SUGGESTED LEDE: Tonight, in Athens, Georgia – a town that calls
itself “the mother of modern music” - there’s a CD release party,
but it’s not a typical one. The music is old – some of it was first
performed more than 250 years ago. Many of the musicians on the CD
won’t be there either; they’ve been dead decades. And the producer
has been working on the album for fifty years.
From Athens, Georgia, independent producer Philip Graitcer (GREAT-
sir) visits with the Art Rosenbaum, producer of “The Art of Field
Recordings.”
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Bed Music – “Trienta-Trienta”
Rosenbaum was a college student, working a summer job at a Lake
Michigan resort hotel, when he wandered by the Hawkhead General Store
and heard Epifanio Sanchez and his friends playing. He had a tape
recorder handy and made his first recording of these migrant workers
celebrating the Mexican Revolution.
That summer, for Rosenbaum, the blueberry fields of Michigan were
alive with music. Besides rancheros and corridos, Southern white farm
families were singing centuries old ballads and playing string band
and fiddle tunes.
Bring up music Xfade Darling Corey
As a college student in the 1950s, Rosenbaum fell into the Greenwich
Village folk scene, and when musicians like Pete Seeger advised him
“Don’t learn from me, learn from the folks I learned from,” he
searched for traditional musicians. Thus began Rosenbaum’s fifty-year
old love affair with traditional music, music of sometimes centuries-
old origin passed from generation to generation by singing and playing.
ACT: ROSENBAUM talking about traditional music.
Rosenbaum’s subjects are preachers and dishwashers, prisoners and
bootleggers who learned their music in the oral tradition from their
grandparents or in their communities. But Rosenbaum, the artist,
draws and paints them, capturing the unusual, the traditional, the
eccentric onto huge canvases.
[We’ll continue with Rosenbaum talking about finding traditional
musicians. We’ll move on to a scene where he’ll jam with Sister Fleta
Mitchell and/or sisters Mary Lomax and Bonnie Loggins. Then we’ll
talk with Rosenbaum about how he began drawing and painting the
musicians and how they and their music became intertwined in his art.
Perhaps we’ll add a museum/art critic to describe a picture.]
