[Bill Vanaver and Livia Drapkin are well known to people in the folkdance world as leaders of the Vanaver-Drapkin Ensemble, which performs tightly choreographed compositions involving everything from Appalachian clogging to Greek and Balkan line-dances and English hornpipes. Bill is also a banjo-picker of some renown, having played with a large number of people from Utah Phillips to Tracy Schwarz. Both are currently involved in a new play based on the Arabian Nights, and are planning a new production revolving around the medieval version of the legend of Orpheus, Sir Orfeo, in which the hero returns safely from the Celtic otherworld, having successfully rescued his queen, Heurodis. The Vanavers make a fascinating couple, and when we got the chance of a flying visit with Bill, en route from Washington DC with a Tunisian drum that he was taking to New York for final rehearsals of the play, we jumped at the opportunity to meet him in the house of our old friend Mary McGlynn in Mt. Airy, Philadelphia. . Our only regret was that we could not include Livia in the discussion, as she was busy rehearsing the dancers in the final days before the play opened. We think you will enjoy the discussion, and might point out some of the similarities in the European experience of the Vanavers to that of Mary Faith Rhoads, our August interviewee. But why spoil the fascinating conversation by interpreting it beforehand? One word is in order, though: Bill got his interviewer started on the subject of medieval drama, and almost turned the interview around temporarily. We kept it, after discussion. It shows another side of Bill Vanaver, his eagerness to learn and fascination with whatever he hasn’t heard of before. Maybe that’s one of the secrets of his success.]

Bill: Boy, listen to that note! [Tapping the drum-head gently, then with gradually increasing force.] You never hear a drum that gives you that kind of note! [Rolling syncopations in varying speeds, head titled and eyes far away.]


John: It took you long enough to get rid of those newspapers it was packed in – what are these, Arabic?

Bill: Tunisian. We got this on the State Department tour we just came back from, and it just arrived. Isn’t that a beautiful sound? [A final series of rolls, and the drum is laid aside, regretfully.]

John: When did you get involved in all of this?

Bill: I got involved in folk music at a camp called Circle Pines, in Michigan, near Kalamazoo. It was a cooperative camp, and had been a cooperative farm, back in the thirties. But by the time I got to it, in the fifties, the McCarthy era, it was just a camp.
And Pete Seeger and Big Bill Broonzy were there that first weekend I was there. I was just a kid from Philadelphia then, into rock and roll, but not too involved with what the other kids were doing. The whole thing – you know, the camp was integrated, very socially conscious, and I didn’t have much of that stuff in my background – just a slight bit of it. So I was overwhelmed by it.

John: Sounds like a mind-job.

Bill: Well, it’s still there. I don’t think it’s going quite as strongly. It was basically a family camp, so there were all ages there. You’d work in the mornings – that’s what made it a cooperative. And then there were all kinds of things, besides folk music. There was folk dancing, the real stuff. Then when I got home I took up the guitar, and then I took up the banjo too, after a while. I had a lot of energy. I was really into it. So by the time the commercial hootenanny thing hit, I was more over into the traditional music already. Plus I never stopped folk dancing. That’s how I got into the foreign stuff, because with dancing, you don’t have to know any language or anything. Just the steps.
That’s what got me involved in foreign music too.

John: Was Ethel Raim there? Bill: No, I didn’t meet Ethel Raim until quite later. At Fox Hollow, I think the first – no, the second Fox Hollow Festival. I got to know her – I got to studying Balkan singing styles with her. And then I eventually started accompanying the Pennywhistlers. I was still performing basically American stuff on my own. But it crept in more and more, and then I went to the Balkans, just decided to go. I was in art school at the time, Tyler in Philadelphia. I went to Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, because that’s what I was interested in. I wasn’t involved in Greek stuff at all, then. John: Did you ever get involved with Dick Crum? Bill: Oh, yeah! Well, sure. I went to a lot of folkdance festivals, and I guess he knows me by sight. John: I was in a class with Dick Crum, Albert Lord’s first class in the oral epic after he’d published The Singer of Tales. And I said to this chap sitting next to me, "Whew! Incredible book!" And he said, "See that wee man sitting up there with the tufty white hair and the hearing aid? He’s the one who wrote it."

