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French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons pp 133–162Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

“I Want You to Be/Just like You Used to Be, Darling”: Choreographing the Newport Waltz

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Abstract

Anxiety over the relationship between authenticity—the real, immediate, organic object or image—and imitation—the manufactured, packaged, approximated commodity—has been a “recurring metaphysical preoccupation” in American civilization, according to Americanist Miles Orvell, inspiring an obsession with the folk, the organic, the original, and the natural, and driving a “consuming effort to restore contact with real things.” This tension was driven by the mass-manufacture of consumer goods, each one of which was an exact duplicate of every other, and by the dominance and pervasiveness of the machine, which replicated, reproduced, and standardized. Orvell’s argument can be elaborated into the domain of sound and expression to locate a cultural anxiety about the authenticity and idiosyncrasy of musicians and performances, an anxiety that Rinzler, like Lomax, learned to live with.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Miles Orvell, The Real Thing, Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xvi, xxiv.

  2. 2.

    Ralph Rinzler, Forward to Cajun and Creole Music Makers, Ancelet, 9.

  3. 3.

    Ralph Rinzler quoted in “From the 30s to the 60s: The folk music revival in the United States,” Ron Eyerman and Scott Barretta, Theory and Society, Vol. 25, No. 4 (August, 1996): 501.

  4. 4.

    Alan Lomax quoted in “From the 30s to the 60s,” Eyerman and Barretta, 513.

  5. 5.

    Eyerman and Barretta, “From the 30s to the 60s,” 538.

  6. 6.

    Ralph Rinzler, quoted in Brauner, “The Newport Folk Festival,” 182.

  7. 7.

    Lisa Richardson, “Women and Home Music in South Louisiana,” in La Musique de la Maison, Origin Jazz Library, 2008, compact disc, liner notes, p. 4.

  8. 8.

    Arthur Arnould, Béranger, Ses Amis, Ses Ennemies et Ses Critiques: Volume 1 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2009), 148.

  9. 9.

    Edium Nacquin, for example, told Rinzler she had learned one song from her grandmother, whose brother had been a soldier in the Confederate Army, and who lived to the age of 99, and another from Ulyses Picrottie, an eighty-year-old resident of Mamou.

  10. 10.

    Francois, Yé Yaille, 39–42.

  11. 11.

    Lisa Richardson, “Women and Home Music,” 4.

  12. 12.

    Robert Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters (New York: Back Bay Books, 2003), 62.

  13. 13.

    Alma Barthelemy, lyrics transcribed by Ralph Rinzler. Library of Congress, Louisiana Collections in the Archive of Folk Culture, Ralph Rinzler Louisiana Recordings, AFC1972/026.

  14. 14.

    Sally K. Sommers Smith, “Irish Traditional Music in a Modern World,” New Hibernia Review 5.2 (2001): 111.

  15. 15.

    Eyerman and Barretta, “From the 30s to the 60s,” 534.

  16. 16.

    Paul Tate , 10/17/64. The Archives of Cajun and Creole Folklore, University of Louisiana at Lafayette , CRI1.004. Audio recording.

  17. 17.

    Broven, South to Louisiana, 240.

  18. 18.

    Philip H. Des Marais, interviewed by Charles T. Morrissey, March 9, 1966, Washington, DC, John F. Kennedy Oral History Collection, JFK #1, 3/9/1966.

  19. 19.

    Times-Picayune, November 18, 1953.

  20. 20.

    Philip H. Desmarais, Oral History transcript, 31.

  21. 21.

    Rinzler, UL archives, field notes to Reel 2B 10/65/3, 4.

  22. 22.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 287.

  23. 23.

    Bernard, Swamp Pop, 85.

  24. 24.

    Bernard, Swamp Pop, 180.

  25. 25.

    Tisserand, Kingdom of Zydeco, 83.

  26. 26.

    Savoy, Cajun Music, 196.

  27. 27.

    Earl King and Ron Bernard quoted in Broven, South to Louisiana, 181–182.

  28. 28.

    Alan Lomax , “Cajun Country,” DVD.

  29. 29.

    John Szwed, Alan Lomax , The Man Who Recorded the World (New York: Viking, 2010), 310.

