Interview of Anthony Seeger

Today is February 2, 2012. This is Alex Cline interviewing Anthony Seeger in his office, soon not to be his office, here in the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. We’re overlooking the Inverted Fountain here, down kind of tending towards south campus, and it’s a nice sunny day. Good morning.

Good morning.

It’s a pleasure to be able to do this and to start these sessions. We’ll get as far as we can with the time that we’ve got.

Okay. Sure.

I know you’re very busy leading up to your departure here. We always start at the beginning, so I’ll just start with a simple question which is always the first question. Where and when were you born?

I was born in New York City in Manhattan in a hospital, I think in Greenwich Village, where my family was living at the time. I was born on May 29th, 1945. My father was not serving in the army; he was a conscientious objector, so he was at home. So I preceded the baby boom a little bit, because, in fact, he was at home. So I was born before the baby boom and spent my first years there.

Before we get into your memories of childhood and your neighborhood there in Greenwich Village in the late forties and into the fifties, we’ll talk a little bit about your family background.

Sure.

Your family background is actually better known that probably almost anyone I’ve interviewed, a lot of illustrious people in your family, all pretty much in the music field. Let’s start with your father, if you can tell us who he was and what you know, which I know is a great deal, about his family background.

Actually, I know quite a lot about my father’s family background, partly because the Seeger family talks about it a fair amount, and actually not only does it talk about it, but my great-grandfather wrote a six-hundred-page memoir, my great-grandmother wrote a fifty-page memoir, and then a bunch of scholars have then written about their children, Alan Seeger, Charles Seeger. And then, of course, my uncles Pete Seeger and Mike Seeger both have biographies, at least one. So, actually, I usually refer people to the books. When people ask me questions about my family, I say, “I’m just a member of the family. I’m just here.” Other people spend their lives studying this family. We trace the Seegers in the United States back to Karl Ludwig Seeger. Actually, I was talking about this in a lecture the other day and actually had a family tree.

Oh, wow. You have some genealogy here.

Karl Ludwig came from Germany. He was a doctor. He arrived in 1781 or ’87, depending on how you read the number on the piece of paper. And married, and his wife died in an epidemic there, so he moved to New England, and ever since then sort of the Seeger family, our part of it, has been based up in the New England area, New York area.

His son was also a doctor in Springfield, and his son had three sons of his own, including Charles Louis Seeger, which is Karl Ludwig Seeger translated into English, who was my great-grandfather, and his two brothers. Charles Louis Seeger began by working in a bank and then sought his fortune in Mexico and made his fortune in Mexico and then worked in Cuba and Paris. He managed to survive both the shelling in the Mexican Revolution and the Siege of Paris in the First World War and married Elsie Adams, who was descended from a whole line of very deeply Bostonian New England families.

Adams is about as Bostonian as you can get. [Laughs]

That’s right, it’s about as Bostonian as you can get, and she sort of viewed the world from that perspective. They had three children: Charles Seeger II, or Jr., I guess it is, that was my grandfather, who we’ll be talking about later; Alan Seeger; and Elizabeth Seeger. Alan Seeger, born in 1888, became a poet, and he went to France to hang out with all the other poets in France after graduating from Harvard and spending a couple years in Greenwich Village. When the Germans attacked France in 1914, he joined the Foreign Legion, the legion of foreign-born people who were going to help France fight the war, and died on July 4th, 1916, before the United States entered the war, in a battle. He wrote a poem just before he died called I Have a Rendezvous with Death, which said that he was going to have a rendezvous with death, and he did, and so it sort of shot him to fame, and most of his poems were published posthumous. But it did make him a kind of hero to a whole generation of people between the wars, right at the very beginning. So as I grew up, people would always often ask me if I was related to Alan Seeger.