Bill: Who was that?

John: Dick Crum.

Bill: With the –

John: Oh no – that was Albert Lord! It was Dick who pointed him out!

Bill: Sounds like a description of Charles Seeger – hearing aid and all.

John: Pete’s father?

Bill: Right.

John: That’s how a lot of us felt about Lord, too, then. Was there any connection with Dick Crum, who had been involved with the Tamburitzans from Dusquesne, at that time, and your getting into Balkan dance?

Bill: Well, in the same way that folk music split off into a popular, a political, and a traditional music group, folk dancing too split up – almost exactly the same lines. There was a social-recreational type, there was kind of a left-wing type that emphasized peoples getting together, and there was the traditional. And I was into the traditional, and that tended
to be Balkan.

John: Why was that?

Bill: Why? Because Balkan music is the bluegrass of folkdancing. For the age I was at and the kind of temperament I had – it was real fast, with fancy footwork. Just like bluegrass banjo-picking.

John: Virtuoso work? Bill: Right. But it was also done on a line, and that was a great feeling, to dance in a line. John: Tamburitzan partying? Bill: Yeah, it’s the same kind of thing the Tamburitzans do. So there was that aspect to it. So I went to Yugoslavia and Macedonia, and it was really great. I got the feel for it. And a couple of years later I met Livia at a folkdance festival in New York. She was singing with Ethel at a workshop. So we got together that weekend, and we’ve been together ever since. That’s about seven years ago. John: Did I congratulate you on your marriage?

Bill: Thanks. I’ll pass it on.

John: Tell me a bit about Livia’s background, since she’s not here to defend herself.

Bill: Oh, she’s been singing and dancing since she was little, in different contexts. She was the head of two companies doing Israeli dancing, in New York, and she went to the NYU School of the Arts, studying modern dance. And she studies with a woman who’s 87 years old. It’s the "Chechetti" – I think – technique of ballet. This woman who’s 87 – she’s incredible. It’s so hard to find really good teachers. She was a recipient of a CAPS
-- Creative Arts Program Services – fellowship, and was the assistant director of the Israeli Folk Dance Festival at Lincoln Center for two years. She sang with Zenska Penska -- like the Pennywhistlers, but a little more traditional. And I should interject that when we met, I began writing music for her choreography, and we created this festival company that does modern and folk dancing.

John: The Coming Together Festival?

Bill: Right. I think we’re now going to call it the Vanaver Caravan – it’s a little shorter.

John: It’s got a nice zing to it too.

Bill: Right. Let’s see – that was seven years ago we met. And just a couple of months before we met, she’d already signed up to go to Greece, to study modern dance on the islands. She has a background in folklore as well as dance. And I said, "Look, I have to play in Mariposa, and I’ll come right over after Mariposa." I went to Greece, and met her there, and she was already dark brown by that time, really relaxed, and I was still filled up with all that city life – she’d already been there for a month already. And we left there and went to Crete, because we wanted to get into more folk music. So in Crete we were looking for these musical instruments called "lyra" and "lauto" –

John: They’re used on your Philo album, Landfall II, aren’t they?

Bill: Right. So we couldn’t find them, and finally we were up in Iraklion, the capital of Crete, wandering around, and we asked these women where to find lyra and lauto, and they said, "Ah! Lyra and lauto! Nikos, Nikos!" They took us to this house, they knocked on the door, and this beautifully angelic guy came out – incredible charisma, he looked like Christ, actually – and he invited us in and started to play for us. See, they thought we wanted to meet a lyra player! We met his wife, and it was really nice, and wile we were there he got a phone call, and his wife said, "Koh-lumbi-ya!" And he got a call from Columbia Records – we’d met one of the two or three most famous singers in all of Greece just like that!

