFAIK we don’t have any transcripts or recordings from that era, but all these things are demonstrated for the record in the 1927 book. Sandburg is not the only American doing any of these things a hundred years ago, but he’s doing all of them at once,  and he’s doing it with a degree of fame and cultural acclaim that was significant.

I was aided in my rapid march through American Songbag  by already knowing many of the songs it contains, and as I encountered them I remembered hearing them in my half of the 20th century performed by Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan and many of those other “folk singers” that surrounded them.***  The Sing Out magazine and Jerry Silverman folk songbooks of the Sixties that are my foundation, are successors to Sandburg’s work, right down to the touch of  using vintage B&W line drawings as interspersed decorations.

Sandburg often includes little stories about the collector (Piper was one of a group who collected the songs “in the field” for Songbag)  and for those he collected himself he says a few words about how, where, and with whom he first heard the song. Here’s one of the most engaging of those stories I came upon today in the book:

Once when the night was wild without and the wintry winds piled snowdrifts around the traffic signals on Cottage Grove Avenue, Chicago, we sat with Robert Frost and Padraic Colum. The Gael had favored with Irish ballads of murder, robbery, passion. And Frost offered a sailorman song he learned as a boy on the wharves of San Francisco.

The song Frost sang for Colum and Sandburg? A subtle wry ballad of farming? A nuanced lyric of nature cooly observed? No, it was this one. Some will know it from its latter association with the Assassin’s Creed video game franchise:

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*Besides the folks songs Piper contributes, Sandburg even quotes a part of a poem from his contemporary Piper’s Barb Wire  poetry collection in Songbag.

**Besides the Folk Scare of the 50s and 60s, the American “Rock Music” that extended Rock’n’Roll to FM radio, college campuses, and rock critics was generally formed from folks who had connections with the just preceding folk revival. Modern Americana and roots music links to the same strains and connections that Sandburg was personifying 100 years ago.

***Guthrie composed music for Sanburg poems later. Ruth Crawford Seeger (Pete’s step-mom, Mike and Peggy Seeger’s birth mother) was one of the composers who created harmonized music for the folk songs in Songbag,  and she also set Sandburg’s page poems to music. When the young Bob Dylan started to expand the poeticism of his song lyrics, he decided to pay a visit to Sandburg, briefly meeting him unannounced in North Carolina at Sandburg’s farm. Other folk luminaries connected? At least a couple songs collected from Leadbelly by John Lomax are included in Songbag.  Lomax is credited, but Leadbelly isn’t, though Leadbelly’s more general public career hadn’t yet started. Let me just say that Lomax’s relationship with Leadbelly is complicated. Just this month I was reading a recollection of a performance by Spider John Koerner (who first performed in the mid-century Minneapolis folk music scene along with Dylan) where he told a humorous story about a farmer who fed his pig by lifting him up to the branches of an apple tree. That’s a story Sandburg also told. I’ll also note that when I came upon several songs in Songbag,  the rendition I recalled from the Folk Scare of the mid-century was by Dave Van Ronk, a wonderful performer and a mentor to Dylan when he arrived in New York.

Whispering Often

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Perhaps we should remind ourselves in this pre-AI age that every poem, any poem, is written by another human being. I did the math with the years, and this is a poem published and likely written about a hundred years ago by a 40-something Midwestern American.

I’m decades past that age, as was Donald Hall when Hall gave us his law that states that most poets, even prize-winning ones, will be forgotten 40 years after they die. This may sound callous, but that process is likely necessary. How many poets can we hold as a culture, as a reader? Dozens? Certainly more. Hundreds? Whatever, there’s a limit. The poet who wrote today’s piece? Who would we give up in the pantheon to let him in?

I came upon the poet who wrote today’s poem, Edwin Ford Piper, by reading a striking poem he wrote of the closing American wilderness that I’ve already presented earlier this year. I know little about him as a person.*  I almost worry to find out more, since human beings are full of all kinds of faults, deleterious opinions, vanities, and misapprehension. Did he write this poem in this time of the year, in the Spring? Who can say. Writers are full of memories, and imagination that can redress any cold or baren place, but it feels like he did. The poem’s trope of Spring’s reincarnation of driving/seeking life paired with the Christian holiday of Easter is far from unique — but the poem’s not, in feeling, much of a Sunday-dress observance — it’s luxuriously pantheistic. “Whispering Often”  was written in a past era we still call Modernism, published in a journal that put forward many of the great English Language Modernist poets, Chicago’s Poetry Magazine, and it was included in Poetry’s  founder’s anthology shortly afterward that had Modern American Poetry  imprinted on its end-boards — but I can’t call it an example of Modernism.

Whispering Often song

If you can un-embarrass yourself, you could sing this Spring poem too.

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It’s not end-rhymed. It does sing on the page, despite having a meter that I can’t easily chart out. There’s a familiar iambic rise to many of the phrases, but I don’t think I can call it blank verse, a form that Piper used elsewhere. Oh, but does this rite of Spring want to sing! The title says whispering, so maybe the poet is abashed at the voice that is called forth. Not a lot of today’s poetry sings like this. Instead, we’re more often interested in a poem showing us a particular apprehension the poet has uncovered, an apprehension we are to recognize and share. We are want to pause and recognize the matter of typical 21st century poems, like a friend speaking with us. A wise friend perhaps, a little better with language than we normally are — but still, we wouldn’t want them to break out into a song over shared teacups or beer glasses. How gauche that’d be!

