Welcome to Big Ears Conversations About Music, a
podcast brought to you by Big Ears Festival.
Each episode brings the listener into dialogue with performers,
composers and artistic visionaries shaping the sounds
of today. These are the stories, sounds,
and ideas animating our global music ecosystem.
I'm Sarah Gilletti. We're glad you're here.
Today on the podcast, we have a special treat, a live
conversation that took place during Big Years 2025 between
NPR music critic and author and Powers and legendary producer,
historian and author Joe Boyd. Have a listen.
I have Joe Boyd here. I should be able to figure out
how to use a mic. You can help me.
Well, first of all, let's just can we all agree?
See, like he, he did it for Dylan and he's doing it for me.
Can we just all agree that having Joe at the festival this
year has been such a mitzvah, such an amazing blessing, as is
one of the what really one of the ruling spirits of the
festival this year? The feeling is very mutual.
It's been incredible this festival.
It's just everyday, you know, wonders unopened.
It's it is and and old friends, people you've never met before,
people haven't seen for years, but also just the spirit of
people and the audiences. Yeah, the audiences are.
They listen. Yes, you know that never happens
I. Mean not always it's it's, but
it's great to see so many music lovers and loving so much
different kinds of music. It's so true.
You and I were talking the other day and you know, the thing
about trying to design A talk with you, Joe, is that it would
have to be sort of like Christian Markley's.
The clock would have to go on forever for 24 hours, never
stopping. And but we talked about how we
will definitely hit on some of the amazing events and
connections that we know from your memoir, White Bicycles.
Anybody out there read that amazing memoir?
But we're really here to focus on Joe's new book and what he's
been up to lately, which is called And the roots of Rhythm
remain. And I don't know if we have a
copy. I wish we did.
Because it's I got 1 backstage. Wait, I should?
Wait. Here we go demo.
I just want you to see. Just wave it in the air.
Look at that thing. Come on now.
Any writers in this room, you are now put to shame because
this is serious. Thank you so much.
We we discussed with the publishers the idea of offering
Sherpa with the purchase, you know, but that was a bit bit
costly. I, I, I think I told you that my
method of reading was to set it on the dining room table.
My husband can attest to this. And, and, and just read like
sort of like the Talmud every night or something, like read a
little bit of it and that, and it's a wonderful read.
It's amazing read. And my first question for you is
kind of a craft question, writer to writer.
How did you decide to write this book at this length with this
structure, rather than say, I mean, honestly, you could have
written 8 books. It's it.
This book travels from Graceland, as we heard, and
through Africa, Brazil, Eastern Europe, the Argentina.
Wherever the rhythms travelled, you travel.
How did you decide to on the structure?
Well, the the structure actually was in my head that way from the
beginning. I think the idea was, you know,
people asked me after white bicycles, are you going to when
are you going to start the book about the 70s.
I said never, you know, I did not have a fun 70s particularly
and I didn't and nothing in my life paralleled anything that
was going on in the culture. But I have, I'm a voracious,
I've become later in life, not younger, but later in life I've
become a voracious reader. And I have shelves and shelves
books and very annually organized in alphabetical order
under subjects. And so I have an eye level in my
main hall. I have a one side books about
British music and the other side books about American Music.
And there's so many great books, you know.
Here's to books. Nick Tasha's Peter Guralnick,
you know, on and on. Ned Sublett.
And powers, you know, Ned Sublet, you know, but but Ned
was an exception because he wrote a very entertaining book
about Cuban music. But the thing that struck me was
we have so much literature about Anglo American music, but not
much new journalism or whatever. Entertaining, not academic books
about music of the rest of the world.
And so that was the jumping off point and I felt that the, you
know, I could have written about rumbetiko and fado and South Sea
Islands, Polynesian music, but I decided to limit it to the hits,
the things that we know in our ears, but we don't know the back
story. Everybody knows Indian music and
a bit of samba and Latin dancing.
They probably had a few lessons at some point.
And reggae, of course, and Eastern European Roma music and
the Mystere de Wobble gear choir and and.
We know it on the surface. But yeah, you know it on the
surface and then. Deeper and you make those
connections. And I had a few little things,
little starts, like, for example, the Mr. Air Choir.
I discovered that within the Soviet sphere, the Soviets hated
them and would never invite them to Russia.
And I thought, oh, there's a story.
And, and then the fact that, you know, everybody thought that
Graceland was this wonderful bringing forth of the African
culture of South Africa in defiance of apartheid.
But actually Zulu music was kind of on the side of the government
and there was conflict between Zulus and the ANC, which nobody
buying their Lady Smith Black 1 Basil Records in the Northern
hemisphere was aware of. That's another subject.
So that was like where the stories, where the stories began
and. You and you definitely
interweave memoir your your encounters with this music
throughout the book as well, but you do it so gracefully.
It is like a top note or something.