John: It sounds a bit like Mary Faith Rhoads story about how she met French musicians in Paris. Bill: He gave us a note to meet Yannis Markopoulos – who has a song on that Philo record. At any rate, he got me into really composing. In the Summer we’d come back and stay with Markopoulos whenever we were in Athens. So we have two real homes in Europe. One is in Athens, the other is in England, where we stay with this director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, David Jones. We met David and Sheila Allen at Yannis’ house in Athens, and when we got off the plane in England there had been some royal screw-ups in our booking, and we were stranded. So we called him, and they came and rescued us. Markopoulos had been in England the year before, writing music for plays, and that was that connection. So they rescued us, basically, and we stayed with them, and went around to folk clubs and so on. We met a lot of people that way, too. Stefan and Liz Sobell, that’s the way we met them. I decided I wanted to go to a festival in Tynemouth, and there was a guy on the train, Dave – who turned out to be Dave Richardson, from the Boys of the Lough – but we stayed at his place, and he took us to meet Stefan and Liz, who were living at the Blackgate Bagpipe Museum in Newcastle. So we got there, and met Jules and Janet Schneider, and they introduced us to the Boys of the Lough – and there was this guy Dave. So that’s more or less a quick sway of describing how we got to where we are now, in terms of the people we connect with and the kinds of music we’re trying to do.

John: Pretty quick, I’d say.

Bill: Well, I’ve been trying to keep three heads together, in terms of what we do. We’ve got our own performing, just Livia and I, and then there’s the company, and now I’m trying to write music for movies. Because everyone knows how hard it is to make a living from just singing folksongs.

John: If I can say it, you remind me in a lot of ways of David Amram – that energy. And he’s got a lot of experience writing for movies – The Arrangement and so on.

Bill: Well, it’s something a bit different. Last year, Kermit Love, who does the puppets for Sesame Street, made a puppet film for a pharmaceutical firm, about pinworm, which infects kids, mostly. It’s a film about how you shouldn’t be embarrassed if you have an itch, and how you should tell your Mommy – it’s really a film about embarrassment, and I think it’s really good – quite apart from the pinworm thing and they want to sell the drug. It’s really about kids who are too embarrassed to say anything to their parents, and I think that in many families people probably transmit their uptightness to their kids, even when they don’t mean to. And it’s a great puppet – funny! – and it takes six people to move it! Anyway, I did the music, and they’re really very happy with it, and now I’ve got two more films to do the music for. At the same time, somebody asked me to do music like the Thirties for a film about the WPA. And of course right now the play is taking up most corners of my mind. It’s opening on Wednesday, for a three-week run in New York. I imagine it’ll be closed down there by the time this appears in The Folk Life. Though it could run again, of course, if it gets good reviews. I’ve got a lot of faith in it, I mean we’ve been working on it for two years now, almost daily. I think it’s really good this time. Last time you weren’t really sure whether you were supposed to be living in a fantasy, or with these people who were actors who were telling you a story. It’s no longer the same thing – as far as believability goes, it’s no longer supposed to be. It’s right upfront, really Brechtian. You’re really conscious of these people in front of you – it’s very like folktale in that sense.

John: My doctoral dissertation dealt with that. The alienation effect in medieval drama.

Bill: No kidding!

John: Oh yeah. The argument runs that if you’re playing Christ, for example, you could be regarded as trying to take the place of Christ – and that’s the crime for which Lucifer fell, that’s blasphemous. So you have to get it right upfront – this is only a game, it’s only a play. That was also one of the problems with the Puritans and Elizabethan theatre, later – boys pretending to be women onstage was wicked transvestitism. Well, if it’s recognized as only a play, that removes that objection. Or it should, although it didn’t stop them from closing the theatres in 1642. V.A. Kolve wrote a book, The Plaie Called Corpus Christi, about this – an application of Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens to medieval drama.

Bill: So, in other words, in the Middle Ages they didn’t want believability either?

John: Well, they were opposed to an illusionistic theatre, I think. It’s Brecht’s didactic use of the theatre, too – the audience isn’t supposed to be lulled asleep.

Bill: Well, that’s an interesting argument towards the archaic approach to art. We tend to think that when another culture does a face or whatever in a non-photographic style, that they couldn’t do the other. But obviously that’s a ridiculous argument. If you look at Egyptian art, half of it is "archaic," the other half is totally photographic.

