Alphabet City: A is for Appalachian Music (and secret museums)

photo by O. Mullick

Welcome, alpha-denizens! Each week in “Alphabet City” I will examine an aspect of local music that corresponds with a letter in the alphabet. The first installment, “A,” takes a look at Appalachian music, since many New York bands, from indie folksters to traditional country musicians, often describe some aspect of their music as Appalachian folk, folk, or “old time music.”

How does rural music from the Appalachian Mountains relate to us city slickers here in NYC? Well, don’t get your flannels in bunch if you can’t figure it out. Playing Appalachian music is about preserving cultural traditions, which the Big Apple is wont to do, and, of course, having some damn fun jamming on a fiddle. “Down Home Radio” host Eli Smith explains that playing Appalachian music is about “preserving the authentic music of the American rural underclass, and not just about preserving the music, but about promoting an aesthetic system which has a totally different emotional quality to the pop stuff you hear across the radio dial and on TV, and to my ear a much healthier one.”

Here’s a brief glimpse into the lives of three groups who play old time music – as Appalachian music is sometimes called – and who each preserve folk music traditions in their own way.

I’d reckon Pat Conte has more music in his Long Island basement than the Internet has in its ether or CAT5 cables. Conte plays guitar, banjo, and fiddle, most notably with longtime pal Bob Guida – who passed away earlier this year – in the old-timey music duo The Otis Brothers. The OBs started in the 70s in Flushing, Queens, and their songs are soulful and bluesy renditions of ballads and folk standards, most often served with banjo and guitar.

Conte is a postal worker by day, but his true life’s work is stockpiling records in his mother’s basement in Long Island. (If the A&E show “Hoarders” got word of this he’d be in trouble.) Conte’s collection, which he calls “The Secret Museum of Mankind,” contains records from every continent, minus Antarctica. The collection, which has attracted multiple visits from national and local media, seeks to preserve a diverse world of music that is being effaced by consumer driven music. Nigerian chants, Russian-American guitar work (from New Jersey), and choral music from Fiji are “canned,” in the preservationist sense of the word, in this museum, waiting to one day be aired. Though the Secret Museum is not open to the public, Conte has brought his treasures out to the rest of the world, airing his cache on WFMU as “The Secret Museum of the Air” from 2000 to 2002. You can still view and listen to playlists online here, and the greatest hits of Conte’s basement have been distributed by blues label Yazoo Records here.

photo by O. Mullick

Eli Smith hosts a radio program called “Down Home Radio” and also plays in an old time music band The Dust Busters, who draw from the musical traditions of both high energy dances with strings and jug band blues. Smith’s radio program calls itself a “hardcore, unreconstructed, paleo-acoustic, folk music program.” A bit of trivia: the mountains of both Scotland and the Appalachians were once physically connected a short millennia ago. That’s why they look similar, and funny enough, when Scots and Anglos settled in the Appalachian Mountains in the 1800s, they played a music very similar to their forebears back across the Atlantic pond. This makes Appalachian folk music “paleo-acoustic” because it is “old” and geologically connected to its ancestors – follow? How many musics can claim that?

Smith explained in an email that Appalachian music is “the head-on collision of Scots-Irish fiddling and ballad singing with the African banjo and musical and rhythmic sensibilities, that developed in the hills and hollows of the Appalachian Mountains.” As an outsider to this musical tradition, I find it interesting that many folk musicians like Smith seem to have a keen awareness of the roots of particular types of folk, which can be extremely specific, depending on the musician’s focus. These “roots” are both an understanding of musical techniques as well as the historical-geographical context that yielded these ways of expressing music.

photo by Laura Mae Nobel

Another group of musicians who have an acute sense of old time musical history and technique is Æ, (pronounced “ash”). Æ is the most recent project of Aurelia Lucy Shrenker and Eva Salina Primack, who often perform their music a capella, (as traditional ballads often were). “Æ sings traditional music from all over the world,” says Shrenker. “Our debut album, that just came out, includes songs from Appalachia, Albania, Greece, Ukraine, Corsica, Bulgaria, and Caucasus Georgia.” Shrenker plays the Georgian panduri, a three-stringed, fretted, lute-like instrument, and Primack plays the accordion. “We have also been experimenting with layering songs from different traditions together,” adds Shrenker. Prime examples of this experimentation include songs like “The Day” or “Idumea” which you will find on their album and also can listen to on their Myspace.”

Æ’s interest in a diverse array of folk makes them a unique entry into the scene of Brooklyn folk music. Shrenker and Primack have studied Georgian folk, amongst other traditional musics, and now pass on their knowledge of vocal traditions in contemporary contexts, like at the Jalopy Theatre. Paleo-acoustically, Æ seem to be the unexpected gem in the legion of Brooklyn folk bands that could easily have ended up on a 78, in a basement, in Long Island, had they existed around 100 years ago.

by Thomas Wilk

Check out this video of Æ singing with Georgian panduri:

Old-timey stuff is all over NYC. Check out these other artists and events:
Brooklyn Folk Fest
The New Lost City Ramblers
The Dough Rollers
The Secret Museum of Mankind on CD