Thanks to the Slovaks … and their researchers

I found my way eventually to Baracnicka Rychta, a lovely little pub in Mala Strana, relieved a bit that Joe had only beat me by a few minutes.  Shoot.  We’d both been a bit lost on the way.  Note to self – choose spots you know as meeting places.  The tasty Svijany brew was some consolation.

Joe wrote me the other day to renew the contact we had at the CZ – SK Fulbright conference in 2003.  He is a US phd student in anthropology who is working in Slovakia on l’udova (folklore / folkloric) as well as”folk” musicking.  As in Czech, “folk” means…well, “folk” as in Baez, Dylan, Van Zandt…something more popular than “folklore”….and as with these folks, sometimes a bit of an Americanist spin.  He’s looking at all sorts of interesting things, including a seeming rebirth of this sort of thing, a convergence of urban/cosmopolitan efforts and marginal/rural activity, etc.  (he wrote his master’s thesis on tramping…by the way)

Along the way, he confirmed, a bit, my thoughts and accumulated observations about bluegrass and country amongst Slovak folks – there aren’t as many bluegrass folks, and perhaps more “country.”  He added an interesting thought, one that hadn’t occurred to me:  that Slovaks often think of bluegrass/country (the constellation of musicking I like to lump as US string band sort of stuff) as CZECH.  I’m not sure how the “American” designation or identification fits in there, but it does make sense that Czech performativity on American(ist) themes would impart some degree of distinctive identification…and that it would contain this resonance to the Slovaks, the neighbors just down the road.

This reminded me of a recent conversation with a Slovak who has lived in Prague for years.  He recalled that there were never a lot of Slovaks playing bluegrass and that sort of thing, but there were always great audiences when CZ bands came over to SK to play.   (In the music scene in general, he also talked a bit about how “za totalita” (during totalitarianism…i.e. communism)  bands that weren’t allowed to play in Prague would get shunted farther out from the center of the nation, to Brno, Bratislava, or, if they were really controversial, out to Kosice or something.)

I came across another Slovak item today, reading some articles on Czech national and ethnic identity.  It’s all pretty sociological so far, and I’m not sure how to use a lot of the information.  But one study’s discussion pointed out the narrowing of Czechness, the dwindling plurality of ethnic/national diversity in the sphere of things with the “Czech” label attached to them.  The expulsion of Germans, the holocaust, and…this is the part that was new for me…the division of Czechoslovakia in 1992-3 all were steps that each eliminated another major and distinctive group that increased the cultural diversity  in the world that Czechs live in.

These sociologists’ quantifications help me talk more constructively about Czech national and ethnic identification, and consider performances the intersect with such constructions.  While Czechs are to different degrees responsible for creating the state they live in, it is also….well, a very complicated world out there.

I’m so grateful for these perspective-expanding moments lately.  It’s encouraging to be working with ideas that are coming together.  This last week has seen me working on consolidating and organizing my backlog of audio and video recordings.  Besides being simply a bit of a drudgery, it’s a sort of overwhelming experience to handle all hese records of culture.  There are so many (and in a strange mirror-way so few) directions for my work tied up in all those files.

Running into, and having good conversations with, some old-new and new-old colleagues lately has also been a great encouragement.  It’s good to know that others are working along similar paths.

Ok.  Back to it.  At the suggestion of a professor here, I’m putting an abstract together for the ICTM “music and minorities” study group meeting that will happen here next May.  I have to find a way to encapsulate my thoughts about bluegrass as it plays in Czech ethnic/group identity.  hmm.

Rickyho na ČT 2

A friend emailed me this link to “Na Plovarne s Ricky Skaggsem – An interview with Ricky Skaggs by Marek Eben.”

They must have recorded the segment when Ricky was in town this summer for his show at “Music in the Park”. (see Marek Eben is a musical personality who has been working as a TV “redaktor” / interlocutor for a while. Before coming across him here, I last saw him as one of the hosts of “Stardance,” an instance of the “reality show” where Czech stars are paired with pro dancers and pushed out on the parquet for our amusement.