John: Yeah, it has nothing to do with ineptitude. In fact, it’s a very sophisticated art, which the Cubists picked up on in their fascination with so-called "primitive" art.

Bill: The reason we’re doing that – you know, it would be very interesting for you to see this play. Because we’re coming out and very deliberately asking for people’s approval. I know, actors are always doing that! But quite openly we go out there and we ask people to like us. The play starts, and while the overture is going on, they build the set out of cardboard. The play turns on the story of the hunchback. He’s been killed, and everybody’s blaming everybody else, and the judge says, "You’re all guilty, and I’m going to kill you all." And then they’ll say, "What a fitting end to the story of my life!"
And the judge, who’s a story-addict, says, "You’ve got a story?" And he starts telling the story of his life, so everybody wants to tell the story of his life, to get them off the hook.
And that’s essentially the story of the Arabian Nights, as we’re doing it. There’s another part of the story, called Scheherezade, that we’re not doing this time. The last time we did it, with the story of the hunchback embedded within it. But it didn’t work for us, so this time we have the hunchback story containing the others. And this thing with the audience is related to that. Whenever in the play something happens and someone in the audience laughs, the actor has the option to back up and do it over again, and re-connect. And they’re very skilled at that – these actors are just right for that approach.

John: It reminds me a lot of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, where the judge, Adzak, is a scoundrelly peasant who’s elevated to the judgeship during the Revolution. And one of the cases he’s asked to judge is between the rival claims of a peasant girl who has been protecting a little boy, named Michael, who’s the natural son of a landlord, and the landlord’s widow, who wants the child back so she can make her legal claim to the estate.
So he has to do a Solomon, this scoundrel. And the whole thing is told as part of a communal celebration of the harvest.

Bill: And the audience is part of the celebration. John: Right. The audience in the theatre is like the audience onstage, sitting in judgement of the rival claims. Theatre like that is clearly using the stories for didactic purposes. Bill: Yes, I think you could say there’s a certain didactic purpose in what we’re doing too. In respect to the play, there’s a lot of themes on the Arabian Nights. And the ones we’ve focussed on are sexual craziness and religious persecution. John: And human cowardice. Bill: Exactly. It’s a satiric play, about how the lower parts of people take them over, basically, so they never reach for the higher. And of course Livia and I have been working on a piece which is based on the medieval "Sir Orfeo." Are you familiar with that? John: Are you kidding? This is funny – in the Journal of American Folklore, Summer of 1974 or ’75 I think it is, I have a piece in there about "Sir Orfeo as Return Song." Bill: No kidding! Wow – that’s really funny. John: Sure. See, as a Return Song, there’s a resurrection, Orpheus doesn’t die or lose his wife, he comes back to his kingdom, so he’s like Odysseus, in that sense.

Bill: Do you understand the relationship between the two?

John: That’s what the article’s about – the argument is that you’ve got a classic old Indo-European Return Song, appearing in the Odyssey and also in "Sir Orfeo." Your hero returns in disguise, telling false tales, being recognized by the worthy in the end after he returns to his palace, to the marriage that ties up the whole thing.

Bill: So it a way it’s much closer to the Odyssey than it is to Ovid’s Orpheus?

John: Oh yeah, much closer. You get the same thing in other medieval romances, like King Horn and so on. When you mentioned the Balkans, I was thinking that Albert Lord has cases of exactly that patterning in his Serbo-Croatian Heroic Songs. "The Captivity of Djulic Ibrahim," for example. Studies of these Balkan stories, using the same patterns as in the medieval poems and the classical Homeric epics. It seems to me that they’re passed along in oral tradition, surfacing as folktales, romance, epic, and so forth.

Bill: What level do you think they were transmitted – do you think it’s a bardic situation?

John: I wouldn’t know how you would tell the difference. I think it’s the same story-stock, whether you’re dealing with princely minstrels or gypsy vagabonds. And I think it may go back to mythological tales of the gods and the otherworld. The same place where the Dead-and-Rising God came from.

Bill: The god, not the hero?

John: The god transformed into the hero in course of time – Gilgamesh become Odysseus.

