Mary’s Universal Musurgy

The Old, Weird John Jacob Niles (1892-1980)

I’m so delighted to launch “Universal Musurgy”, my new regular feature here at The Hinternet! When Justin invited me to join this ever-expanding project, he did flatter me perhaps overmuch by insisting that I’m the only person in the world who knows more than he does, and can write better than he does, about popular and vernacular musical traditions of the 20th century. Shucks, I’ll certainly do my best! I just hope you all will give me a chance, generous readers. I’m not JSR —who is?!—, but we do need to give our founding editor some much needed sabbatical time to do the long, slow work of planning and developing what we’ve come to call “Phase 2” of this fine publication. In part for that reason, I’m taking over as The Hinternet’s resident musical critic, archeologist, and tastemaker. (And yes, my column’s name is inspired by Athanasius Kircher).

I was going to focus in my first installment on Bing Crosby, and on the reasons why I sincerely believe he is the most important musician since the dawn of the recording era. But Justin gently pressured me away from such a peculiar focus as this for my inaugural piece, so instead I chose another of my long-time obsessions, the Kentucky folk balladeer and dulcimer player, John Jacob Niles.

It is fitting perhaps that when you begin to enter this man’s name into Google, auto-fill will usually suggest that you finish it out with “Jingleheimer Schmidt”, for both men by now seem, at least to me, to occupy roughly the same liminal position between reality and legend. Was there ever a real John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt? Probably, yes, before he got apotheosized into legend and song. Was there ever a John Jacob Niles? There is somewhat more documentary evidence in his case, but still I remain less than fully convinced. Although I have myself visited the John Jacob Niles Archive at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, I have studied his handwriting and have fondled boxfuls of his old billets, I am still inclined to suspect this man was conjured right out of the humming of ancient washerwomen, out of the rhythmic blows of grim horseshoers.

Many of the folk balladeers of the early recording era have been recycled over and over in the broader public consciousness, first in the folk revival of the early 1960s, then more recently in the freak-folk scene of the present century. It is true that at least some representatives of this latter current, notably Devendra Banhart, have acknowledged a debt to Niles, and one of his greatest songs, “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” (1940), was featured in Harmony Korine’s 2007 film, Mister Lonely. Both of these shout-outs would seem to have positioned Niles perfectly for widespread celebration, at least within a certain class of cooler-than-thou aficionados, and perhaps even reaching as far into the popular consciousness as to earn some brief reportage on NPR, or some such downstream maker of liberal mass taste. Yet as far as I know he has not been given the same treatment as, say, Sybille Baier or other next-generation non-American folk-appropriators. He remains in need, I feel, of some further amplification.

I first learned of John Jacob Niles while reading Henry Miller, of all people. Here is that great old American pornographer laureate writing in Plexus (1952), the second installment of the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy:

Over coffee and liqueurs we would sometimes listen to John Jacob Niles’ recordings. Our favorite was “I Wonder As I Wander”, sung in a clear, high-pitched voice with a quaver and a modality all his own. The metallic clang of his dulcimer never failed to produce ecstasy. He had a voice which summoned memories of Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere. There was something of the Druid in him. Like a psalmist, he intoned his verses in an ethereal chant which the angels carried aloft to the Glory seat. When he sang of Jesus, Mary and Joseph they became living presences. A sweep of the hand and the dulcimer gave forth magical sounds which caused the stars to gleam more brightly, which peopled the hills and meadows with silvery figures and made the brooks to babble like infants.

Miller mentions, but hardly emphasizes, the one trait of Niles’s singing that is sure to stun anyone who listens to hm for the first time: his soaringly high, over-the-top falsetto. Are we in the presence here of the last of the castrati? one cannot help but wonder. It is so extreme, and so unrelenting —he does drop down to a typical male register, occasionally, but never seems to be at home there—, as to strike the listener as both comical and extremely unsettling. But my recommendation is to push past that. Before long you will stop laughing, and start luxuriating. Niles sounds the way he does, it will soon seem to you, because he is a musical androgyne, or rather because he is altogether beyond sex — and as we’ll see soon enough beyond race (just like any truly great American musician). He is, and I mean this in the most loving and admirative way possible, an absolute freak.

In later installments of my “Universal Musurgy” column I will probably have occasion to write almost as rapturously of other great male musicians of various traditions who likewise prefer to sing falsetto, from the bluesman Skip James to the great Romanian lăutar Dona Dumitru Siminica (who did get his NPR treatment back in 2006). Some sources claim that Niles initially employed the falsetto to impersonate female characters in his ballads, which are, as he always insisted, essentially a form of ultra-condensed and ultra-emotive storytelling. But Niles himself claimed that the high registers were the natural expression of a distinctly Appalachian sort of ecstasy. Perhaps Miller also has Niles’s falsetto in mind in his description of the “ethereal chant which the angels carried aloft”, for indeed when his voice soars it sounds just as if what Niles has done is to open some secret Kentucky-to-Heaven portal. This effect is perhaps delivered most powerfully in “When I Gets Up into Heaven” (1959). Listen to it, I say, with all due focus, and perhaps even reverence, before reading further:

Niles is for me a crucial missing link between English and Celtic vernacular traditions and American country music. Some of the Hiberno-British influences in American folk music —Irish fiddling for example— are well-known and unmistakable. But it is in the ballad genre that you find not just musical but also lyrical continuity, and not only of themes, but sometimes also of the stock characters that sometimes seem to reach back as far as the medieval lore of knights errant and their damsels. In one strange and wonderful interview (watch the whole thing), Niles theorizes off the cuff that Appalachian ballads only passed through England as part of a much longer and ancient voyage extending back to the indigenous pre-Germanic peoples of the Baltics and Scandinavia. I have no idea where he’s getting that from.

Other Appalachian musicians of the folk-revival period did remarkable scholarly work, first developing real competence as ethnomusicologists, and then pursuing important research on all sorts of fancy fellowships into the trans-Atlantic continuities of ballad motifs. The great Jean Ritchie (1922-2015), for example, a fellow dulcimer player from Viper, Kentucky, went from dirt-poor singer of songs learned by her mother’s side, to respected scholar, in part by tracing out the full genetic heritage of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”. Today I am writing about a particular musician, John Jacob Niles, though it often seems to me the ideal way to write about popular music would be to take the songs themselves, and not their singers, as the suitable subjects of biography, and “Black Is the Color…” shows vividly why this is so. When you isolate its fundamental elements, it is obviously an old English ballad. When you hear it sung by Nina Simone, it remains the same ballad, but it is also incipient Black-power jazz. When you hear it from Patty Waters, it is the ultimate expression of the break-down of sense that was occurring in all domains of culture and civic life circa 1965, which the avant-garde knew best how to put into sound and vision. Listen to Patty, too —who died just this past June—, if not with reverence, then with horror and wonder at a world that could move someone to perform this song in this way.