You know, it's we get the story, we get the story we didn't know,
and then we also get your story all combined.
So was that what you always intended?
Well, I just always felt like there was some stories where my
experience could, you know, bring, make it more personal,
less academic. I was always on a fight with
myself to make sure that it didn't get too academic, too
theoretical, too long winded, whatever.
And so if you it's all anecdotes and personality and when I can
bring myself in, I don't know, I think I think you're.
Pretty fascinating guys. Well, but I will thank you for
all the scholars of the world that you also do credit the
scholars because that doesn't always happen.
So really grateful. And in that, in that regard, we
have to credit my wife Andrea, who did such a magnificent job
with the bibliography in the notes and.
It's fantastic. I would have been, I, I, you
know, I was, you know, when I, when I found a quote that I
wanted to use, I would grab it and put it in.
Then I'd read it and I'd say, well, actually, you know, that
might sound better if I took the last sentence and I put it at
the top of the quote. And then when Andrea went
through and checked it, you know, she said, what are you
talking about? You can't do that.
You know, she went to Cambridge. You know, she, she's like.
And so, you know, we had to change things back and be sure
to credit exactly the way it was.
Well, as we were talking about, this book really lays out a
circulatory system or or maybe several intertwined.
I'm not sure if the best metaphor is like, you know, an
astral one or a or a circulatory one.
But you're, you know, music travels via rhythm across
continents and through time and social change is spurred on by
music, but also effects, as you were saying about the Soviets,
like social changes and does this state affect how music can
travel? All this happens in the book.
I wondered at what point in your own life, long before you wrote
this book, you started to come to that real, those
realizations, both. Let's let's ask this question in
two parts. Let's start with the
connections. At what point in your life
'cause I think we can maybe hear a little bit of someone who
you're very associated with to illustrate this, but let's just
play a little bit of Nick Drake. Betty came by on the highway,
said she had a word to say about things today.
And before we play anything else, can I just say that
listening to Nick Drake, I didn't have some great
revelation of connection, but it was mysterious to me.
It was the way Nick played the guitar was unlike the way, I
mean, he was full of influence from Davy Graham, sounded a bit
like Bert Jantz sometimes or, or, you know, But there were
things in his music that were mysterious.
And some of that mystery was solved when I discovered his
mother's music, which is such a harmonic key to Nick.
But then, since long since his death, and when I didn't have
any opportunity to ask him about it, I became intrigued during
the writing of this book with the story of this artist.
And when I, when I began, I mean, I'd always been aware of
João Gilberto and bossa Nova, but studying him and learning
about his, you know, in research for the book, he's so Nick Drake
like in a way, not only in his personality and the way he
isolated. I mean, he would before he
became famous, he used to walk on stage in, in Rio de Janeiro
and play. And if the audience was chatting
and didn't pay attention, he'd just get up and walk off.
And he was a very solitary guy. He invented bossa Nova during
six months he spent in his sister's tile bathroom in a
provincial town way in the north of Brazil.
And there were just other aspects of the story that made
me think of Nick. But I think in answer to your
original question about where, I don't know, there was this when
I as when I was a kid and I had my brother was an equally
passionate listener to to records.
We used to listen to jazz and Blues.
And Jeff Moldor, the singer who many of you may know was with
us, he was our friend and we used to hang out together when
we were 14151617 and listen to Blues and jazz obsessively and
and we were very Snooty about the folk movement that was
growing up. We didn't like all these white
guys with guitars and we thought that was pretty lame and.
That would have been John Jacob Niles.
People like. That well, but even after, even
though we even Joan Baez at first, when I we there was a A10
inch LP that we somehow came across folk singers around
Harvard Square, which was Joan Baez and Ted Alavisos and Jackie
Washington and somebody else. And but when I got to Harvard, I
discovered that they weren't so bad.
You know, there were some pretty interesting singers and they had
collections and there was this atmosphere around Harvard
Square. People who were playing
Leadbelly songs were also listening to those Bahamian
recordings of John Joseph. Spence.
Yeah, well and John Robertson. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, those those
Cham charters things. And also, I went with Jim
Question and Jeff and I don't know a couple of other people
from the Harvard Square folk scene to Jordan Hall to hear Ali
Akbar Khan. And one of the great little
connections that I found in my research was the discovery that
when Yehudi Menuan arranged the very first concert in the West
for Ravi Shankar, Ravi Shankar was going through terrible
problems at home, and he said, I can't go.
And Yehudi was crushed and he said no, but listen, Ali Akbar
Khan, my my friend who was the son of his guru, he'll do it.
He'll be great. And he convinced Yahoodi to for
Ali Akbar to go. And then he came later.
And in Harvard Square we had a joke, which was if Ravi Shankar
can't do it, Ali Akbar Khan. And we thought that was really
clever, but we didn't know. But it was true.