Bill: Did you ever read Joseph Campbell?

John: Sure.

Bill: Well, his wife runs the theatre where our play is going to take place.

John: It’s a small world.

Bill: It’s funny how everything comes together. I mean, you’ve obviously got these interests, in the ancient mythologies and in modern folklore, what’s happening now.

John: I don’t think we should make these divisions. Distinctions, maybe.

Bill: Right. I know, there’s a different feel about it, but the one learns from the other. I mean, Livia and I were doing these theatre pieces, and they’re very spaced out, science fiction, and one of them has Stonehenge as a setting, it’s called "Bird Among the Blue Stones." It’s based on a Robert Graves poem, a Celtic charm that he translated or reconstructed. And these people were saying "Oh boy! Vanaver’s… not the same old banjo player!" And they just couldn’t handle it. And people that knew Livia thought it was weird – why doesn’t she just stick to dancing? It’s a hard attitude to fight.

John: But then you run across something like the John Edwards Memorial Folklore and Mythology Foundation, and that’s exactly the point. There shouldn’t be that division. Distinctions, all right. I can see mythology as having to do with the sacred and folklore – well, I was going to say the profane, but even that –

Bill: That’s a good question. You could use the profane to mean secular, but even then –

John: Well, that’s how they are sometimes used. But there are studies of the folklore in the ballads, and they focus on the supernatural elements in the British ballads, so it’s a weak distinction.

Bill: Well, Christianity is certainly founded on fusing these distinctions – Jesus being a carpenter, the everyday person being a god.

John: And all through the Middle Ages, the Apocryphal Gospels – which are now regarded as "folklore" – were accepted as embodying the myth, the religious faith.
And then there’s the idea that the ballads are simply versified folklore – if you take a folktale and put it in verse, you’ve got a ballad. Or you can take a folktale and put it on stage, as you do with The Arabian Nights. Are you into this in your version of Orfeo?

Bill: Well, we came at it from a different angle. I remember Martin Carthy sang me a version of "Sir Orfeo," from the London or Caedmon Records. It’s got an old man, I think from the Shetland Islands.

John: Child’s collection has a late 19th century version from the Shetlands.

Bill: Well, Martin’s version has Sir Orfeo in it, with a king in the East and a king in the West. He doesn’t perform it onstage as far as I know.

John: Yeah, the king in the East and the king in the West correspond to Orfeo and the medieval King Pluto – Plutus – of the Underworld. The rivalry is over the queen, who is in the middle.

Bill: No kidding? Maybe I should have a copy of this tape!

John: Oh, you’ll see it in The Folk Life!

Bill: It’s much different though. It starts out with the king in the East, and from then on it’s all Orfeo and the faeries. Orfeo plays a pipe, rather than a harp, which I would keep – I’d substitute that. It’s basically the same – he goes to the woods and charms the beasts.

John: Yeah, in the medieval texts that follows the abduction of his wife, and before he goes to the otherworld to retrieve her. It doesn’t follow the failure in Hades, as in Ovid.
That’s his disguise when he comes back to his palace – he was wandering in the woods all those years, you see.

Bill: The one nice thing that the ballad doesn’t have is this thing with the steward who takes care of his lands.

John: Well, he’s the worthy party to whom one returns in the end, the one who sees through the disguises.

Bill: Well, it also corresponds to the idea in mysticism, in spiritual growth, of finding a steward in yourself, to coalesce all the parts of yourself that you want to keep. Your real "I" – that’s God, or Orfeo – comes to the foreground then.

John: So it’s really yourself that you’re testing?

Bill: The inner growth is the same as the myth. Supposedly, that’s what you’re doing, teaching about inner growth.

John: That’s interesting, because American Indian folktales also teach you about the return from the otherworld. Any religion that only teaches you how to prepare for the otherworld, for heaven beyond, and doesn’t teach you about how to use your hard-won wisdom back home, is only telling you half the story.

Bill: Well, how different is that than Jesus telling you that you must die to the world to be reborn. You become dead to all your petty little likes and dislikes—you know, when I was a child I spake as a child, and then I have put away childish things. And then you find God. It’s the same idea.