His younger sister, Elizabeth Seeger, was a young woman, educated at home at first and then went to Brearley School and then did not go to college. Women didn’t go to college much, as I recall, in those days. But she was a very educated woman who then became a schoolteacher at the Dalton School in New York City and wrote quite a few books herself. She wrote textbooks for children on the history of China, the history of Russia, and she did children’s editions of some of the famous Indian epics, the Bhagavad Gita, I believe, and the Ramayana. So she was a very active, intellectual woman. Then the oldest of the family was Charles Louis Seeger, and he was born in Mexico City, where my great-grandfather was working, and his early years were spent between the United States and Mexico. He went to boarding school in the United States and then went to college at Harvard and studied music, much to his father’s disgust. In fact, his father was pretty disgusted with both of his sons. One became a poet, and the other a musicologist, and that wasn’t what he’d planned. He wanted them to be businessmen, preferably in his own business.

Right.

Charles rebelled against that, and after graduation went to Germany for two years and studied composition and conducting, and then came back to the States and was at the age of twenty-six appointed full professor at the University of California, Berkeley, to start, and he became the first chair of the Department of Music. He created a music curriculum. He had some brilliant composition students.

He then became quite politically active. He was taken by a radical sociologist to visit the migrant workers in the Valley—this would be 1913 or something like that—and was shocked by what he saw and became sort of the cultural arm of the International Workers of the World and other organizations. He would go give lectures on music to the people. As the United States drifted toward war with Germany and entering what became the First World War, we call it, he and a lot of people in California were strongly against it. They thought that we shouldn’t be siding with either side, that we didn’t have a dog in that fight, we should let capitalism sort of die as it was going to and let the monarchies be overthrown and let it go, for which he lost the job at Berkeley.

Ironically.

Ironically, yes. That’s right.

Considering the direction Berkeley went.

So he got a sabbatical, but he got a sabbatical with an invitation never to come back. My father was born in Berkeley, and his older brother, I think, had been born on the East Coast, and his younger brother, Pete, was born after they’d been thrown out of Berkeley. This is all now covered in an excellent biography of Charles by Ann Pascatello. Charles came up with the idea of taking music to the people and built a handmade trailer, house trailer, and drove around playing music concerts for a while.

That’s a memorable—it’s well documented with some lovely photographs, and so that’s a memorable moment for my uncle and my father and my other uncle, because they were stuck in a one-room trailer together for a whole year, with no running water. So it was memorable all around. I’m sure they made themselves quite miserable, along with other people. My grandfather learned a lot.

How old would they have been then?

Let’s see. They must have been—in the photograph it looks like Charles II, that would be my Uncle Charles, would have been about ten, it looks like, and John about eight, and Pete was still in diapers at about four or something like that. They could have been a little older, it’s hard to tell, but it’s around there.

Wow.

I could find those out. I mean, it’s pretty easy. It’s probably sitting behind you somewhere, and I brought them all out. There’s also a biography of my great-uncle, Alan Seeger, I think, Sound No Trumpet or something like that. So my father grew up traveling around and not with terribly permanent places, said he went to lots of different schools growing up. My grandfather divorced my grandmother when my father was in his teens, and later married one of his composition students. So this first family with Constance Seeger, Charles had Charles, his son; John Seeger, my father; and Pete Seeger, the youngest, my uncle. Grandfather then married a second time. He married Ruth Crawford, who was one of his composition students, a brilliant and wonderful composer, and who became very active in the transcription and publications of American folk music. With her he had four children: Mike Seeger, born in ‘33; Peggy Seeger, born in ‘35; Barbara Seeger, born in 1937; and Penny Seeger born in 1943.

At that time, Charles had moved to Washington. He moved there in about 1935 to work with the Roosevelt administration and then stayed on working in the Pan-American Union, Music Division. So my father, like Pete and his older brother, they were all sent to boarding school, partly to get them out of the house and partly because that’s what you did in my family, you went to boarding school. So John went there, and then he went on to Harvard. He said he wasn’t very good at reading, he was sort of dyslexic, and so he decided to major in English so that he could get better at it. His brother Pete started a little later. The Depression had had a very disastrous effect on the fortunes of both my great-grandfather, Charles, and also on the family of my father’s mother, Constance Seeger. So they’d been putting the family through college and couldn’t any longer, and so Pete’s money ran out at the end of the second year. So he dropped out of Harvard and wanted to be a journalist, and, failing that, sort of encountered Woody Guthrie and started to bum around the country, and the rest is history as demarcated there. Pete was much more active with Charles’ second family because he wasn’t that much older than Mike and Peggy, and so he was a teenager when Charles married Ruth, and so he was much more involved in that and became part of sort of the musical part of the Seeger family.