That went over big with the girls, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, there were girls there who
like that kind of joke. I don't doubt it.
Well, since you brought up Ravi Shankar, you have a wonderful
chapter in this book that actually has been useful to me
since I'm working on something about The Beatles and thinking
about the the connection of that music with an English rock,
classic rock. And this might be another moment
to play something, Andrea, if you think there's something
appropriate because we were talking before about the drone
wars. And you know, Robbie, I love
that chapter because I think what often happens with
Americans and maybe people who are not that well informed is
that, you know, you look at someone from another culture and
you sort of exoticize them, and you don't realize that they're
as cosmopolitan as any American ever was, right?
Some of them. Some of them, good point.
Some of them. Well, Ravi Shankar was
definitely that he was sort of this international Playboy, but
also just to sophisticate, you know, all of those things.
And and I guess my question about this, I was thinking about
that figure of Ravi and then all the English rock bands furiously
competing to get the raga rock song out there and to like
impress these guys, right? And I wonder what?
To impress the Indian. Yeah, yeah.
Was that really happening 'cause I wonder how artistic ego
factors in to these different. Currents.
I don't know. I mean, I think it was genuinely
revelatory first for John Coltrane, who came upon this
earlier than the folkies did or the rockers did.
But I think for a lot of Western musicians, the discovery that
the tempered scale, the notes on the piano, the frets on the
guitar, the valves on the saxophone, we're not absolute.
That is not the only way to make music.
And that and and there's a quote, one of my favorite quotes
in the book I have is Paul McCartney when he he sat all The
Beatles down to listen to a Ravi Shankar raga from beginning to
end. And when the needle takes the
needle off the off the disc and he turns to the other three and
he says, did anyone else notice that they never changed key?
And and you know, the discovery that drone and an improvisation
on a scale based on the drone is actually quite liberating.
And and Mickey Hart says so and I quote him in the book about
how it created jam bands. You know that for.
Better or worse, Yeah. That is the that is the the.
But now it it, and it fueled the Grateful Dead.
You know, this idea that you could just sit on a cord and to,
you know, to a lot of Western musicians, this was great, you
know, and, but the whole idea. Well, Lancome last night, I
don't know who saw Lancome, but they they have.
That's the whole thing that they do is a drone runs through their
they pull the the out of the bog of Irish music, they pull the
drone. Yeah.
And, and Richard Thompson, I mean, Richard Thompson is a
great guitar player, but he it does not ever play Blues.
There's no Blues. There's Blues techniques and
Blues rhythm, but there's no Blues harmony.
It's all bagpipe, which is drone and melody.
That's the basis of all of his solos, everything he does.
And you know, and we talked about Mike Bloomfield, you know,
in East West. And but then you go into John
McLaughlin and you go and and and in a way, you know the the
record, which is credited for being the soundtrack to the most
conceptions of new children ever in history, way kind of blue.
Yeah. Oh yes.
You know, that is very, you know, modal and drone based, you
know, and this and this new sound entered jazz, it entered
rock, it entered, you know, and even when people shift back to
changing chords, it changed the way that they conceive of of
melody and music. I was fascinated to discover
that Indians rock. Every ROG has a different scale,
and every ROG scale goes up one way and descending.
It's one note different. And isn't it like they're
associated with different seasons or or yeah, like times
of day, right. It's.
Which is. Which is how the Monterey Pop
Festival came to be. Oh, do tell that story.
Because Robbie, when he started touring America and it became
famous and people were booking him for concerts, he would, they
would always be evening concerts.
And so he can only ever play evening ragas, but there are
morning ragas and afternoon ragas.
And so his his manager had this idea, hey, let's do this.
Let's book the fairgrounds in Monterey for an afternoon raga.
And so they booked Ravi into the Monterey fairgrounds for an
afternoon raga. And then one of the promoters
there said, well, since all the hippies are going to come down
from San Francisco to see Ravi, let's have a show at night with
some of their bands. And so then the whole thing
just, you know, grew like Topsy and and everybody suddenly
wanted in on it. And the only musician who got
paid for Monterey was Ravi because because he had a
contract to get paid 3000 bucks for this afternoon raga.
Wow. Well, let's journey from from
India to Cuba for a second because you have a great chapter
on Cuba. And I think one of the
fascinating things that happens in this book is that you look at
how politics and mythology and St. level musical dissemination
just among musicians and tourism and so many other factors going
to forming or distorting a musical lineage.
And the case of soul and music in Cuba is definitely one.
And you write that in the 30s, you asked, there was a question
being asked, was Afro Cuban music a source of national pride
or shame? Cultural and political leaders
seemed unsure. And I think this is something
that kind of echoes through a lot of a lot of the stories you
tell. You know, in what ways does the
involvement of the state distort the flow of music or encourage
the flow of music? You know, how how did you like,
how did you witness that? And how is that part of the
stories? Well, I think there's three big
tectonic plates that dominate many of the forces that I
describe in the book, 2 of them, religion and the state, both of
which are generally unnerved if not generally freaked out by the
sensuality of dancing drums. And the fact that there's a
quote in there from, I can't remember, from somebody writing
about post communist Europe, so that your music reaches people
at a part inside them in a place that the state cannot access.