John: Does the play, as public entertainment, have this kind of thing as an underlying point you’re making?

Bill: Not really, except in the sense that it’s all there anyway. I mean, you can’t teach that – the play has to exist on many different levels, and it’s there for you if you – I mean, for some people, the play might appeal to their prurient interests! The inner growth idea will miss them. People have to come away with different things, in the end – they have to get what they get. It’s the same thing when you do a song and there are all these things working together, texts and melodies and so on, and people pick up what they can. So many different levels something has to exist on. It’s in the stories, though, it’s not something we’re superimposing.

John: Would that be a basis for your choosing one story over another?

Bill: Maybe somewhere in my own work, but The Arabian Nights is directed by someone else. It’s totally secular in its feeling – totally, totally. I guess when we do "Sir Orfeo" it will be less so. But I think we’ve been very romantic about that, and we want to be less so. Dance tends to be romantic anyway. You’re idealizing movement, and you’re making things bigger, you know. And so we have to find a way to make things more human as well. The kind of dance that we don’t like is the kind that separates you. Though we don’t like the "happening" thing, either.

John: What kind of feedback have you been getting from people in your attempts to bring together these different traditions from different countries?

Bill: It really depends on who you’re talking to. Part of it is people trying to find "more real" things. Though of course one man’s "real-er" is another man’s cop-out, isn’t it? Some of my friends who were rock musicians thought I wasn’t doing the real "going to essence."

John: They were?

Bill: Of course. I was really just being naïve, doing something that doesn’t exist, because they realized that folklore really didn’t exist. But I sang rock, you know! I just never identified myself with it. For instance, we had a Jewish wedding. Five years ago, I might have thought that was silly. But it was great. I don’t believe on these things on a first-level basis, that’s for kids. But it was never intended to be read on that literal level.

John: That seems to be the reason behind a lot of rejection of religion – and of folklore too. If you can’t accept it on that first level, you have to throw it away.

Bill: But surely the people who laid it out weren’t that stupid!

John: Not religious adepts!

Bill: This is getting pretty heavy, isn’t it? (Laughter)

John: I agree, and I know we have a lot of ground to cover. About the music, for example. How long have you known Jay Ungar?

Bill: I met Jay and Lyn with the Putnam County String Band. I was with a thing called the Newport, and then the Sing Out! Travelling Folk Festival. It was funded to bring traditional and interpretive music around to all the different colleges, at really low prices. I mean, for a thousand dollars you could have the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Almeda Riddle, Elizabeth Cotton, some really incredible things. That’s where I met them, and started playing with Jay. And Abby Newton played with the first Coming Together Festivals we put on.

John: When did those start?

Bill: That was when I had first met Livia, we put those on. When we came back from Greece – about five years ago, I think. We did one down at the Washington Square Methodist Church, and we did one down at the South Street Seaport, on the deck of that restored whaling ship down there. It was a really nice time. It was a freezing cold night, and with those metal decks the audience was really freezing their butts off. So every few songs or dances we’d get them up to dance around, just to warm up! Our idea always was, with audiences, that we wanted to dance with the audience, not just perform for them.

John: Which brings up something else – the South Street Seaport, I mean. On this Philo album, the first piece, with Jay’s fiddling, is called a hornpipe—

Bill: Yes, but this piece isn’t really a hornpipe! It’s got more of a Latin feel to it for some reason – I don’t know, it reminds me of some early Alec Guinness movie…

John: "Our Man in Havana"?

Bill: That’s the one!

John: Why is there the sequence there is on the album – the alternation of Greek music on Side 2, for example?

Bill: Well, there wasn’t always an intellectual reason – we’d just recorded about one and a half times more tunes than there are on the album, so we just tried to make it a composition. Sometimes it’s because of a big change from one to the next, sometimes it’s a link because of the meaning. In the past few years we’ve done a lot of change-change-change, now we’re getting more thematic. Sometimes if we had three Georgian songs, we’d spread them out over an evening. Now we tend to put them together, to form sub-structures in an evening. And this record isn’t just background music – it isn’t music to do something by.