And so, I think of this poem now, as Spring is rebeginning here in my Midwest, as the Abrahamic religions are celebrating holidays of freedom, rebirth, and revelation — but more so as the northern half of earth is celebrating something that Abraham could have seen in a place outside Ur. In this case, a man in his 40s, a Midwestern American like myself, stopped and wrote this down.

What an odd act! If he paused to think about it, he would know that by all odds this poem will be soon forgotten. Yes, Piper was a professor of literature, but he was an adult, someone who knows the comings and goings, the correct way to behave, the agreed worth of this and that. Yet the poem will appear as something as outrageous as an unbidden public song, one with a crush of erotic desire for life. Religion can shape and seek to make that solemn — and perhaps such a transformation teaches wisdom, brings thoughtful ethics to our roots and melting eddies — but that Spring is older than wisdom.

It’s enough to make a grown man break out into song after all.

So I did. Earlier this month I hurriedly sang a bunch of pieces I had written that I feared wouldn’t have time to shape and improve into full arrangements in an interrupted life. Long-time listeners will know my voice isn’t going to be polite, though maybe it should be. You can hear that quick, short, performance with the graphical audio player below. No player? You don’t have to rush past, you can use this alternative highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*It’s not certain, but there’s a fair chance that later this year I will make another trip to pay respects to one of my poetic heroes, Carl Sandburg, and on the way tarry awhile to see if I can learn more about Edwin Ford Piper.

The Last Antelope

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Nothing excites me more while doing this project than coming across a little-known poet that I had never heard of. Some of these poets have perhaps a single poem worthy of interest; others, whole bodies of work which have slipped off the page, fallen to the floor, and have then been lost in the cracks.

Just how interesting is Edwin Ford Piper? I don’t know yet — and that’s fascinating! I’ve picked up a few things about him. He grew up during the closing act of the American frontier in the vicinity of the small town of Auburn Nebraska near where Nebraska’s southeastern border meets up with Missouri and Iowa. Despite a typical rural childhood of his era, with schooltime being “Sometimes two months a year, sometimes none,” he largely educated himself as a child by reading, graduated from the University of Nebraska, and he then became a long-time college professor of English Literature at the University of Iowa until he died in 1939.*

But here’s what’s intriguing me so far: unlike a great many of his contemporaries, it appears he takes as his subject the local culture of the Midwest in his time, including the ordinary working-class and underclass. At least at first glance he’s a Modernist of a sort. Some of the first poems I’ve read look like a melding of Sandburg** and a Midwestern, not New England, Frost — but with his own vision and sound.

I’ve been long-winded lately trying to share as much as I’ve been able to find out about another lesser-known Midwestern poet of this time, Fenton Johnson. So, let me rest your eyes from the historical matters of Piper so far, and share a performance of the first poem of his I came across: “The Last Antelope.”

In its deep cross-species empathy the poem reminds me of Kenneth Rexroth, who’s a generation later. Piper tells its story using some Modernist tactics, including abrupt time-shifts and changes in point of view, always chasing the most vivid perspective. It’s in an unfussy iambic pentameter, but like Frost, the language and word-music seem so natural you don’t hear the pentameter, just feel the rhythm without noting it. If  you’d like to read the poem along with my performance of it available below, you can find the text of it here.

Edwin Ford Piper

Like Fenton Johnson, there’s not a lot of pictures of Piper to be found online. How little-known is Piper? Not even a stub Wikipedia page!

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A few pieces of detail about the pronghorn antelope that might serve as background for this poem: it’s the fastest land animal in North America (55 mph top speed!), and unlike some other speedsters world-wide, it can keep up significant speed over a long time and distance. The method of hunting implied in Piper’s poem is similar to what Indigenous tribes used, but with guns improving on bow and arrow: large groups of hunters driving the antelope into a natural or constructed dead-end pen where it can’t use its speed to escape.

Why did it become extinct in the Iowa/Nebraska area in Piper’s childhood era? He concisely notes the reasons in the midst of the chase the poem takes us on: they are skittish prairie creatures who want the lookouts of high ground and long free spaces to run. Early attempts to conserve them in fenced ranges failed, they refused to thrive where they couldn’t run. Barb-wire, a famous marker of the closing of the American frontier, was particularly dangerous: the pronghorn generally don’t leap over fences, they prefer to kneel and crawl under them. The barb-wire then tore at them, their crown of thorns.

Simple music for this closing of the frontier story — just acoustic guitar — but I hope I can tell well the story Edwin Ford Piper wrote. You can hear it with the audio player below this. No player? This highlighted link is an alternative way to get an audio player for it.

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*Coincidences: for a few years late in the 20th century the University of Iowa’s Iowa Poetry Prize was named the Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award, but for whatever reason, this name was abandoned. While it had this name, Missouri-to-Minnesota poet Phil Dacey, who I treasure for his early kind words and influence to me, won that prize.

**Like Sandburg (actually “with,” as he submitted collected songs to Sandburg’s landmark American Songbag  that helped kick off the American Folksong Revival) Piper was known to break into song when reciting poetry. He got called “The Singing Professor” for this, and that makes him a natural Parlando Project interest.