Interesting. Wow.
That it it, you know, when you're listening to music, that
experience cannot be manipulated or changed or prevented by the
state. And the same thing with
religion. I mean, you know, and one of the
stories, that one thing I found fascinating in the story of the
Roma who came into Europe and went everywhere and learned how
to play the local music better than the locals could.
They were persecuted, jailed, murdered, exiled by religious
and political leaders and by the bourgeoisie because they were
unrespected, not respectable. The poor people love them.
Interesting because particularly in the wake of the Black Death
and the 100 Years War and all the turmoil of middle medieval
Europe, the church said it's all your fault.
You're sinners, you're being punished.
And you know, and the government wanted to exert control over
everything. And the Roma came in and just
played for dances, and everybody just let their hair down and
picked up their skirts and pranced around and danced, you
know, And they love the Roma for that.
One of the points you touched on about Cuba is something that
repeats again and again and again throughout this book or
throughout the story of music in the world, the bourgeoisie
particularly, and government in league with governments very
often. I mean, here's ironic fact
number one in my book. Desi Arnaz, who built his career
playing the conga drum and used Babalu IA as a theme song for
the biggest television show in American history, was the son of
the mayor of Santiago, Cuba, who outlawed the conga drum in
public because he was so freaked out with the way at Carnival
time, white women would join the comparsus, you know, would March
in the street and dance in the street with the conga drums.
And he said this is giving the wrong impression to foreigners
and this is unsettling our youth.
And so they were banned and and the carnivals and that street
music, Afro, Cuban street music was banned from the middle 20s
until up until the late 30s in much of Cuba.
And the thing that changed it, and this is the point that you
were getting, I think that I took from what you were your
question is that the thing that changed it was tourists because
they want, hey, we're in Cuba, we want to have a party.
Where's the street party? And and so many times there's
music that is discarded or suppressed in a culture and
outsiders say, wait a minute, that's great.
We want to hear that. I think really we want to hear
that. Oh, well, if we can make some
money off it, I guess we can, you know, let you let it play.
And time and time again, you know, foreigners have a
different take. And there's a quote from Mikhail
Bakhteen in my book about the only, I mean, which is
contentious. Well, it's contentious.
It's I'm not, I don't defend the
quote absolutely, but it's an interesting point of view, he
says. The only way to really
accurately view a culture is from the outside.
Oh, interesting. The people inside a culture
can't see their own culture really as clearly as an outsider
can. You know, I think in.
Dialogue. Maybe it's a dialogue, you know?
And de Tocqueville, you know, I mean, he came through the South
and saw a lot of what's happening now.
I'm making a little leap here for something we wanted to play,
but thinking about this isn't exactly the state, but music and
nationalism. We had a certain Swedish artist
that we wanted to invoke, and I'm dedicating this to my
husband Eric, so he'll get. This, but also can we just
preface it by saying that folk music and traditional music very
often in many corners of the world and in many times and many
moments in history, is viewed as uncool and unhip and unmodern.
You know, all of these things, you know, and it gets of it's,
you know, people who listen to folk music are kind of
considered like a minority and but the influence of folk music
is everywhere and in the most surprising places.
And So what we're going to hear is a Swedish pop musician who,
whatever success he may have, every summer he gets out his
accordion and he tours the lakes and the resorts of northern
Sweden with his band playing traditional music.
And I challenge anyone here not to hear the close connection
between what he plays with this group and his accordion and the
records that have made him a billionaire.
That is, of course, Benny Anderson from ABBA.
Chikikita. I can hear it.
Chikikita. Yeah.
And, and Benny and Bjorn, as I was telling you, even wrote
about the, the, the story of the emigrants and they're completely
invested in this folk music. Yeah, I mean, you know, and, and
folk music, even when people aren't even conscious of it,
it's there, you know, it seeps, you know, and of course America
is the perfect, you know, example of that because some our
music is basically, you know, Blues and.
Yeah. Oh, this makes me want to ask
you the question. OK, we we definitely agree.
We wanted to focus on the global story, but one little bit about
tiny little digression into a complete unknown.
You know, Joe was at Newport when Dylan went electric,
etcetera. We're not going to focus on
that. But will you tell the story
about the prison gang which we see in the movie?
How many of you have seen? I bet most of you have seen a
complete unknown. Yeah.
So in that film, right before Dylan goes electric, there's a
strange glimpse of an African American prison gang.
Like using axes to do something on stage.