John: Well, I was looking at "Georgia, USA" and "Georgia, USSR"!

Bill: Oh, right! I think those two, Uncle Dave Macon and the other Georgia one, work well together.

John: I was interested in the Uncle Dave Macon, "From Earth to Heaven," condemning the car, because on one of the County Records’ Early Nashville String Bands albums, he has a song praising his "Henry Ford car."

Bill: Praising the Ford car? That’s funny, because most of his songs about cars really oppose the automobile, because he ran a freight wagon business. That’s an interesting shift.

John: And I see the Georgia, USSR, song, "Netavi Gogo," is listed as "traditional." Where did you hear that?

Bill: From a group of records put out by a Soviet company, which have a booklet with the words and everything. They’re by a Georgian woman, Mrs Somaya, who helped us with the pronunciation and everything. Usually, we like to make sure that whatever song we sing in another language, we could sing it to the people from that culture too. Most of our Greek music is pretty easily appreciated by Greeks. Though I feel more at home with the Appalachian music and feel more able to take liberties with the material, because I know the idiom better.

John: You know, it’s a different definition of "folk," when you’re dealing with someone who’s within one tradition –

Bill: You mean, comes out of a tradition?

John: Right – as opposed to someone who crosses from one tradition to another in their performance.

Bill: What I feel about that is that it depends on where you are from. There are a lot of folk musicians who are familiar with different folk idioms. There are people like gypsies, especially, who can play in many, many different folk idioms.

John: I hadn’t thought of that case. I was thinking of Aly Bain, steeped in the Shetland folk tradition, yet willing and able to play with Paul Siebel on Hank Williams songs at Mariposa. Or Lou Killen, singing Delta blues to American audiences as a demonstration that British folk revivalists, at least, have heard something other than Child ballads as they were growing up.

Bill: Especially in Europe, with all the migrations. Especially fiddlers – and we tend to think that musicians play this or that out of choice more than anything else.

John: That seems to be David Bromberg’s attitude.

Bill: I wouldn’t go so far as David would. I’ve had this kind of talk with him too, and he tends to see music as just music. Not to judge different musical forms. And to me different kinds of music do have different statements, do make different kinds of appeals, have different psychological statements, work on various levels with different parts of the personality. So I’m apt to find myself making value judgements on that.

John: Well, David had a July interview with Folkscene Magazine, out in Los Angeles, and he does make that point too. He talks about the different disciplines that underlie each kind of music – how, for example, jazzmen used to sneer at rock-and-roll, saying anyone could play that stuff, but when they tried it, it just came out "wimpy" – like jazzmen trying to play rock-and-roll.

Bill: Absolutely. And I think David would go for quality in any of them, because he has just excellent musical taste. I don’t think we’re presently talking about quality, but kind, you and I.

John: I think so, yes. But it does seem like a difficult feat, to immerse yourself in another culture, such as the Greek or Balkan music you deal with.

Bill: Yes, but in some ways it’s not so different. I mean, the skills involved in singing an old American hymn – you know, the real "high lonesome sound" of Roscoe Holcomb and that kind of singing – is not all that different than in Greek singing. Certainly they’re closer to each other than either would be to modern "pop" singing.

John: Why would that be?

Bill: Because of the placement – the vocal styles are not all that different. The style that goes through non-commercial Western – and Eastern, from China to India – music, all have the same basic vocal styles.

John: That’s not a matter of the scales that are used?

Bill: No, it’s a matter of the styles, the vocal production. Now, many of he scales we have in the old styles are Byzantine in origin. But when you think of a scale, there’s more than a scale – in Greece you have "droma," the same as raga in India, or macams in Arabic music. And in the higher art forms, in classical Indian music, you find the ragas – they don’t think in terms of ragas in their folk music. And it’s the same in Turkey or in Persia, or in Greece, even in the church. They think of these musical "modes." They’re things like, you can go from "doh" to "me" – but you have to go down to "ray" before you can go on to "soh." That kind of thing. And the ways you can ascend and descend, that’s a set rule, and any melody you write. It follows one or another of them, or a combination – fro the same psychological reason they were created in the first place. And especially the older ballad melodies follow them closely. So you find some of the older ballad melodies being exactly the same as Greek folk melodies. And most of the successful folk melodies – "This Land Is Your Land" – follow the same sequences.

