The other day, the New York Times published an obituary of the founder of the New Lost City Ramblers, a “New York-based string band at the forefront of the old-time music revival of the 1950s and ’60s.”(1) The trio “introduced a generation of young urbanites to the work of Depression-era rural performers” of the American South. While celebrating the music of the past, the trio also influenced contemporary performers such as Bob Dylan.
Oh, the name of this musician (he was also a photographer and film maker) was John Cohen. A Jewish Yalie from Great Neck, Long Island.
Was this Yiddish booster of Appalachian music slammed, shamed, and disdained for promoting and performing music that had originated in a culture far from his own? Was the dreaded accusation of cultural appropriation hurled at him?
On the contrary. Cohen was recognized, in the words of folklorist Jon Pankake, as fulfilling “a visionary role befitting his artist’s training and talents.” He brought something valuable that was hidden away into the ken of the larger world.
Mr. Pankake continued: The Ramblers were about
something more than entertaining, . . . carving out some yet unknown place in history and inspiring many of its audience to become a new kind of musical community.
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And then there is Mary Jane Leach.
Ms. Leach is a composer and a proponent of the music of a colleague of hers, Julius Eastman, a gay Black man who died in 1990. In an article in ARTnews,(2) Ms. Leach revealed what happened when she appeared to present “a lecture on him and his work at the OBEY Convention, a music and sound festival in Halifax, Nova Scotia.”
[I]n a pre-planned group discussion following my talk, I soon realized that the subject wasn’t going to be Eastman and his music but instead an inquisition into me that would wind up marginalizing—again, as had happened to him so often in the past—the true subject at hand. What I hadn’t known was that there had been earlier discussions before the festival about whether it would be ethical for me, a white woman, to speak about a gay black man.
Worse was to come. A later concert of Ms. Leach’s music was cut short by the Convention’s organizers, who claimed
they had received complaints about my lecture and were pulling my music from the program.
I was incredulous and asked them to reconsider, but they insisted that they had to provide a safe space for vulnerable communities and that the people who had objected to my lecture were adamant that it would be too traumatic for them to have to listen to my music.
Then to add insult to injury,
the festival posted a public apology for the whole situation on its website calling my work on Eastman an “example of colonial oppression” and my lecture—in which I addressed the issue of problematic language around Eastman directly—“an instance of anti-black racism.”
In the ARTnews article, Ms. Leach details her interest in her former colleague’s music and how she became “by default” a specialist on Eastman’s work. She notes that she was basically the only source on Eastman and “when people found something, they could contact me and figure out what to do with what they had.”
Ms. Leach points out that the moderator of the post-lecture discussion was “the leader of an activist group of queer people of color.” Do he and his group, one must ask, have the right to hegemony over the work of artists like Eastman? Could one expect that they would make the effort of preserving and promoting the work of such artists? They certainly haven't done it in Eastman's case. When they attempt to wall off the rest of the world from a group of artists, do they do them justice? And aren’t they themselves walled off from the greater group outside? Who is the loser here?
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John Cohen and the other two Ramblers could have left Appalachian music in the hills and hollers. But how much better the world became when they allowed us to love it too.
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