Here's the story. Well, the story is that I was
the production manager at Newport that summer and and so
one of the logistical problems that I had to deal with was that
Saturday night, the night before Dylan, one of the groups that
was scheduled to perform was a group of prisoners from a Texas
prison farm. Which was like Almomax recorded.
No, a guy called Bruce Jackson. Oh, Bruce Jackson.
OK, but this was a common part of like.
Folklores. It was like, it was like a Lomax
type. Only Bruce Jackson was a more
modern ethnographer. I think he was a professor at
University of Texas. He went there, recorded and the
record was released on Elektra. And it was a terrific record,
you know, and it's, but you know, these, these recordings
that we all thought were so great.
You know, when when they pop up on my listening rota, my random
listening and you suddenly hear a recording that Alan Lomax made
at Parchman Farm or something, I get kind of stabbed in the
heart. You know, you just think of what
these people must have gone through to get their framed,
chained, beaten, you know, and now they're making beautiful
music. And that's another theme in my
book is the amount of beauty that has been created under the
most brutal and inhuman conditions in the Congo and in
so many places, you know? But anyway, back to Newport.
So they were scheduled for like right in the middle of the show
on Friday night, Saturday night. And one of the best tracks on
the record was a cross cutting song where you have 4 men around
a tree chomping it down to on the one and the three, the other
two north-south on the two and the four.
And and Pete Seeger was very interested in this and was very,
you know, he was on the board. He was one of the sort of
executive producers of the festival.
And I talked to him about how we're going to present them and
we agreed that the best way to do the only way to do this cross
chopping song was to get a big tree stump and put it in the
middle of the stage. And he said, I'll do that.
I'll just give me the the guys, the the prisoners that had a
guard with a gun and a truck and some chains and a pulley.
And they drove out into the swamps of southern Rhode Island.
And they came back with this huge tree stump that was like
this big weighted ton. And they got it lifted up on
stage. It was sitting off stage.
And when the group came on, we put it in the middle of the
stage and there were a couple of microphones on, booms hanging
down over. And then they started the chant
and the chop and it was great. It was incredible theater.
And it was, you know, the, the chant, the the song was
fantastic and the singing was great.
And I was standing next to Seger in the wings and we noticed that
the wire from one of the booms of the mic booms had was with
the rhythm was starting to come loose and it was drooping down
and in danger of entering the arc of the chop.
And so I got the rhythm in my head and I just lunged and
pulled the the the in between strokes.
I pulled the wire out and looped it around the thing And Pete
gave me a, you know, thumbs up. Good, good going kid.
And and so then of course the following night we have the
famous Dylan going electric and the booze and the more and the
cheers and the whatever, and Seeger's quote supposedly from
an interview he did a few weeks later that he will try to chop
the wire to. Of Dylan to.
To an axe. And in fact he didn't say that.
He said if I'd had an axe, I would have chopped the wire to
the speaker. And I've always thought, I mean,
first of all, it was just hyperbole.
Obviously he was not going to go get an axe and it wouldn't have
done any good because there were lots of wires to lots of
speakers. But but, but I always thought
that the that image, the fact that that image was in his mind
is because of that moment on Saturday night.
See, there you go. Who knew?
I love that story. That's a basic story.
The book is full of these stories like this, little little
little anecdotes. Like you can open almost every
page and you're some little mind blowing thing surfaces.
For example, I didn't know that Paul McCartney wanted to work
with Fella Africa 70. But he didn't actually what he
wanted when he he went to record his first solo album Band On the
Run in Lagos, right? And he tried to hire members of
Fellas Band. But fellas said no, right?
Fellas said no. Which is like who says no to a
Beatle? Come on.
Well, fella. And was it really because he was
concerned that McCartney would steal his music?
That was his, that was his story.
I mean, he said he didn't want some white guy coming and
stealing his music. I mean, Fella was, you know, an
incredible figure of great importance politically and
musically, but also a very strange guy.
Another story you tell is we were talking about Desi Arnaz,
but Karma Miranda that her most famous song Excuse my bad
pronunciation. OK, OK.
K Abayana Tem was written by Dori Val Kayme, who's a very
important figure when he was only 19 and like went to her,
went to eat fair water at her kitchen.
Can you talk a little? Bit about that well.
Talk. Tell a little bit about who he
is. So.
Right. Dory Val Kaimi.
Well, well, Carmen Miranda was this actually born in Portugal,
finally moved to Rio when she was a little girl.
She grew up in the kind of red light district of Rio and loved
the music and became, you know, a star.
And a lot of the, you know, it's one of the thing again, it's an
interesting connection, connection to America.
A theme that goes through a lot of cultures is that a certain
region of a country becomes idealized as the cradle of the
culture or particularly the music.
And it's like in Hungary, it's Transylvania.
That's where all the great music comes from.
And, and in Brazil, it's Salvador de Bahia, which is
true. And in both cases, it's kind of
true that the music comes down the coast from Bahia and Bahia
becomes idealized. There's all these sexy girls up
there and there's all this wonderful culture.
