REVIEW:

H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-Southern-Music@h-net.msu.edu (February 2007)

Michael Ann Williams. _Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude
Knott_. Music in American Life Series. Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2006. xvi + 221 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$60.00 (cloth), ISBN 0-252-03102-4; $20.00 (paper), ISBN 0-252-07344-4.

Reviewed for H-Southern Music by Zachary J. Lechner, Department of
History, Temple University

The Authenticity and Artifice of Folk Music

In her dual biography _Staging Tradition: John Lair and Sarah Gertrude
Knott_, Michael Ann Williams relates the lives of two key, but often
overlooked, figures in the popularization of folk and country music during
the twentieth century.  Williams, the head of the Department of Folk
Studies and Anthropology at Western Kentucky University, not only fills a
gap in the musical and historical literature, she also adds another layer
to the scholarly conversation about authenticity in folk and country
music.

Williams presents Lair's (1894-1985) and Knott's (1895-1984) biography in
the form of a chronological, declension narrative.  These individuals
crossed paths only occasionally, so Williams alternates her focus between
Lair and Knott throughout the book.  Generally, the approach works well,
fueling the author's argument that despite their different techniques Lair
and Knott both sought to be center stage by presenting "traditional"
culture in a theatrical manner.  Lair utilized the radio airwaves while
Knott employed the festival stage.

Knott, Williams states, differed from her folk mentors such as Paul Green
and Frederick Koch "in conceiving of folk art as a form of theatrical
performance rather than as source material for theatrical presentations"
(p. 16).  She incorporated this ideology in her creation of the National
Folk Festival in 1934.  Noting Knott's emphasis on folk arts rooted in
ethnic or regional identities, Williams emphasizes the festival's
inclusiveness.  By the end of the 1930s, Knott allowed participation from
American territories and other countries in the Americas.  Despite the
breadth of her productions, Knott showed a penchant for staging shows.
She tended to follow her own tastes rather than those of her artists.  She
also sought the advice of others, especially academic folklorists.  When
she excluded Delta blues performers from the festivals, Williams points
out that Knott took advice from middle-class black leaders who often
looked down upon the tradition.  This advice, rather than any racism on
Knott's part, kept Delta blues out of the festival.

Knott's popular staging of the folk arts found kinship with John Lair's
staging of country music.  Lair began broadcasting his radio program the
Renfro Valley Barn Dance on Cincinnati's WLW in 1937.  He recognized
Americans' interest in hearing "authentic" musical acts.  Acting as a
folksy master of ceremonies, Lair told his listeners that all of his
performers hailed from Renfro Valley in Kentucky, where he moved the Barn
Dance in 1939.  Describing his exploitation of nostalgia, Williams
describes the location as "[a] stand-in for whatever loss of the past his
listeners felt" (p. 50).  Lair made sure that his artists dressed the part
of rural folk.  For instance, he placed his popular Coon Creek Girls in
gingham dresses and high-top boots even though their star Lily May Ledford
preferred more cosmopolitan fashions.

The post-World War II period, not surprisingly, marked a turning point in
the life of the National Folk Festival and the Renfro Valley Barn Dance.
During the Depression, Knott could sell the festival traditions as a way
to escape the national malaise.  Postwar prosperity made that objective
less relevant.  Lair's program suffered from television competition and
from bad commercial investments.  By all accounts, the folk boom of the
1950s and 1960s should have revitalized Knott's and Lair's operations, but
both producers felt alienated from the young purveyors of folk and
traditional country music.  Likewise, the folk revivalists found Lair's
radio program and Knott's family-oriented festivals quaint and out of
touch.

For her study, Williams mines a wealth of primary materials culled from
both archives and oral histories.  The John Lair Collection a Berea
College in Kentucky, the Sarah Gertrude Knott Collection at Western
Kentucky University's Folklife Archives, and the Library of Congress's
National Folk Festival Collection are indispensable repositories of
letters, festival programs, and other writings.  These sources offer a
critical perspective on Lair's and Knott's visions for their endeavors and
how performers, academics, and businesspeople responded to those visions.
Williams also draws on many recorded interviews with Knott and Lair, as
well as conversations with family members and artists such as Pete Seeger,
fiddler Jim Gaskin, and many others.

With this strong source base, Williams moves beyond a simple retelling of
Lair's and Knott's lives.  She makes a larger argument about folk music
and authenticity.  Strangely, Williams never defines the latter term.
Because scholars use it so frequently, it risks becoming devoid of
meaning, and so a definition is needed.  In his 2003 study _Blue Chicago:
The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs_, sociologist David
Grazian offers a cogent, two-fold definition of "authenticity."  "First,"
he writes, "it can refer to the ability of a place or event to conform to
an idealized representation of reality:  that is, to a set of expectations
regarding how such a thing ought to look, sound, and feel.  At the same
time, authenticity can refer to the credibility or sincerity of a
performance and its ability to come off as natural and effortless."[1]
According to Grazian, the search for authenticity will never succeed in
recovering the idealized representation.

