Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946

Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946. Book by James P. Leary. University of Wisconsin Press/Dust-to-Digital DTD-43 (456 pp., 5 audio CDs, 1 DVD). This release certainly has the appearance of a book but was submitted for a sound recording review; in my headnote I have incorporated properties of both. James P. Leary is a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an editor of the Journal of American Folklore, though his tenure in that position ends in 2015. To typify Folksongs of Another America as Leary's pet project would be to do it an injustice; it is the sum total of fifty years' work and forms the central keystone to a cycle of studies devoted to folk traditions in North Midwestern states, namely Wisconsin, Michigan and Northern Minnesota. This area has cold winters and is largely underdeveloped and unpopulated even today, and settling this part of the world has been a shared experience for a wide range of diverse immigrant cultures--Finns, Swedes, Germans, Viennese, Lithuanians, Poles, French-speaking former Canadians, Scots, African American former slaves and so forth--joined by contact with indigenous peoples such as the Ojibway and Ho-Chunk. Between 1937 and 1946, folklorists armed with disc cutters swept through the region periodically; Sidney Robertson (later Cowell) in 1937-38, Alan Lomax again in 1938 and Helene Stratman-Thomas in 1940-41 and 1946. Folksongs of Another America is both distillation and contextualization of these wide-ranging field trips, and Leary has usefully subdivided the recorded material among five CDs organized by field trip and substance. Just because the book contains five CDs does not mean that the audio content is more than what is manageable for the reader; the content of the field trip determines the overall length of each disc, and the second disc, devoted to songs of Wisconsin lumberjacks recorded by Robertson, only runs a half an hour, including tracks as short as 24 seconds. Ethnographic recordings, by their very nature, are often brief, and listening to many of them in long stretches takes some measure of discipline on part of the listener. Folksongs of Another America is not the exclusive domain of amateur performers and many of the correspondents contacted by the folklorists, such as French-Canadian singer Mary Agnes Starr or the Wisconsin lumberjacks group recorded by Robertson were professional or semi-professional performers at folk festivals or in more intimate contexts, and the musical performances are of a consistently high quality. So much of the material here is previously uncirculated that neither Leary nor Dust-to-Digital indicates former releases apart from including the titles in the "Sources" section, but all of the audio transfers--by Brad McCoy of Library of Congress and Michael Graves of the Osiris Studio in Atlanta--are far superior in comparison to older issues. Each track is lovingly examined and annotated individually by Leary, accompanied by original field notes, texts and translations. …