That being said, my father enjoyed music. He apparently taught Pete how to sing harmony. They would go to the beach from wherever they were living, probably in New York, and they would sit in the back of the car and harmonize together. There were memorable trips in which they would just sing and sing and sing, because the three of them could then manage three parts once Pete had learned how to sing in harmony. My father then sang for his entire life. He had learned how to play the guitar and the flute. The flute he gave up, I guess, the way one does give up a classical instrument. If you don’t practice it, it really doesn’t do much good. The guitar, he got a message from Pete at one point, a telegram, saying that Pete had jumped out of a freight train on his trip with Woody and broken his banjo, and could John send him his guitar. So my father sent him his guitar and never took it up again.

Wow.

But he did keep singing. John then, after coming out of Harvard, came out in the middle of the Depression. That was ’37, I mean, things were pretty bad then, and he said there weren’t really a lot of options. He was rooming with his older brother, and they were looking for jobs. His older brother found one, and my father found one in business, which is what his grandfather wanted him to be, was a businessman. So he was sort of trying to help out and found a job working in the credit department of a department store. He and a friend sort of redid the whole credit department and were apparently very successful, and he was appointed a floor manager of the department store after a while, out of the basement and into the store. But he was getting more and more depressed about what the life of a businessman involved, the social life and having to go play golf and doing things that he really didn’t believe in. He decided that life really had to be better than this. He had to do something else.

I did an interview with him before he died, several years before he died. How he made that transition from being a businessman to being an educator, which is what he did for the rest of his life, he did it partly by working in summer camps. Summer camps were very important, especially in the East Coast region, this whole culture of summer camps. It’s very different from the West Coast. People would send their children to summer camps, and they would stay there for a long period of time, for the whole summer, for eight weeks or ten weeks or something like that. It wasn’t just the wealthy people who sent them there; it was also the working classes sent them there. There were special camps for working-class people, and many of them were Socialist camps and some of them were religious camps. Some of them were secular camps. So there were summer jobs. So my father began to work summer jobs at a summer camp named Manumit, which was run by the father of one of his friends from college, Fink, Mr. Fink. Manumit actually literally meant “end of slavery.” It was a camp for working class, for laborers’ children, was I think, the way it was described, and it was, as many of the camps were, fairly radical places. My father was working there with kids, and he met my mother at that camp. I believe it was at Manumit. She was working there, and she was still in college, and they hit it off. They liked to sing together. We have a picture of them singing, singing to campers at that point.

So he worked at Manumit, became engaged to my mother, and then was trying to figure out, well, how do you get a job. He had no training at all in teaching, and so he asked Ben, he asked his former friend’s, his college friend’s father, if he could stay on and teach. He said, “You don’t know how to teach.” So he said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. You need a tennis court. This tennis court’s a mess. I’ll make a new tennis court for you.” So he said, “Okay,” and so my father dug up the court and put down whatever it is and then put down clay. He was good at making tennis courts—he made them later in his life too—and made the tennis court. Then he said, “Well, now what can I do?” The guy says, “You can’t teach. We have nothing for you.” He said, “Well, I could teach shop.” And so he began to teach shop, and in the fall when he was teaching shop he said, “You know, I could start a newspaper. We could start sort of a student magazine here with student writing in it. Would you let me do that?” They said, “Okay. You don’t need to be a teacher to do that.” So he started a magazine, and by the spring they decided that he was a pretty good teacher, because the students were writing amazing stuff for this magazine that was coming out once a month, and so the next year he was a teacher. But as with many of us today facing the strange job market that we’re in, he kind of had to make his own job, too, by going around and convincing people and using the contacts he had to do so, and they were, interestingly, not the contacts of his grandfather, who had all the business contacts; it was contacts through his own college experience.

