Toward a Sound Ecology

New and Selected Essays

Jeff Todd Titon

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253052360
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

How does sound ecology—an acoustic connective tissue among communities—also become a basis for a healthy economy and a just community?

Jeff Todd Titon's lived experiences shed light on the power of song, the ecology of musical cultures, and even cultural sustainability and resilience. In Toward a Sound Ecology, Titon's collected essays address his growing concerns with people making music, holistic ecological approaches to music, and sacred transformations of sound. Titon also demonstrates how to conduct socially responsible fieldwork and compose engaging and accessible ethnography that speaks to a diverse readership. Toward a Sound Ecology is an anthology of Titon's key writings, which are situated chronologically within three particular areas of interest: fieldwork, cultural and musical sustainability, and sound ecology. According to Titon—a foundational figure in folklore and ethnomusicology—a re-orientation away from a world of texts and objects and toward a world of sound connections will reveal the basis of a universal kinship.

I.

FIELD WORK: FOLKLORE AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

THIS SECTION’S ESSAYS ADDRESS SOME OF THE QUESTIONS that, for me, have constructed folklore studies and ethnomusicology during the last fifty years: What are the natures of oral narrative, and how are they experienced? What is the nature of fieldwork, and what kinds of knowledges arise from it? What are the meanings of text, how are they experienced in performance, how do they live in memory and community, and what will the texts of the future be? What definitions of ethnomusicology and of applied ethnomusicology are worth having, in light of the history and praxis in the field? I also address these questions in Early Downhome Blues, Worlds of Music, Powerhouse for God, Give Me This Mountain, and my other books, but the essay form offers an opportunity for more precise focus and, paradoxically, for more speculative conclusions.

1

THE LIFE STORY

AUTOBIOGRAPHY BEGAN TO WHET MY CURIOSITY IN THE 1960s in connection with blues lyrics and the narratives blues singers told me about their lives. In the mid-1970s, I developed a seminar on oral and written narrative where, among other things, we explored the fictive aspects of nonfiction genres such as autobiography and ethnography. (I write about that seminar in “Text” and “Knowing Fieldwork,” both reprinted in this volume.) “The Life Story” emerged after John Sherfey, the principal figure in my book Powerhouse for God, replied to my interview question “When and where were you born?” by telling me the story of his life, uninterrupted until my recorder ran out of tape a half hour later. Conversations with anthropologists Dennis and Barbara Tedlock about our fieldwork; about stories, oral poetry, and ethnopoetics; and about the rendering of oral performance in print helped me understand Sherfey’s life story narrative further within a broader performance context. Around that time and then unbeknownst to me, folklorist Sandra Kay Dolby-Stahl was naming and defining a similar folkloric performance genre, the “personal experience narrative.” Like life stories, personal experience stories were first-person oral narratives. As a folklore genre, the personal experience story had been neglected because of its allegedly nontraditional content; it was not a folktale, riddle, proverb, or other defined genre of verbal folklore but rather a true story. Yet, she and other folklorists contended, it could be examined for its performance characteristics and for the folklore themes and motifs it displayed, even when its content was nontraditional. Its status as a folklore genre did not trouble me. I was interested in the life story as oral autobiography, concerned with distinguishing it from life history, biography, and oral history, while emphasizing its fictive aspect and discussing the relation of life storytelling to meaning making and personal identity. Toward the end of this essay, I wrote about fieldwork and friendship, a theme I developed in several subsequent essays. An anti-instrumentalist bias (“the life story need not be ‘used’ for anything”), developed in my sound ecology project thirty years later, is also evident here. An earlier version of this essay was presented to the Graduate Colloquium in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania on October 1, 1979.

A life story is, simply, a person’s story of his or her life, or of what he or she thinks is a significant part of that life. It is therefore a personal narrative, a story of personal experience, and, as it emerges from conversation, its ontological status is the spoken word, even if the story is transcribed and edited for the printed page. The storyteller trusts the listener(s), and the listener respects the storyteller, not interrupting the train of thought until the story is finished. That is not to say the listener is passive as a doorknob: he or she nods assent, interposes a comment, frames a relevant question—indeed, his or her presence and reactions are essential to the story. The listener may coincidentally be a folklorist, but the role is mainly that of a sympathetic friend.