The purists of the folk and blues revivals certainly adhered to this
categorization.  But what about Lair and Knott?  Williams contends that
these two producers created something of a balancing act when it came to
authenticity.  Folk and blues revivalists, for the most part, rejected any
tinge of commerciality.  That emphasis sometimes resulted in a skewed
vision of the music's established connection to the popular realm.  Lair
and Knott, on the other hand, rarely assumed the stance of purists.  In
fact, Williams states, "neither authenticity nor commerciality seemed to
much influence their choices" (p. 15).  Their true interest laid in
theatrics, the act of staging, not in crafting a "real" slice of southern
and Appalachian musical life.  Lair, for example, decried the Nashville
sound and the increasing electrification of country music in the 1960s but
then took pride in helping to incorporate the string bass and Hawaiian
guitar into the genre.

Williams argues that such paradoxes in Lair's and Knott's career demand
that scholars rethink their conclusions about these individuals and what
is "genuine" in music.  "In the end," Williams asserts, "the issue was not
about authenticity but audience and a generation's popular tastes" (p.
173).  Knott's folk dance revival and family entertainment conflicted with
the differing goals of the folk revival.  Similarly, Lair fell behind the
trends once television damaged the popularity of country music radio.
Lair and Knott increasingly retreated into the trope of authenticity
during their later years, convinced that their creations, in contrast to
the folk revivalists, were accurate and traditional representations of
folk music despite their obvious technological and cultural manipulations.
 To her credit, Williams consistently cues her readers to Lair's and
Knott's ambiguous relationship to authenticity and commerciality.

The author's careful parsing of this ambiguity allows for a fair judgment
of their work.  Whereas scholars of the folk revival might portray them as
masters of artifice, Williams suggests that musical purity remains
elusive.  Indeed, she echoes David Grazian's discussion of authenticity by
asserting the unavoidability of artifice in any portrayal of folk culture.
 "Despite exhortations to folk artists to act and dress naturally," she
writes in her final chapter, "… we know full well that the most successful
participants are those who figure out how to stage their own culture" (p.
181).  Lair's and Knott's supposedly tenuous ties to "real" folk and
country only serves to reinforce Grazian's point about the losing struggle
of authenticity to recover any semblance of reality.  All folk
artists--whether they played in 1960 at the National Folk Festival or the
Newport Folk Festival--constructed their own realities.  From this
perspective, the manipulations of Lair and Knott and someone like Alan
Lomax, who paraded Leadbelly around in prison stripes in order to make him
appear more "authentic," are actually quite similar.

Aside from her astute observations about authenticity, Williams raises two
other salient points toward the end of her book.  First, she suggests that
the scholarly distinction between folk and country music, as advanced by
Bill Malone and others, should be reassessed.  She challenges the
prevailing argument that Harry Smith's _Anthology of American Folk Music_
(1952) made the country genre acceptable to folk audiences.  She provides
several examples of Alan Lomax embracing country.  She also mentions that
Knott and fellow folk festival organizers frequently combed hillbilly
radio for talent.  Similarly, John Lair's career challenges the standard
interpretation.  "Of all the early country music radio entrepreneurs," she
posits, "no one had their feet more firmly planted in the folk realm than
John Lair" (p. 178).  The author's other important point involves her
rehabilitation of Lair's image.  She argues that Lair does not deserve his
reputation as an exploiter of talent.  She admits that he profited from
the work of others and could be miserly, but at the same time, he created
many opportunities for inexperienced performers, which often set the stage
for their later successes.

Such insights raise _Staging Tradition_ above the level of a standard
biography.  Occasionally, the demands of telling Lair's and Knott's life
story causes Williams to lose her focus on the subjects of staging and
authenticity.  I found my interest waning during the final third of the
book, as Lair and Knott struggle--mostly unsuccessfully--to remain
relevant in their fields.  Nevertheless, Williams's excellent concluding
chapter returns to the book's themes and drives them home.  The author
does more than recall the lives of two key innovators in the staging of
folk music; she succeeds in drawing out the ambiguities of that staging.
She recognizes the trap of authenticity while also demonstrating that we
must continue to study why and how it was constructed.  Aside from its
target audience of folklorists and musicologists, this book deserves a
wide readership among historians of southern and Appalachian music and
culture.

Note

[1].  David Grazian, _Blue Chicago:  The Search for Authenticity in Urban
Blues Clubs_ (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 2003), 10-11.





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