So he married my mother, and they worked at another camp, and continued to work at camps for the rest of their lives. My mother became a teacher as well, teaching various sorts of things, and they both taught in private schools. So I was born in 1945, and they were living in a fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Greenwich Village, and it was a tiny place. I was put on the porch, which was a very cold porch, because there was no room otherwise. It was basically a one-room bedsitter, and had the bed in sort of as part of the living room and a tiny kitchen. But I was just multi-care [phonetic]. I guess they figured they could just wrap me up and it didn’t matter. So that’s where I spent the first six years of my life, was sort of in that apartment in Greenwich Village. It was a very lively, artistic community at the time. Once the war was over, a lot of people came back, and so growing up when I was a year and a half, or somewhere between a half a year and a year and a half, I was taken to sing Christmas carols at Lead Belly’s house. Lead Belly apparently picked me up out of the basket I was being carried around in and sang me a song, which was “The Grey Goose.” And my father was convinced that that’s the reason why I became interested in music was because I’d such a great time being sung “Grey Goose” by one of the great musicians of the first part of twentieth century. So there we are. We’ve got my mother, we’ve got my father’s history in there, and we’ve got their marriage and my birth. Where would you like to go from there?

What do you know about your mother’s family background?

Mother’s family background. Her maiden name was Paur, P-a-u-r, and her father had recently emigrated from Germany, Ernest Paur, as I recall. Again, I have a letter about this somewhere from her, but since I just moved all my stuff, I’m not sure exactly where it is. Her mother’s father was a musician, and his father, I believe, was a concertmaster of an orchestra in Boston. So there’s music on that side of the family too. My grandfather, Ernest Paur, was also an enthusiastic amateur violinist, as well as a construction engineer, which is what he did, spent most of his life doing. My grandmother, Ernest’s wife, died when I was a year old or so. She died of a heart attack after climbing the stairs to our apartment to babysit for me, so that was a bit of a hard time for my mother.

Wow.

She had a very difficult time dealing with the fact that she may have killed her mother by having her over to take care of me, and it was also the reason I didn’t see that much of that side of the family. My mother had one brother, Ed Paur, and Uncle Eddie, as we called him, was a motorcycle cop for the New York Police Department for a while, and after that, engaged in all kinds of his own sort of self-employment business activities and lived in Long Island. I did see a fair amount of Eddie. He would come by in his uniform and visit his sister in the apartment later, and I also saw him and his daughter. My cousin and I were more or less the same age, so we saw each other a fair amount.

But the other side of the family, Ernest’s second wife, we would see on occasion, but I didn’t see them very often. Ernest would sometimes come down to the house, because he was employed in New York, and we were living in New York, so he would come by and see us, see his daughter. But we weren’t close, in the sense that my parents were also working really hard, so we didn’t have a whole lot of opportunity that I remember, anyway, of seeing all of the other members of the family very often. We didn’t have family reunions or anything like that.

There’s an interesting combination of kind of more upper-class boarding school, college, educated presence and also what becomes this politically concerned with the working class, with people who are less fortunate, and also some interesting decision-making that maybe have been largely inspired by those concerns, moving away from, for example, business. Or even the kind of more lofty goals of higher education in favor of going out and singing for the people or this kind of thing. In your own family, you’re living in this small apartment in Greenwich Village. It’s not the sort of, you know, more opulent lifestyle of the highly educated, more kind of East Coast image that we think of, people going to Harvard and attending private schools. In fact, the whole private school thing versus what I would think might be a concerted interest in public education is also an interesting factor in all this. We’ll probably get more into this later when you get older and become more aware of these sorts of things, but what do you remember about what could have been but probably wasn’t, what could have been an interesting maybe dichotomy or tension between these different influences and sort of streams of influence in your family background, expectations, for example, that may have resulted from that in terms of higher education? You mentioned already that there were dashed expectations when people went into music rather than business. But, you know, your grandfather was certainly very respected and elevated—

He managed to make a living at it, hard times though they were.