This essay is directed to folklorists whose fieldwork, like my own, involves talking to people and finding out about their lives. My intention is to define and develop an approach to the life story as a self-contained fiction and thus to distinguish it sharply from its historical kin: biography, oral history, and the personal history (or “life history,” as it is called in anthropology).

Among the dimensions of folk culture that Richard Dorson observed during his 1968 field trip to Gary and East Chicago, Indiana, was something he called “personal history.” He told folklorists to cast aside worries over whether the personal history is a traditional oral genre and urged them to collect the “thousands of sagas created from life experiences that deserve, indeed cry for, recording” (Dorson 1970, 67–68). Dorson caught the documentary spirit of the times. The following decade witnessed a rebirth of interest in the experiences of ordinary Americans, especially blue-collar workers, racial and ethnic minorities, and women. Not since the New Deal era was there such a burst of documentary energy. Studs Terkel’s books became best sellers; Robert Coles’s books influenced public policy; Theodore Rosengarten’s life of black Alabama sharecropper Ned Cobb won the National Book Award; professional sociologists turned out monographs on the lives and opinions of the so-called silent majority; hundreds of oral history projects were born at the local level, thousands of people were interviewed, and millions of pages of typescript were produced (Terkel 1967; Coles 1967; Rosengarten 1974). Folklore’s contribution to the documentation decade, in the popular mind, resides in the Foxfire concept of education and the resulting Foxfire book (Wigginton 1972) and the subsequent books in the series.¹

In the midst of all the documentation, it is well to recall what Thoreau ([1854] 1985, 411) wrote: “Much is published, but little is printed.” Most of the published documents appear to be life stories but are not. That is, they give the impression that a person is speaking about their life in their own voice, but in reality someone else has muffled and distorted it. What appears to be a person telling a life story is usually an informant answering a series of questions. Then by a common ruse, the interview comes to masquerade as a life story. The interviewer or an editor selects the relevant answers; arranges them according to editorial purposes, be they chronological, topical, or historical; smooths out the talk for the printed page; and then removes the questions. This false alchemy is clear enough when one compares Terkel’s writings with his tapes. It is a brazen art in the hands of Coles (who does not use a tape recorder);² it is obvious in the two or three segments of each Foxfire book given over to personal narratives; and it is evident also in the relatively small number of personal documents that professional folklorists have published.

The reason we transform interviews into life stories on the printed page without much uneasiness is that we habitually fail to distinguish story from history when the medium is talk. Dorson’s choice of the phrase “personal history” is illuminating, for he used it interchangeably with the phrase “life story” when recalling how he happened upon examples of them: “Several memorable life stories,” he wrote, “came to my ears without prompting” (Dorson 1970, 67). As a good historian, Dorson knows that story is not the same as history. If he sometimes conflates the two, it may be because his concept of folk history relies on the transformation of oral traditions and personal documents, set in the structures of everyday life, into the history of the folk (Dorson 1972).

The difference between story and history is perhaps best understood through what Charles Olson, that most historical of poets, labeled “stance.” Olson identified two complementary stances toward life: fiction (story, including poetry) and history. In its root sense, facio, fiction is not a lie but a “making,” whereas history, ‘istorin, is “found out.” To Herodotus, the Greek verb poiein (from which our “poet” derives) meant “to make,” whereas the noun histor meant a “learned man,” and the verb ‘istorin meant “to find out for oneself” (Olson 1970, 19–23). A story is made, but history is found out. Story is language at play; history is language at work. The language of story is charged with power: it creates. The language of history is charged with knowledge: it discovers. Story is a literature of the imagination; history, though it be imaginative, drives toward fact. The generation of historians who were my teachers believed, along with R. G. Collingwood, that history was a branch of the humanities. So long as history is humanistic, it is a complement of story; but they are not the same and certainly not interchangeable (Collingwood 1948).