Here’s his introduction to the interview:

Dobrý Večer.
Když jsme ještě jezdili na Portu, tak se v Portovným žargonu děleli muzikantí na kotlikářem. To by trampy. Pak na hledače nebo pro roky to byli folkáří. A pak na pytlikačí a to byli bluegrassové muzikantí.

Ovšem jsou pydlikáčí a pydlikači. A když za pydlikání dostanete hned dvanáctkrat Americkou Grammy, už to musíme brát vážně. Máme dnes to velké potěšení přivitát na Plovárně absolutné špičku Amerického bluegrassu. Multiinstrumentalistu, spěváka, skladatele, Rickyho Skaggse.

Here’s some English:

When we used to go to Porta, in Porta jargon musicians “děleli na kotlikářem,” [referring--I think-- to the kotlik or pot that tramps used on their rambles.] Those were tramps. Then… This just gets tangled – he is using a lot of funny words…any of the Czechs in the audience care to adda comment below, to explain all this?

I can add a bit of context. Porta is a distinguished festival founded in Ústí nad Labem in 1967; it’s still going strong. The festival’s name comes from the Latin phrase describing its hometown as the “Porta Bohemica,” or “gate to Bohemia.” The event’s original subtitle was “Celostátní festival country western music“…that is, Country-wide festival of…well, country western music. So you see why I’m interested. Eben’s list of folks involved at Porta ends with bluegrassers, the “pytlikače.” Another bit of “jargon” from that Porta scene – something to do with little bags…? Google helps me none here, but I get the sense that this is something like “picker,” an emic term for someone who “picks” a banjo or guitar or mandolin. Inflection can give the word extra emphasis; as Eben says, and Americans too, there a pickers, and there are pickers. When, for their picking, someone wins 12 Grammy awards…you take them seriously. Then he goes on to introduce Ricky and the interview progresses.

I haven’t seen the whole thing yet, but I did notice Eben making what seemed to me a forced smile and some over-nodding as Ricky talks in the first few minutes about music coming from God. Maybe I’m forcing this cynicism on Marek, but at the very least…I can’t imagine he would use similar American-evangelical-style “blessing-from-God” speech to describe his own music-making. Jirka, the colleague who sent me the link to this internet version of the show, stressed that it was about bluegrass and God. I’m curious how he and other Czechs deal with such strenuous testimonies to the sacred aspects of bluegrass musicking?

There’s much more to be done here – now I just have to find a copy of this interview that is not translated over with Czech dubbing…

Šumava roundtable

Yet another retrospective entry, this one about the second-to-last evening in the Sumava with the Roh crew and associated other folks. There was no jam that night, just a circle (in the same position as when we were playing) around the table outside, drinking, smoking, talking. Talk was often about music, and there was a lot of talk about bluegrass that was entirely relevant to my work -and my project was a topic of discussion. It was great to be part of this ring of words.

Zbyněk Bureš was a big part of the evening’s ranging conversations, and he addressed a lot of the questions that I launched into the fray. I forget how, but we got on the topic of “country” as a term used in the Czech Republic / Czech language. Zbyněk got going on this one, laying out how here,”country” when applied to music is a pejorative term, associated in Czechs’ minds with horses, “fantasie,” on escapism based on old-fashioned imaginings of “Amerika.” This definitely jibes with my experience.

I countered with another question – “so why does that matter?” There seems to be a genre issue that impinges on identity: “…If I tell someone I am playing ‘country’ they think of Country Radio, horses, the Nedvěd Brothers – NOT Merle Haggard, George Jones, etc.” That first batch of signifiers points to what is best termed “Český Country,” and is probably best typified and even defined by what is played on Country Radio.

There is also an element of connoisseurship – the identity part. Zbyněk is passionate about U.S. Americana music, and I can see how Czech country and the popular uses of the term encroach on a set of sounds, repertory, style (the US hard country aesthetic, it might be called) that he holds dear. With Zbyněk there is also a lot of concern for technique – whereas most Czech Country is sung in Czech, Zbyněk has an outstanding vocal ability that he deploys to sing soaring bluegrass tenors, rumbling gospel bass lines, and to croon baritone country ballads – and I’ve only heard him sing in Czech a few times..ever.