Yes.

Yes. I would say the whole Seeger family, back to Karl Ludwig, who actually went to a sort of experimental school in Germany and was a schoolmate of Schiller, and sort of became enthusiastic with the ideas of the philosophy of the American Revolution and the writings of sort of the revolutionaries. That’s what brought him to the United States. So there’s been a belief in the importance of education all along, and that was true even for my great-grandfather, who went into business. He actually had already been admitted to Harvard, but he decided, because of the family situation, he would go start working for $150 a year as a cashier. But he had money to go to Harvard. His mother didn’t want him to take it because it was a gift from Harvard and friends. So, yes, the family has very much emphasized education all along, and my parents thought it was very important. My parents thought it so important that they devoted their lives to it, as did my great-aunt Elizabeth, and as did Charles when he went into teaching rather than just private composing. The 1930s were, of course, a time of tremendous upheaval. A lot of people thought it was end of the capitalist system as we knew it. A lot of people thought that the world was going to change and the United States was going to change radically. Pete said that the Communist Party was doing the important work. Really, it’s not doing it, actually; it was always supporting it. It wasn’t very big and it wasn’t very strong. It didn’t have that much money, but it was always supporting the labor movements. It was supporting the movements for equal rights on the part of African Americans. It was supporting avant-garde composers like Charles. They would meet once a week in a loft. The Composers Collective, I think it was called. A whole bunch of avant-garde composers would meet in an apartment paid for by the Communist Party in New York City and compose music for the coming society and for parades and Labor Day events and things like that.

My father said everybody was associated with the Communist Party then. If you were going to be an activist, they were there. So certainly Charles’ children, as a rule, almost all of them have been politically at least leftist and quite often activist. I think that comes from the life that Charles led, from his firm belief in sort of the importance of breaking the mold of his father and sort of recognizing the existence of and the importance of the suffering of the working classes, and also a reading of Marx and a vision of a former type of life in the United States that really was unjust and should be changed. They didn’t think that just because it existed it had to stay the same, which, I think, continued right down to the present in our family. So, yes, education was very important, and my father got his later job after I was born, I think, through his aunt, Elizabeth Seeger, at Dalton School, which is one of the outstanding progressive schools of New York City and has been a private school. It was founded by someone who started a school in, I think, originally—she was a private tutor and then she was so successful as a tutor, she started a school in New York City. Parkhurst, I think, was her name. Elizabeth had known her, and then she brought John in. As early as I can remember, I would go to—I must have been sort of like pre-nursery school, at Hamilton School, which was another private school but for very young children, where my mother worked, and my father would stay on the bus and go up to Dalton.

But since my mother was working—and she worked her entire life. She was a professional. People sort of stereotype the fifties as when the women stayed home and took care of the kids. That was not my mother anyway, and it certainly wasn’t my family and my experience at all. She said it took most of her salary just to pay the help that would come and take care of me. So I was raised in part by a whole series of wonderful housekeepers. They were virtually all German or Hungarian or Polish, and they were virtually all widows by the time that they were coming to take care of me, and then they would come and spend the day and take care of me. When I started school, they were around when I got back, and that allowed my mother to correct papers and do all the other things she needed to do.

Interesting. The women in your family seem generally somewhat out of the—I don’t know if it was out of the mainstream or not, but certainly out of, as you mentioned, our idea of what women largely were involved with during those days, including your grandmother, who, I gather, started as quite an amazingly adventurous and promising composer in a world that’s very heavily dominated by men, especially then. Let’s start with this, since you were talking about your mother and her work. How would you characterize your relationship with your mother and with the women in your family?

Well, since we sort of started on the women in the family, Ruth Crawford was my step-grandmother. My grandmother was Constance. Constance was a concert violinist, and so she was also a working person and gave lessons [unclear].

Right. I was referring to your step-grandmother.