And it was of course, the big slave trading center where all
the Africans were pulled ashore and put in chains and put to
work and work to death. And eventually the music came
down with Africa Afro Brazilians to Rio and that's the birth of
Samba's when this by Ian Music joined the Portuguese culture of
Rio, blah blah blah. And she always liked these songs
that idealized by it was everybody.
Brazil loved these songs and the song that she was going to sing
for. They had a every year they would
have a film of all the top stars, which would then go into
the movie circuit and everybody wanted to be in it.
And she had to be in it. And the song, they couldn't
agree on the copyright deal. And so this kid had seen her
perform in Salvador. He was from Salvador.
And he thought the songs that she sang, she was great, but the
songs were terrible. And he said, I can do better
than that. And he came down to Rio and he
heard that, you know, she was always had an open house for
songwriters. She was always looking for
songs. Like Mary Lou Williams did that
for jazz players. Everyone could come over to her
house. And yeah, she always have a pot
of fejuada on the stove and a pot of coffee, and people come
over. And he played this song.
And when she couldn't use the song from her regular songwriter
because of copyright issues, he didn't want to give up the
publishing smart guy. And so she took this song, which
is, oh, what is it that the Bayana has?
That's what the translation means.
But the the thing that I think is so interesting about this
phenomenon, the Bianna and the romanticization of Chattanooga
Choo Choo, you know, there's so many songs in America in the
post Civil War era which idealize the South.
And they're supposed to be theoretically sung by either
blacked up white people or by African American singers who
sing about the dear old Southland.
Oh my Siswani, how I love you. Hi my and mammy.
All these images seem to me to be ways that the bourgeoisie,
the white bourgeoisie and their songwriters try to, I don't
know, sort of encourage this fantasy that all these African
Americans who fled to Northern cities really were homesick for
the South. Well, it's.
The air clock called it love and theft, you know, And then Bob
Dylan named that record after air class book.
And and and a lot of places use music to sanitize their history.
I wanted to jump to Eastern Europe and which is a different
kind of relationship between music and the state.
It was interesting to read that like Trio Bulgarka for example,
that there was a kind of defiance against the state in
Eastern European music. Is that fair to say or?
Well, I mean, not in those state ensembles, I don't think.
I don't think there was much to find.
So, I mean, there was a the fascinating difference that you
hear in but Mr. de Wobbulgar is that sound which was developed
by Philip Kuttev, this brilliant arranger composer.
And he because he recruited all the singers for the ensemble
from the villages who had learned from their grandmothers.
And they had that open throat sound which is very distinctive
Slavic way of singing. And they went to Russia once in
the early 50s, and the Russians hated them and would never
invite them back. And the reason why that was the
key to my Chapter 7, you know, is that the Stalin and the rest
of the hierarchy of the Communist Party, it was clear
that communism, Russian communism was an urban
proletariat phenomenon. The peasants had their own way
of collectivizing the land. They shared work.
They shared land. They didn't need these people
coming and and they rebelled. They fought tooth and nail.
They killed communist people coming to collectivize and the
communists just killed so many of them.
And lots of the lots of official statements that I've got some
quotes from in the book. We have to destroy peasant
culture in order to rebuild it. And this was an objective of the
Russian Communist Party. And the open throat voice,
particularly coming from women was so threatening to them and
throw a hateful moist, the moist of ensemble, which was the big
famous folklore ensemble that toured the world was complete
fake lore. It was nothing real about it.
It was all the music was fake. And so that dictators tend to
hate authenticity. Write that down.
Those are the Bulgarian Women's Choir and famous copyright that
was used in I don't know, it's now been sampled a lot in hip
hop and a lot of other stuff and but there's some images I love
in the book of that. When the peasants were rebelling
against collectivization, they learned that if they put women
at the front, that the soldiers were less apartment to open
fire. And it's, and I, some people
describe the sound of like a whole crowd of women singing
open throat like that with these incredible harmonies marching
towards the Soviet commissars who've come to confiscate all
the horses and the pigs and the cows.
You got Kate Bush on a plane. We've talked about this.
Kate Bush doesn't fly. I've never gone to see her
because she doesn't fly. Tell us about that story.
You know, I I had heard the Kutab ensemble, the first, the
Bulgarian national state state ensemble, the women's Squire on
a record in 1965, which Elektra released on the non such label.
And it blew my mind. I mean, it was incredible and it
was hugely popular among hippies.
You know, people used to smoke a joint, put on headphones and
listen to the Kutab Ensemble and and then it kind of went out of
fashion and then suddenly came back in with the mystery of
wobblegare thing in the late. That was Evo.
No, no, no, That was That's the choir.
Right. No, but I'm talking about they
was out on 480, right? That came out on 480.
Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah.
