Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Save the Wails

For 51 years, Art Rosenbaum has been recording folk music.

He's recorded fiddle players in North Carolina, Mexican guitarists in Michigan, gospel singers in Iowa, and shouters along the Georgia coast.

NAT: Automobile sounds?.

Today, Rosenbaum?s on his way north to the foothills of the Georgia Appalachians. He?s going to visit Ed Teague, an 85-year old banjo player.

Ed?s an active banjo player. As far as I know, he?s the only active old time traditionally school banjo player of the pre-bluegrass style, he?s a two finger banjo player.

PG: How did you find him?

AR: I cant really remember?I think it was through Ray Knight. I?m drawing a blank?

Folklorist Alan Lomax recorded Ed Teague in the mid-70s, but Rosenbaum knew him first. Teague has been playing at dances in north Georgia since the 1930s.

It?s a dirt road going his house. That?s a cowbird singing. Teague?s standing on his porch as we drive up ? ramrod straight, with a denim work shirt and jeans; he?s got a banjo slung over on his shoulder.

NAT: greeting, introductions?.

XFADE to banjo music?.

Before Rosenbaum has even got his recording equipment set up, Teague starts playing. Rosenbaum joins him on fiddle ?

[Music finishes]
Teague: Pretty good little tune
Rosenbaum: Where did you learn that from
Teague: That?s an old tune I picked up from my grandpa. He used to do a lot of them funny ole tunes?

Rosenbaum grew up in New York and Indianapolis. His grandmother sang Yiddish folk songs, his father played mandolin, they listened to recordings of the Almanac Singers. You might say he was a kid folkie.

You could learn a song quickly and it would tell a story that would have to do with people?s struggles, or it had to do with humor or ? maybe a little of it was romanticism.

He taught himself banjo. He started seeking out musicians just to learn more music. In those days you couldn?t learn folk in music school.

Rosenbaum was only a teenager when he found Scrapper Blackwell.

[MUSIC: Blackwell]

Blackwell was popular in the 20s. By the 50s he was forgotten.

FOLKT9_1(:15) I heard about a guitar player who could play blues and Christian songs that make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. So I went and met him. His friend said you gotta get some birdseed to get the bird to sing. I was too young to buy beer so I gave them the money to buy beer and he turned out to be a marvelous guitar player.

Rosenbaum went to Columbia University and fell into with a crowd of folk musicians in Greenwich villiage. That?s when he met one of his idols -- Pete Seeger.

When Pete Seeger said don?t learn from me, learn from the people I learned from, I realized that you go to the source.

That?s how he got serious about documenting folk music. Rosenbaum was seeking out traditional musicians ? people who learned their music in their communities or families, not from recordings. The oral tradition.

He?d do what they call shotgun collecting ? just show up in a community and asking at the general store or a filling station if there are any fiddle players or banjo pickers in the neighborhood.

I remember one time I just knocked on some door in Keakuk, Iowa, well, I said do you know old songs, and they said oh we know frog went a courtin? and they started singing that?.

Rosenbaum?s short, balding, unassuming. It?s hard to imagine him being so forward.

As a kid I was shy. I was shy with girls and I wasn?t shy about going up to strangers and asking them about music because I was so interested in the kind of music I though they might be capable of providing.

Rosenbaum?s a painter, and since the 1950s he?s taught studio art at the universities of Iowa and Georgia.

Pretty much all his free time, he spends gathering music. It?s not getting easier.

Right now we can still meet people whose formative music experiences were apart from the electronic media?But there are fewer people that are part of that person-to-person chain.

But just a year ago, he learned about Mary Lomax ? no relation to folklorist Alan Lomax. She lives in the foothills of Georgia?s Blue Ridge mountains, she?s 80 and has never been recorded.

[bed Mary Lomax singing]

Her father sang a lot of songs and she had a book that she compiled of her father?s songs.

As he listened to her, Rosenbaum realized she was singing what?s called a ?Child ballad? ? an old British ballad, first documented by Francis Child, the pioneer of American folklore. The words have passed down for hundreds of years. He got the kind of chill that a folklorist lives for.

[up music]

Now Mary Lomax might sing Lord Lovell stood in his castle gate combing his milk white steed. Now that?s before her time and before her father?s time to be talking about castles and milk white steeds and lords and ladies, but the sadness of the story can speak to modern sensibilities.

Not many people collect traditional music. Like Mary Lomax and Ed Teague, Rosenbaum is one of the last of his kind.

Right now, he?s putting together CD boxed sets of his 50 years in the field.

Ed Teague thinks that?s good news.

Pretty soon these old people like myself and these ladies, we aren?t going to be around to do it. If somebody don?t catch on to it and start learning and try to keep it going, it?ll be a dead thing.

I'm Philip Graitcer

TAG: The Art of Field Recording, the first volume of Rosenbaum's field recordings, has been recently released on the Dust to Digital label.

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