But Constance’s mother has a very interesting story on her side, because she was married to a medical doctor who graduated from Annapolis and had post-traumatic distress syndrome from sinking a ship in the 1898 war. So she had better ideas for herself, and she had a liaison with a diplomat from—I believe it was Morocco. And when he went back to his home, she picked up, took the kids, dropped them in Europe, dropped Constance in a convent school and her son in a school in Switzerland, and went off and followed him. So we’ve had some fairly strong-willed women in our family. Constance then became a violinist, studied violin and became a violinist, and her part of the family was related to the mayor of New York, and she was very definitely integrated on the margins of the high society of New York City. Ruth Crawford was born, I believe, in the Midwest, in Cincinnati or something, and then went to Chicago and then came to New York to study composition with Charles and eventually married him. But, yes, I would say the Seegers, in my experience, sort of looking at my generation, the generation above, especially, and the generation above that were fairly driven people, and the lucky ones married women who were fairly driven themselves and strong-willed and liked to work and not only helped them, but had a whole career of their own, and that was certainly true of my mother, who had a whole career of her own.

I called both my parents by their names. They were John Seeger and Ellie Seeger, and there was no Mom or Dad or Pop or anything like that, and that was partly because that’s what I heard everybody else calling them. They were teachers, and they were running camps, they were working at camps, so everybody at camps didn’t call them Mom or Pop; they called them John or Ellie. Ellie was a wonderful person, full of life and a sense of humor, but she was also very tough and she could be very sarcastic, and so you sort of had to tiptoe around her sometimes. But I remember her for lots of wonderful things we did together, and the family did a fair amount together. We would all pack up and go to some camp in the summer. But I also remember very much, especially in those early years, I remember Mrs. Gauthier, who was my babysitter—not babysitter, our housekeeper, who did all kinds of things like go shopping, take me shopping, take me out and sort of [unclear]. So in my head I also have a lot of the basic childrearing of my housekeeper, the housekeeper. And she also cooked. My mother hated to cook. The only thing she ever taught me how to make was brownies. It was actually fudge. But the only thing she really liked to make was sweet stuff, and so she was perfectly happy to pay someone else to do the cooking, and we were all perfectly happy to eat it. That went on for at least most of my life.

Let’s see. So here we are in Greenwich Village, and I was really tiny. My parents had a reasonably large circle of friends, largely but not exclusively other teachers. One of their good friends who also taught with my mother at the same school, Hamilton, was a woman named Adele, and she and her sister were living in New York. Her sister was Rita, and their last name was Austin. No, their last name was Oberdorfer [phonetic], actually. Rita married Lee Austin and became Rita Austin, and they had a daughter named Judith Austin. We met when we were three months or something, like when I was three months old and she was a little older, she was a year or something, a year and five months or four months. And I married her many years later.

I know. [Laughs]

So among the relationships that were sort of established were a very close relationship with my eventual wife’s aunt, because they were working together. Then eventually Rita moved out to Pittsburgh with her husband, and Judy disappeared until she came to my family’s camp as a camper. So they had friends, and I met a number of their friends. I had a friend downstairs, Jonathan Hale, whose mother served ginger ale every afternoon. We would have coca-loca parties, they were called, though no Coca-Cola was ever seen on the table. So I had friends in the building. My parents didn’t have time to sort of follow me around all the time, so I was given free rein to take my little toy jeep and go pedal around the block all by myself in Greenwich Village at the age of four, which when you think of Greenwich Village today, you think of the terror that people have of letting their children out of their sight, it’s really quite remarkable of them. My parents had an arrangement with some of the shopkeepers around the block, because it was all ringed by stores in those days, small, small stores, and they would call them up and say they’d seen me go by, and so they had an idea of where I was.