Ivo. What's Russell?
I thought you mean Ivo. Yeah, right.
Yeah, yeah. No, not they've Ivo, Pop
Russell. Yeah, the other.
So I went to Bulgaria finally in 1986 to this huge festival and I
was heard with the connection between the formal stuff and the
village stuff and put together a kind of Buena Vista type All
Star team called Volcana, which included these three singers,
the trio Bulgarka and one day. And we toured, played London and
New York in a few places and had a record out.
And one day the phone rang in my office and somebody looked at me
funny and said there's somebody in his phone says she's Kate
Bush. And I said because at this time
Kate was huge in England, right? And I picked up the phone.
It was Kate Bush. And.
And she said that she wanted to add some Bulgarian women's
voices to her new record. And she'd heard that I was the
guy to talk to. And I said, yeah, well, I
certainly can put you in touch with the best, but I said if you
but you can't just bring them to London, bring them in like a
group of session singers and ask them to figure out a Bulgarian
sounding backing for your song. It's going to be much more
complicated than that. And I think the best way to do
it would be the next time I go to Sofia, you come with me and
I'll set up a team of translators.
You need a really good translator who knows musical
terms, an ethnographer and a Ranger because they can't figure
out the harmonies that will work with your harmony on their own.
And she said, I don't really like to fly, but OK.
And and the weirdest thing and one thing I'll detail I'll never
forget was we got on the plane, it was a, this was still pre
Berlin Wall. The plane was a Tupelov, you
know, Russian plane, very old and a bit rickety.
And they Balkan Air, the state airline of Bulgaria, had just
like a month before entered the modern age by deciding that they
needed to have smoking and non-smoking sections.
And they had, in their wisdom, decided that the smoking section
would be the right side of the plane and non-smoking would be
the left. And so Kate sat there who didn't
smoke, you know, and just suffered.
People would ask me, as I was trying to finish the book, have
you got something in there about some new artists that it just
appeared, you know, in 2020 or something like that.
I said, no, I don't have anything about new artists
because I have to draw a line somewhere.
Otherwise I just keep writing and writing and writing.
And people ask me how far up to date do you get in your book?
And I say I go back to the mists of time, the Rico, Roman gods.
Not very much of that, to be honest, up to the drum machine.
And there I stop, right? The book is about rhythms that
are created in a space by people interacting with each other,
right? I'm not saying that that's
necessarily always better, but it's different, right?
And, you know, rap and hip hop have been so tied to, I know
that their forms and there been some great projects involving
rappers and people playing spontaneously without a machine.
But I got, you know, my book is big enough as it is.
And so I have to stop somewhere. And so really it's about rhythms
that come from the hands and the heart and the body of people
without any machines. I look forward to your sequel on
turntablism though. Another question.
Yes, the question for those who didn't hear it's about the Cuban
connection to the music of the Congo, which is something that I
I wrote about and and it's in it's amazing.
I mean, it's, it's, you know, because Cuba discovered very
early on in their colonial empire, they first, the first
slaves they brought to work on the cane fields were from
Senegambia, from the northern part of Africa.
And there were rebellions. The slaves sacked Havana in 1524
and they, the king got a report saying, well, that's because
they're Muslims. And the Spanish were paranoid
about Islam because they spent 8 centuries trying to rid the
peninsula of Islam. And so they subcontracted the
slave trade to the Portuguese who had explored all the way
down the coast of Africa to the Congo.
And so many, many, most of the slaves in the early centuries
coming to Cuba were from Congo and Angola.
And so this culture infused over the centuries Cuban music, mixed
with later on with Yoruba and other African cultures.
And when a London record company, HMV Records, had this
bright idea to license a bunch of Cuban masters, press them up
in London and ship them to Africa, they went, particularly
when they arrived in Leopoldville, which is the
capital now Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo.
Congolese listened to these Cuban records and they went, of
course we know this, we know this stuff.
Where is it? What is this?
This is, this is our rhythms. We have the Clave, you know, we
have all this stuff is Congolese.
But the thing was amazing to the Congolese was it was their
rhythms and lots of elements of their music, but it sounded so
modern and so international and so powerful on these records as
translated through Cuban culture.
And so they were inspired by this to use Cuban, what they
called Roomba as the template for Congolese music to take
village melodies and their harmonies and their their scales
and everything and impose them on a Cuban rhythm.
And what they did with that exploded across Africa and
changed the shape of African music.
So many African cultures, particularly ones from the
Francophone colonies, all them is the Baobab orchestra used to
endure. I mean, you know, all across
Africa maybe we could hear just a little bit of independence Cha
Cha, which was the first big trans African hit that came
from. And one of the things that made
that took it, it kept its Cuban base, but it evolved in a very
Congolese way. And there's 22 big things aside
from the addition of their own different cultures, the melodies
of different cultures in Congo, which is huge and has so many
different languages and cultures.
