by Peter Berryman
Beatniks Revisited
First, an update. I just stumbled across a Dave Van Ronk quote that is a little bit relevant to April's Whither Zither, which had something to do with the relationship of Folk Music and the Beatniks. Although I never really implied anything about their relationship per se, and only about their appearing on the scene at roughly the same time, it was cool to read of Van Ronk's take on the situation. He was interviewed for the book Hoot! A 25 Year History of the Greenwich Village Music Scene by Robbie Woliver.
Van Ronk was referring to the period around 1960, by which time the Beatnik scene was a "...mass-media preoccupation." He says that the Beatniks hated folk music. "When a folk singer would take the stage between two Beat poets, all the finger-poppin' mamas and daddies would do everything but hold their noses." And when the Beatniks read their poetry, the folk fans would "...do likewise."
He remembers that only in the media were the two movements compatible. No doubt there were exceptions, but it's interesting to think about this turf-war of the hep.
The Cornbelt Mailbag
Moving on, daddy-o, today in the mail, addressed to Cornbelt Records (also known as L & P Berryman Inc.), was a postcard proclaiming in black block letters on lemon yellow card stock:
It goes into detail: "The High Hill Fashions Music Video Package Includes: (1) Assisting recording artists with the proper image according to each music video concept, [and] (2) Helping each artist to be elegant, classy, and stylish." Their motto is "Imparting fashion secrets to help all artists look their very best." Then an address (California of course) and phone number, and that's it. As an eye-grabbing image, there is a high-contrast representation of two electric guitarists, a drummer, and singer holding a microphone, all genderless and dressed in what look like tuxes without ties.
Now, I doubt that the sender of this card knows that Cornbelt Records is two aging folkies with NA beer tastes on a KoolAid budget. But what if I'm wrong? What if High Hill Fashions actually put some thought into selecting Cornbelt Records as part of its target audience? After all, there is a void where elegance, class, and style should be, here at Cornbelt HQ, where we obviously can be trusted to keep fashion secrets secret.
So maybe there's a vision behind all this. Maybe Joel Mabus got one of these cards, and Lucy Kaplansky, and Arlo Guthrie, and Art Paul Schlosser. Magpie and Small Potatoes. Maybe Pete Seeger himself has popped for a High Hill Fashions Music Video Package.
Picture This
But the mind boggles at what a music video fashion stylist has as a mental image of a folk music video. Imagine:
The camera zooms into the soundhole of a Martin 00-18 to reveal a circle of Girl Scouts in sequined lima-bean green jumpsuits with seersucker ASCAP pinafores who pull their some-mores apart to reveal a hardanger fiddle burning in painted flames that turn out to be animated rosemaling.
This in turn morphs into the image of Leadbelly dancing across the deck of a neon-bordered Edmund Fitzgerald, bound for Botany Bay, with Joan Baez and Art Thieme who, dressed as Sweet Betsy From Pike and Her Uncle Ike, scatter bronzed back issues of Sing Out! magazine and autographed copies of the Secrets of the Kum Bye Ya Ya Sisterhood into the slo-mo backlit ocean waves undulating under a flotilla of mandolins with harmonica rack masts and bandanna spinnakers.
The great ship cracks apart like a bagette and a hundred fifty thousand National fingerpicks and Dobro thumbpicks pour out of the hold and into the brine, twinkling down and becoming tinsel in a snowglobe settling like dandruff on the shoulders of the original Kingston Trio members along with Brownie McGhee, each holding a corner of a Hudson Bay Blanket like a trampoline which bounces a denim cummerbunded Burl Ives into the air as four hundred singer songwriters click their capos on and off in the background to the rhythm of their blinking electronic tuners, all led by Mr. Green Jeans as the Old Folk Singer wearing a Richard Dyer Bennett Sweatshirt, a pewter ukelele bola, and a hemp tam-o-shanter.
All this to a sound track wafting across the Wide Missouri of fifteen translucent Plexiglas dulcimers, a puce flocked balsa travel guitar, two pitch pipes and a tumbling dryer full of flip flops swelling to a crescendo as pre electric Bob Dylan's ghost, intercut in sepia close ups, eats granola with a tuning fork from overturned bongos at the church basement shrine of the inventor of the folding chair, just as somebody forgotten's beloved grandfather staggers out of the memory of a woodshed with his ancestral Zitherino strapped across his lederhosen, serenading the roses and briars with his folk processed version of Peg and Awl by the Carolina Tarheels:
In the year of eighteen and one,
Darts and board
In the year of eighteen and one
Darts and board
In the year of eighteen and one
Throwin' darts is all I done,
Hand me down my darts, my darts,
My darts, my darts, my board
...as the claymation schnitzelbanks jig around the holographic gum tree on the outskirts of Scarlet Town with Old Blue the dog. Fade out.
Bibliography
Hoot! A 25-Year History of the Greenwich Village Music
Scene by Robbie Woliver, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1986.