Weekend America

The Art of Field Recording

Philip L. Graitcer

JANUARY 24, 2009

Willie Mae Eberhardt and Fleta Mitchell

(Philip L. Graitcer)

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Most people think of folk music as a thing of the past. It seemed to disappear in the '60s when rock and roll and the Beatles swept the music scene. But if you search hard enough, folk music and the musicians who play it are still around. Art Rosenbaum has made it his life's work to find and record it. He's become the Indiana Jones of folk music. Independent Producer Philip Graitcer traveled with Rosenbaum to visit a few traditional musicians.

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Art Rosenbaum and I are visiting 94-year-old Fleta Mitchell. Everyone calls her "Mother" Mitchell. Mitchell lives with her pastor and singing partner, 78-year old Willie Mae Eberhardt, in a tiny one-story cinder block house just outside of Athens, Georgia.

Mother Mitchell's been singing gospel music in her church since she was two years old, almost a century ago.

Art Rosenbaum: We talked a lot about your starting out in music when you were a little girl, how you'd sing "Let Me Fly" and�

Fleta "Mother" Mitchell: �and "You'd Better Mind." I was so short, they'd stand me up on the table�they didn't have no piano then, and I stood up on the table and sang, "You'd Better Mind."

Mitchell's been blind since birth. She seems frail, bent over with age, and can barely walk. But as she sits down at the piano and fumbles to find the right keys, she becomes a living jukebox of gospel music.

Rosenbaum: Mother Mitchell, I remember first meeting you through Doc and Lucy Banes, and they said I had to meet you and your husband, Reverend Mitchell - that you were old friends and sang all those old gospel songs together?

Mitchell: That's right

Rosenbaum: And they said I had to meet you. They said that you sang all those old gospel songs together.

Rosenbaum has known Mother Mitchell for more than 30 years. He met her like he's met many musicians: by word of mouth. Rosenbaum does what's called shotgun collecting. He goes to a small town grocery store or gas station and asks if there are any fiddle players or banjo pickers around. Then he goes and knocks on their doors.

Rosenbaum: I wanted to record so I could learn�We took a little reel to reel monaural tape recorder to record his music so I could listen to it - like you take your little camera around to take snapshots of something you want to look at again.

What started as a hobby has turned into much more than that. Art Rosenbaum now has 52 years of field recordings, and recently, he's collected the best into two boxed sets. His first, The Art of Field Recording, Volume I, was nominated for two Grammy awards.

Mary Lomax lives in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. She's 80, and in one of Rosenbaum's recordings she sings a 250-year old British ballad she learned from her father called "Lord Lovell." For Rosenbaum, finding a living person singing this old ballad was the equivalent of finding the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Rosenbaum: There's this chain, these links in the chain as they go on. So the oral tradition is very important. Now Mary Lomax might sing "Lord Lovell he stood at his castle gate, combing his milk-white steed." Now that's before her time, and before her father's time to be talking about castles and milk-white steeds and lords and ladies, but the sadness of the story can speak to modern sensibilities.

Rosenbaum is on a mission to record the diversity of American folk music. He's recorded singing blueberry pickers in Michigan, shouters on the Georgia coast, and old time fiddle music.

Earl Murphy is a 91- year old fiddle player who grew up in Missouri.

Earl Murphy: My Dad played and I just started picking his fiddle up. Found a few notes on it. Learned how to play two pieces. Started playing a tune. �Prisoner Song.

As Murphy tunes up his fiddle, Rosenbaum reaches for his banjo.

As kids, Murphy and his brother played square dances in their hometown of Marshall, Missouri. Later he worked day jobs like stock yard wrangler or security guard while playing the fiddle on the radio or at night in the honky tonks.

Now his life is kind of lonely. His wife is in a nursing home, and to pass the time Murphy invites other musicians over to play, like guitarist Bill Ashley.

There's a reason why the musicians Rosenbaum records are so old. When they were kids, there wasn't any television or even radio; the family entertainment was playing music together. Rosenbaum says that process sustains the most pure and authentic music.

Rosenbaum: You learned music by emulation, not imitation. You wouldn't get somebody to sit down and say, "Now here's how to hold your hand," here's how to play this tune or that tune, you'd just hang around and hear it."

Now there are fewer people that are part of that person-to-person chain. Murphy's determined to keep the tradition alive. He's taught his grandson some of the old fiddle tunes, and they play together when he's in town.

And Rosenbaum's recordings will keep the music alive for the rest of us.

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Next week in Athens, Georgia, Mother Mitchell, Mary Lomax, and Earl Murphy will be playing at the release party for Rosenbaum's latest collection of field recordings, The Art of Field Recordings, Volume 2.

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