I really liked Greenwich Village. I have memorable memories of going to band concerts in Greenwich in the square there, in Washington Square. That’s where I went to play. That was on Fourth Street, it was just around the corner. I have lots of memories of that period that are quite fond ones. They were hard times. The biggest blowup I had with my family during that time was when I had a piggybank, and all of a sudden I noticed it had gotten light. I said, “Wait. Somebody took money out of my piggybank. What did you do with the money in my piggybank? That was my money.” And they said, “Well, haven’t you noticed we’ve been eating oatmeal for the last four days? We simply didn’t have enough money, so we borrowed some of your money.” I said, “You can’t borrow it without telling me.” So we had this big—so I learned that you couldn’t trust people over thirty, or twenty, or whatever it was. Pretty young. It was terribly memorable to all of us, I’m sure. So they were caught out.

Wow.

And I learned the realities of actually having to share things I didn’t think I was having to share. Then my mother got a job at Dalton School also, the same school my father was teaching at. So when I was six—and this is sort of when I’m beginning to remember things more clearly myself—we moved from Greenwich Village up to Park Avenue on 90th Street, which was then and still is a very fancy part of town. It’s on the East Side on one of the major tony avenues of the city. That’s memorable for a number of reasons. First, it was a big move. Second, it was within a short walk of Dalton, so I didn’t have to take the bus to go to school anymore. Third, we moved in above a man who was having problems, according to my parents, and I had to be very quiet. I had to tiptoe around the house. I couldn’t go running the way I had been clomping around in downtown, because we knew the people downstairs. The person downstairs was a man named Alger Hiss. [Interruption]

All right. Sorry.

So, living in an apartment over Alger Hiss was my first awareness of the political difficulties in which the country was, and as a child, of course, my perspective of it was from about three feet tall and with no idea of what was going on, except that the man downstairs had lots of problems so I shouldn’t make a lot of noise. And he would come up, and the two couples would have long conversations into the night. Anthony Hiss was about a year older than me, their son, and I would play endless games of dominoes while they talked and talked and talked in the night.

Wow.

It’s an amazing old building on Park Avenue. It had a birdcage elevator, sort of one of those things as you go up in it. It had direct current. My father had to install the transformers so that we could run our stuff.

We left after a year. My mother said she really didn’t like having to get dressed up to walk the dog. We had a cocker spaniel at the time, and she said that she felt on Park Avenue she had to get dressed to go outside, and that wasn’t what her idea of a good time was. They had found, in the meantime, a really nice apartment between York and First Avenue on 89th Street, which was in an old sort of former garage, and it had been the garage of the Aga Khan. So it was actually one of the chauffeur’s quarters of the Aga Khan’s garage, and it was a commercial photography studio and processing plant, and above it were four apartments. It had nice, big apartments, and it had long halls so I could run up and down it, and after five o’clock, no one was downstairs, so I could finally run up and down to my heart’s content. The other people in the building, there was a judge who later became involved in prosecuting McCarthy. There was Hal Prince, who was a producer. Actually, the company owned the third one, so there was just three apartments in it, and they were nice, big apartments. So if I remember, I was going into first grade at that point. I was in first grade.

Let me ask, did your family move to the apartment on Park Avenue to be closer to the school, or what was the motivation?

Dalton was on 89th Street, between Lexington and Park. So 90th Street on Park, it was one and a half blocks from school. It was really close. I think they found the other one through—I think Hal Prince was actually a parent at Dalton. So I think the apartment came up, and they went over there. But, yes, so they went up there because it would be closer, and it was a long way from Greenwich Village. It was a long trip up, and my parents never had a car. My father didn’t have a car in New York. They bought a car in the fifties, but they kept it garaged outside the city, because they didn’t need it during the winter for years.

Interesting.

So there I was, I was going to Dalton, too, because—well, if I had been the children of schoolteachers teaching anywhere else, they could never afford to send me to Dalton. It was an expensive private school. But because they were working there, they got a special discount, I assume, and so I went to Dalton. I was an only child. My younger sister wasn’t born until I was ten years old.

I was about to ask that. [Laughs]

So my parents were sort of like a hen with one chick. They were taking very good care of me, and they could also afford to take care of me. I was really a sickly child. I’d been born prematurely and had all kinds of childhood illnesses and things like that, so I was also seeing a fair number of doctors, which was probably costing them a fair amount of money. So there I was in Dalton and in this new apartment.