But most of the records were sung in this lingua franca of
the river, the trading language of the Congo River, which is
Lingala. And but the the two things that
really changed the sound that made it distinctively Congolese
where the the some Belgian arrived in the early 50s to help
set up a studio and in his luggage he had two Les Paul
electric guitars. And that changed everything.
The Congolese just loved the Les Paul electric guitars.
And soon everybody needed to have a Les Paul electric guitar.
And the Cubans have never liked the electric guitar.
They never used the electric guitar very rarely.
And and so it gave it a different sound.
And then there was a a guy who came just for a season at a
hotel in Leopoldville called Fudd.
What was it, Katriks Katrice. Now, Anyway, had some weird
Flemish name. And he used to play with Django
Reinhardt. And he played the saxophone and
the the producers brought him in for a couple of sessions with
Congolese musicians as his sax. And they all, they've been
playing the clarinet before this and they heard the sax.
They went, oh, no, that's what now we're talking.
And so suddenly Congolese music had the Cuban bass, electric
guitars and saxophone and that shattered into the future.
And the thing that I say in the book, which is just so
incredible, is of all, I mean, colonialism was brutal and
horrible everywhere it went. But the Belgians and King
Leopold were the worst with the special brutal horrible.
What they did in Congo was just unspeakable.
And in this hell, the most beautiful music was created.
It's unbelievable. Congolese if you just go back
and listen to nothing but Rochero and Franco, Africa, jazz
and TP OK, you could listen for a week and never get bored and
never hear anything but gorgeous stuff.
So true that I think, again, these are words we need to keep
in mind in our current moment. I think we might be out of time
or maybe we can ask one more question.
Anybody else have one? I see you, gentlemen.
Yeah, there's a there's a quote in the book about an African
musician saying Bob Marley showed us how to be both African
and modern. Interesting.
Although you also say that Harry Belafonte is more important
Jamaican, the most important Jamaican or?
The most famous? Most famous?
OK, yeah, it's fascinating, particularly in Africa.
You can get quotes and interviews from musicians
starting in the late 60s, early 70s.
Everyone talks about Jimi Hendrix as like a key influence.
And then by the 80's, the late 70s, everybody's talking about
Marley as a key influence. And I think Marley, you know,
there's two ways that Marley had such an influence, particularly
in Africa on on one level and and all around the world on one
level. They're the clones, you know,
they're these people who, you know, in South Africa.
Lucky Dube, you know, had a band.
He started out as singing in Baklonga, but he decided to
switch to reggae and he had a band who mastered the one drop.
They mastered everything. It just, you might as well,
you're listening to them. You might as well be listening
to something recorded in Kingston in 1971 and the same in
in Cote d'Ivoire. There was a, you know, what's
his name in the artist anyway? There's a big star there who did
exactly the same. And you have the same on the
Apache Native American reservation.
You have bands that replicate this sound from a particular
moment in Jamaican history. You have it in Poland, you have
it in, you know, Indonesia, You have it all over the world,
which to me isn't as interesting as the effect that Marley had in
a more abstract way, You know, to make people proud of their
own culture, not try to learn the one drop, but take what they
have in their own backyard and build it up into something that
is exciting to the youth of the country and empowering to the
culture as it is known, becomes known internationally.
And I think what's his name, you know, the, the Garifuna.
Collectives, you know, of the, the Garifuna people along the
coast of Nicaragua and Guatemala and Belize, you know, who
developed a whole rock industry based on Garifuna rhythms and
Garifuna traditions, which was clearly inspired by what Marley
was doing across the Caribbean. And, and so many, you know, all
over the world. There are there are examples of
that. So I would say they're two
strands of the Marley influence. One is the imitators, which for
me is less interesting than the Inspire inspirations.
Which is really what you trace throughout the book in so many
different ways. Well, in and, and in fact, in so
many ways, yeah, that you've have attempted.
You know, that is what's so interesting about the reggae
clones is that they actually did it.
They actually got it nailed exactly.
And that's what's boring. Yeah, but whereas most cases,
you have so many examples of people picking up on another
culture's music, trying to play it and in failing, coming up
with something new, something. I mean, even as much as British
art students trying to play Mississippi Delta Blues, you
know, completely, they figured out something else, you know,
and, and that's a story of music around the world.
There is no pure music. Everything is mongrel.
Big Ears Conversations about Music is a production of Big
Ears Festival. I'm your host Sarah Gilletti.
The show is produced by Matt Marowitz.
This episode was edited by Trevor Smith with Delilah Ryder.
Ashley Capps is the executive and artistic director of Big
Ears. Special thanks to our guests Ann
Powers and Joe Boyd. Big Years 2026 will take place
March 26th through 29th, 2026 in downtown Knoxville, TN.
For more information and festival updates, visit
bigyearsfestival.org. Thanks for listening.