“The real language of men in a state of vivid sensation” was how Wordsworth (1805, i) characterized the source of his own poetic diction, contrasting it with the language of artifice used by poets who had been long out of touch with genuine human sympathy. The romantic baggage that accompanied Wordsworth’s revolutionary ideas placed a value on rustic life that few modern folklorists would publicly embrace. Nonetheless, his interest in the common man and woman of the countryside was chiefly an interest in the renewing power of a natural language that arose from deeply felt, personal experience. This, of course, is the language of the life story, not the language of history. It is particularly not the language of history today, for increasingly during the past twenty years the narrative mode of writing history has been attacked for its failure to meet adequate scientific standards of explanation. Many historians now believe that so-called covering-law explanations—that is, explanations of specific events by a general law that “covers” the specific conditions—are the only valid form of historical explanation. Whatever its value in historical writing, this scientific criterion is irrelevant to explanation in storytelling. Why it is irrelevant is best illustrated by an example, a life story. The following life story is the religious conversion narrative of blues singer Son House (fig. 1.1), which he told to me in response to my asking why he waited until adulthood to become a blues singer. I have transcribed it verbatim from my field tape:

When I was a kid, a youngster, a teen—a young teenager and up like that I was more churchified. Then that’s mostly all I could see into. ’Cause they’d had us go, we’d had to go to the Sabbath school every Sunday. We didn’t miss goin’ to no Sabbath school. We’d be into that and then in this church there, some of the ones a little larger than me and like that, and it come time of year for ’em to run revival meetin’. Some pastor come to open up the revival meetin’, oh, for a week or more. [Coughs.] Well, we’d all be goin’ to the thing they call the mourners’ bench. Gettin’ on your knees, you know, and lettin’ the old folks pray for you. Yeah, and in a couple of days or weeks, somebody’d come up, holler out they had something. They had religion. They’d squall round man, go on. So they left me thataway I guess, oh about, near ’bout six or eight months sometime. I didn’t fall for it because I, I figured they was puttin’ on and I didn’t want to be puttin’ on. I wanted mine to be real and so I just kept on until finally, [clears throat] the next session, I said, “Is there—this one time I’m just gon see is—is any way to get this thing religion they goin’ ’round here talkin’ about, puttin’ on and goin’ on.” I prayed and prayed, commenced prayin’, man, every night, workin’ in the field, and plowin’ the mule and everything. Work all day hard, and go on home, whew, tryin’ to pray, tryin’ to pray, and work. So, finally, I kept on like that until they come back home that night, middle of the night after the pastor turned out. So I went on home. And I was livin’ down in the lower part [of] the place from where my daddy an’ them stayed, down to my cousin’s. Went down there; I didn’t want to be up there around the old folks. And man, I went out back of the house a little bit, in this old alfalfa field out there. I had been scared of snakes, ’cause snakes would be bad in the summertime, you know, crawlin’ through them weeds and things. But I wasn’t studyin’ them snakes then. I’d say they better get out of the way if they don’t want to get their heads mashed off! [Laughs.] I went on. I was there in that alfalfa field and I got down. Pray. Gettin’ on my knees in that alfalfa. Dew was fallin’. And man, I prayed and I prayed and I prayed and for wait awhile, man I hollered out. Found out then. I said, “Yes, it is somethin’ to be got, too, ’cause I got it now!” [Laughs.] Sure did. Went on back there to that house and told my cousin Robert and all them ’bout that and went, walked about two miles and a little better, and up to another white fellow’s house, and woke him up and told him all about it. We was workin’ for him, too. But I wouldn’t care how tough he was or what not. “Get up out of that bed and listen to what I got to say.” [Laughs.] He thought I was crazy! Yeah. Name was, we all called him Mister Keaton, T. F. Keaton. Yeah, I say, “Oh yeah!” Found out better now. (Titon 1976, 2–6; 1977, 21–22)³

Figure 1.1. Eddie “Son” House, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1970. Photo by Jeff Todd Titon.

On hearing this story, a doubting Thomas might object that it contains a hollow core—that the before and after of conversion is described but not the moment itself. Someone who had undergone a similar experience and was less of an empiricist would perhaps say such a demand was philistine. But proof is not at issue here. Nor is it a question of whether the religion Son House was converted to is a delusion. What is at issue is a human being recollecting, in a state of vivid sensation, a critical moment in his life and to a degree reexperiencing it by means of storytelling. Covering laws stating conditions under which conversion is probable operate in an entirely different dimension. A sophisticated religious critique might score Son House for confusing an intensely felt experience with the validation of a worldview, but no critic could rob him of the memory of his religious conversion. His life story is not a historical description, and it does not obey historical laws. It is a fiction, a making, and like all powerful fictions, it drives toward enactment.