John: Sandy Paton, talking about the ballads that he picked up on Beech Mountain, in North Carolina, noted that some of the old, old singers sang in ways that the younger singers simply couldn’t. Bill: Exactly. John: They’d flatten out the melodies to fit popular songs – Bill: Of course, and they’d add a vibrato or something – John: They’d drop off grace notes and so forth. Things that were natural for the older singers. Bill: Sure. This kind of ornamentation is quite European, in fact. It goes all through European music, and it’s difficult to gain an appreciation for the one when you have a musical language that’s geared to another. John: What about – I took a devil’s advocate position not too long ago, half-joking, that you shouldn’t learn to read music because you’d have to filter your perception of folk music through a standard musical notation which wasn’t made for that.

Bill: H’m. Well, I don’t know as I’d go that far. I wouldn’t argue that you shouldn’t learn to read music. In my case, it only helps me to identify more quickly the ornament I want, for instance. I mean, almost anything can be written in notes – at least on the same level as you could perceive teaching someone about it. But I would certainly recommend oral transmission along with it.

John: I was just reading a book on blues piano, where the author points out that there are certain notes in the blues which simply don’t exist in your standard piano tuning on your standard piano keyboard.

Bill: Right, which is exactly why they have to hit two keys at once to get "in between the notes" – the quarter-tones. Which is also true of ballad singing, they do sing in quarter-tones there. And these same quarter-tones are also perceived in Byzantine music and in Arabic music. But we don’t know how to identify them in terms of the discipline itself, the set of rules, which is lost. But they still sing in the same quarter-tones, because you can go to Greece and hear the same tones and the same melodic type.

John: Has that been transcribed?

Bill: I’m sure there have been papers about it, but I don’t know with what kind of orientation. You know, some ethnomusicologists are more concerned with the vocal "coloration," and they measure everything on a computer in terms of what vocal bands are "happening" at given points. The notation really varies, in terms of what people are interested in. But that’s an interesting subject. Diffusions from East to West, particularly….

John: Assuming one is trained in one vocal tradition, how does one pick up another?

Bill: Well, what I’m saying is that they are the same tradition! Deep down, they’re the same, and if you get deep down, if you get into various traditions, you see what are the various idiosyncrasies, and what are the general things that go right through them. And of course we’re fortunate to have so much represented – even in Western music, there are such similarities to say, Indian music, that go right through. There are pentatonic ideas that go right into it, and influences from the American Indian, and there’s the whole African influence on our pop music.
John: I was thinking of American country music, and the direct influence right through from the Appalachian versions of the English and Scottish popular ballads….

Bill: Well, that’s the same all over. It’s the difference between plain home cooking and McDonald’s. Some of the differences have to do with access to the media – media and technology have a big influence on the styles. Also, the commercial, hard-sell approach, grab-the people-quickly approach. And the kind of time that people have, or that they live in. I don’t mean in terms of the times, but the times that people have. I mean, for instance in the ballad thing people are more relaxed, you have more of a horizontal approach. When you’re listening to the Beatles, it’s immediately changed to grab-you, grab-you. It’s a different psychology when you sing the ballads – although of course ballads can turn into a one-up-man-ship thing too. People trying to impress you with how many different ones – whereas in folk cultures I would imagine people singing the same ballads for years and years. Which is one of the things that attracts me to it.

[But despite that, the times were upon us, and he did have to run; rehearsals in New York were calling, and then the play itself…. So endeth the reading of the original text, from The Folk Life Magazine, in November 1977. To check on how Bill and Livia and the Vanaver Caravan are doing now, as of July 2001, go on over to their website – how can you miss the Vanaver Caravan? – and check out their new CD, Pastures of Plenty, based on the work of Woody Guthrie. They’ll be doing the show based on the CD – or is it the other way around? -- with Arlo Guthrie in the not-too-distant future. I bet Lila Downs would love it.]