  30. 30.

    Leo Soileau , interviewed by Ralph Rinzler, USL archives, R12. Audio recording.

  31. 31.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 189.

  32. 32.

    Terry H. Anderson, The Sixties, 4th edition (Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2012), 41.

  33. 33.

    Robert Shelton, “Symbolic Finale: Folk Festival Winds up with Songs of the Negro Integration Movement,” New York Times, August 2, 1964, Sec. 2, 9.

  34. 34.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 123.

  35. 35.

    Cohen, John. Quoted in Szwed, “Alan Lomax,” 337.

  36. 36.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 66; 102; 161.

  37. 37.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 107.

  38. 38.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 122.

  39. 39.

    Ron Yule, Louisiana Fiddlers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009), 6. Szwed, Alan Lomax, The Man Who Recorded the World, 337.

  40. 40.

    Dewey Balfa, “The Balfa Brothers Play Traditional Cajun Music,” Swallow Records, 1965, compact disc, liner notes, 3.

  41. 41.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 159.

  42. 42.

    Blanc and Strachwitz, “J’Ai Eté au Bal.”

  43. 43.

    Will Spires, The Balfa Brothers: They Carried Cajun Music to the World, Frets Magazine (May 1982): 30–33.

  44. 44.

    Broven, South to Louisiana, 243.

  45. 45.

    Barry Jean Ancelet interview with Dewey Balfa, USL archives, AN1.

  46. 46.

    Cajun guitarist D.L. Menard in “J’ai eté au bal,” Les Blank, Chris Strachwitz, DVD (1998).

  47. 47.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 185–186.

  48. 48.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 194.

  49. 49.

    Barry Jean Ancelet, Cajun Music: Its Origins and Development (Lafayette : Center for Louisiana Studies, University of Southwest Louisiana, 1989), 38.

  50. 50.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 195.

  51. 51.

    Ralph Rinzler, Letter to John Pankake, Oct. 1, 1965, Mamou , Louisiana. Ralph Rinzler Papers Fieldwork Box 4 Louisiana, Correspondence 1–3, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Washington, DC.

  52. 52.

    Spires, “The Balfa Brothers,” 30–33.

  53. 53.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 195.

  54. 54.

    Floyd Soileau, quoted in Broven, South to Louisiana, 245.

  55. 55.

    Soileau, quoted in Broven, South to Louisiana, 260.

  56. 56.

    Canray Fontenot, in Cajun and Creole Music Makers, Ancelet, 86.

  57. 57.

    Gagné, “Ralph Rinzler,” 28.

  58. 58.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Foundation,” 86.

  59. 59.

    James, American Scene, 211.

  60. 60.

    Walker, Transformation of the Universal Museum, 192–193.

  61. 61.

    C. Malcolm Watkins, “The Historic Roots of American Folklife,”1968 Festival of American Folklife, The Smithsonian Institution, Program Guide, 10–11.

  62. 62.

    American Folklife Preservation Bill, March 20, 1969, S. 1591.

  63. 63.

    Benjamin A. Botkin, quoted in Romancing the Folk, Filene, 139.

  64. 64.

    Botkin, quoted in Delaina Sepko, “The Archive of American Folk Song, The Library of Congress Recording Laboratory and Notions of American Identity,” Fontes Artis Musicae 62/2, 98.

  65. 65.

    Walker, Transformation, 104–105.

  66. 66.

    Fairclough, Race & Democracy, 383.

  67. 67.

    Fairclough, Race & Democracy, xx.

  68. 68.

    Brauner, “Newport Folk Festival,” 195–196.

  69. 69.

    Joshua Clegg Caffery, Traditional Music in Coastal Louisiana: The 1934 Lomax Recordings (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 50–53.

  70. 70.

    Aubrey DeVille, Ralph Rinzler Papers Fieldwork Box 4 Louisiana, Correspondence 1–3, Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Washington, DC.

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  1. Berklee College of Music, Boston, MA, USA

    Patricia Peknik

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Peknik, P. (2019). “I Want You to Be/Just like You Used to Be, Darling”: Choreographing the Newport Waltz. In: French Louisiana Music and Its Patrons. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97424-8_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97424-8_6

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