Biography, Oral History, and Personal History

Among the historical kin to the life story are biography, oral history, and the personal history (or anthropological life history). Any folklorist interested in the life story would do well to become familiar with the procedures of these historical genres, if only to avoid them. Folklorists practicing these historical genres, which of course are perfectly legitimate folkloristic interests, should, on the other hand, understand why they cannot pretend, to themselves or others, that their products are life stories.

The word “biography” came into English with Dryden, who in 1683 defined it as “the history of particular men’s lives” (quoted in Holman 1972, 64). The biographical impulse is praise for an exemplary life, and so the public function of most biography is didactic, either implicitly or explicitly (Gittings 1978, 19–21).⁴ Modern standards of professionalism in biographical writing, however, dictate that the biographer owe his allegiance not to his subject but the facts of his subject’s life. In Theory of Literature, René Wellek explains why the biographer adopts historical methods: “The problems of a biographer are simply those of a historian. He has to interpret his documents, letters, accounts by eye-witnesses, reminiscences, autobiographical statements, and to decide questions of genuineness, trustworthiness of witnesses, and the like. In the actual writing of biography he encounters the problems of chronological presentation, of selection, of discretion or frankness. The rather extensive work which has been done on biography as a genre deals with such questions, questions in no way specifically literary” (Wellek and Warren 1956, 75–76). The biographer is thus a historian, a life writer aiming to describe and explain the circumstances of his subject’s life, personality, and influence. Yet because his product is the record, sometimes even the story, of a life, the historical imagination will sometimes crawl out from the avalanche of data available to the modern biographer and turn its subject into a palpable human being, usually by giving him or her words to say. Boswell, the first modern biographer, catches Johnson’s person through his conversation more than anything else. When we hear him, then we know him, or at least we think we do.

A biography that announces itself as the writer’s account of someone else’s life is not likely to be confused with the life story because there is no question about who is the author. The question of authorship is central to the problems of oral history and the personal history, but the lines are clearly drawn in biography. Biography per se has not had much of an appeal to folklorists, particularly in recent years, when the main lines of research and writing have concentrated in collection, annotation, and analysis of texts; in folkloristic theory; in material culture; and in the application of folklore to the concerns of local, tradition-bearing groups (but see E. Ives [1978] and his other biographical studies).

Oral history, like biography, proceeds from a historical rather than a fictive stance. Like biography, its overriding concern is with factual accuracy. Unlike biography, its focus is chiefly on events, processes, causes, and effects rather than on the individuals whose recollections furnish oral history with its raw data. A recent development, oral history dates from just after World War II, when Allan Nevins of Columbia University convinced his institution to become a repository for interviews with the men—and in most cases they were men—who had “made history.” Historians were trained to ask lawyers’ questions in an effort to get evidence from living witnesses. By 1974, more than three hundred institutions in the United States housed more than five hundred different oral history projects (Baum 1977; Davis, Back, and MacLean 1975).

Not all the projects in oral history are elitist. Possibly in response to the climate of the “new” social history, oral history projects now sometimes focus on the experiences of ordinary Americans. When Richard Dorson called for a folk history built up from the personal histories whose collection he urged, he could not have anticipated the local oral history projects that were springing up even as he was writing. Yet his assessment that professional historians would not be the ones to undertake folk history projects is still correct (Dorson 1972, 239–241). The new social history’s emphasis on quantification and its distrust of literary evidence drive historians into harder and harder “scientific” lines in order to maintain professional respectability (Veysey 1979). Charts, graphs, tables, Greek symbols, and a variety of English sentences reduced to laws expressed by mathematical equations now stare out from the pages of the historical journals, while personal documents are left far behind in the quantitative analysis.

Scientism of this sort has not yet appeared among folk-culturally oriented oral histories, but they suffer from other problems. The Appalachian Oral History Project, for example, based at Alice Lloyd College in eastern Kentucky, began interviewing residents of central Appalachia in 1971. In 1977, it published Our Appalachia: An Oral History and introduced the book as a “social history” that “has provided the opportunity to let residents of the region tell their own story” (Shackelford and Weinberg 1977, 3, my italics). Here is another illustration of the confusion of history with story. This oral history is really the product of highly directed interviews, and we know this because the editors had the good sense to print some of the questions. When we come across a leading question in Our Appa...