Zbyněk told a great story about the first Czech stilkytara (what I would call a pedal steel guitar) that illustrated to me his relish for the obscure details of country–it basically boiled down to the fact that the guys who were intent on making the instrument couldn’t figure out how to play the chords and melodies they heard on recordings or what those wierd pedals did – until one day in the pub, one of them suddenly found the answer – “Hey! what if they change the pitch?” He told the story to illustrate just how foreign the recent Czechoslovak/communist past is to the present day (along the lines of “we can’t understand that period – what it was like to discover American instruments and sounds for the first time”) But I see that past, in all its exuberant discovery, in Zbyněk’s face as he gets into vocal harmony, or plays his own pedal steel.

The highlight of the evening (and there were many glowing spots) was when Zbyněk turned the tables on little-old-researcher-me, asking what the point of my project was. I tried to boil it down into one sentence – here’s the dressed up version: “To write about how ‘Americanness’ has value [function?] for Czechs who play and otherwise deal in bluegrass-influenced musics.”

Everyone seemed ok with that main thesis, but things got a bit rowdy when I started listing my chapter headings – “Fiddle?!” Zbyněk retorted, “why not write about an instrument that Czechs play well…like the banjo?” I had a chance to talk through my interest in and focus on boundaries and margins, the awkward points that indicate “in-between’ness” and ongoing cultural work. I’m curious why fiddling isn’t as highly refined here as plucked instrument playing – or at least why so many people insist that it isn’t.

Zdeněk got my back at one point – “He wants to talk to normal people.” NOT the big stars that folks around the table listed off as being important to bluegrass history here–Kůs, Vyčital, Křešt’an and the rest. As we mulled over who exactly would be the best people to ask about CZ BG, the conversation moved to complaints about a set of contributors on the www.bg.cz web chat forum, and how they dominate the discourse online. Zdenek added that a lot of junk gets talked on US forums, such as the “banjo hangout,” where someone had been trash-talking European banjos in response to a post about Zdenek’s “Rolls” instruments.

Zbyněk related a story (lots of stories were hoisted this evening) about a 1930s survey that accurately predicted a Roosevelt victory because it polled a sample that reflected the voting electorate–this all to say, these folks are aware of the tasks involved in trying to address a community and its “worldview,” and are at least receptive to my work in examining, “pooling” a wide set of folks here, guided by a sensitive cultural awareness and as well as my own investigative agenda. And they seem ready to talk about what I am doing, which is the part of this evening that I am most excited about.

I didn’t bring up ethnicity that night, not wanting to get into that area before I am prepared to talk about it–I still don’t even have the vocabulary I would like to use in talking about “whiteness” in Czech. Fortuitously enough–again–I didn’t have to bring it up. In a loop of talking that arced out of the historical/Americanist side of things, Zdeněk threw in a story about a visiting Californian [Who?! - Zdeněk - can you fill me in?] who, after seeing the Czech western garb, positioned himself on the “cowboy” side of that iconic split between cattlemen and native Americans–apparently his father is a rancher and identifies with the wranglers. But Czechs–in Zdeněk’s story and around our table–usually take the side of the Indians–the verb used was “fandit,” the same word used with regard to your favored football team. [that's a complicated thing to say--anyone have any thoughts here?] After various excurses on the plight of native Americans, the nature of the Europeans who settled the U.S., someone compared the situation to that of Czech Roma–and was quickly answered by a speaker who said “I wouldn’t fandit gypsies!” At that moment Zbyněk looked across the table and said, “It’s like that in the states with blacks, right?” And all the blocks fell in to place – ethnicity and Americanness ARE tied to things here. there a lot more to be addressed here, but for now, I just demurred: “It’s hard to say.”
I went to bed soon after, but the conversation rolled on, talking about Czech musicality with regard to other central European countries, the divide between Bohemia and Moravia–or more broadly, how regions of the CZ Rep. have different ways of playing, are dominated by different bands and traditions. I walked away with all sorts of sparks kindling in my head, so many things to follow up on – and at least a preliminary assurance that I really am barking up the right tree–at least I’m after some of the things that folks here deem worth considering; heck, they/we spent a whole evening talking about it!