Let me ask at this point, since we talked a bit about your mother, how would you characterize your relationship with your father and what you remember what he was like when you were a child?

Both my parents were tremendously supportive of any of my enthusiasms, I think, so I think that’s one of the things I remember them both for and owe them an immense gratitude for. I remember when I was young, they used to sing as they drove, when they got the car and started to drive. They would sing harmonies to each other. They sang popular songs. They loved to sing together. They had wonderful voices, and my father could harmonize on anything, and so he would harmonize.

One day I stood up in the front seat of the car—there were no seatbelts—and I said, “Stop! I want to sing my songs!” So they stopped and they let me sing my songs, which, of course, I’m grateful for, but I felt terribly guilty many years later about as they increasingly stopped and insisted that my sister and I carry on. But my father, what I remember especially during these years, living in New York after first grade was that every Saturday we would go out somewhere. I think it was part of the get me out of the house and free up some time for my mother, but it was also because my father could free up the time and would free up the time. So we would explore New York. On nice days, we’d go outside and go to Central Park or take the ferry over to Staten Island or go walk by the United Nations or something or another. And every day that it was not nice to go outside, we’d go visit a museum. I have very fond memories of spending hours and hours and hours in museums, my favorite being the American Museum of Natural History. One of the striking exhibits there at the time—I don’t think it’s there anymore—was you would be sort of in the South America Hall, and there’s a connecting area between two halls, and it would get dark. Suddenly you would turn a corner, there’d be a statue of an Indian shooting up into a canopy that you could actually sort of see the vague outlines of trees, and it was the only part of the museum that had sound in it. You would hear the sound of the rainforest, the calls of birds and falling rain, and I don’t know what all else, but I loved that part. I thought that was the best part, probably because my ears were sensitive and I really liked sounds. That was my favorite. We always had to see that part of the museum when we went, no matter what other part we might also explore.

So we went exploring the city. When I became interested in cave exploring, my father got interested in cave exploring. We explored caves. I was a member of the National Speleological Society when I was in eighth grade or something like that, and we’d go to meetings, which were held in the American Museum of Natural History. So, yes, whatever it was that I was interested in, I got a lot of encouragement to go as far as I felt like going in it. That was actually my parents’ philosophy. When I was four, they bought a summer camp of their own in Vermont, and they went and sort of tried out for a year with the understanding if it worked out, they would buy the camp at the end of the summer or take out a mortgage and buy the camp at the end of the summer. The camp was a camp called Camp Killooleet. It was a very important part of my life from then on, because my parents were both teaching full-time but also running a business on weekends, which they would recruit new campers and visit the parents, set up the camp, hire the people, and then go up there after the school year was over, open the camp, welcome the campers, see them off, shut the camp, write the reports, and go back down to New York and start their jobs. So that meant that they were really doing two jobs, so they were working hard, and it made the time that we actually could do things like explore the city all that more valuable because otherwise my father was a fifth-grade teacher, and he was correcting a lot of papers. My mother was not correcting so many papers. She was, for many years, a second-grade teacher, and that doesn’t require papers, but she’d be doing other things and reports. Private school meant a lot of individual attention and concern about the general development of children.

The idea of the camp was that—I asked them once, “Well, why do you run a camp when you’re already teaching?” And they said, “Well, when you’re teaching, you’re always having to report to somebody else. The school has a board of trustees. As a teacher, you have a principal or head of the department or whatever it might be.” They said in the camp they could try out their own educational theories the way they really thought they should be tried. So they built a camp around the idea that every child can discover things that they really would like to do, and the camp’s whole structure is to help children discover what they like to do, and then give them the means with which they can carry it as far as they feel like going. So if they suddenly discover they’d like to become a potter, they can become a really good potter. Or if they really like to shoot rifles, they can become a really good shot. Or if they like to ride horses, they can become a really good—so the idea was you begin exposing children to a lot of things and then you just sort of give them as much freedom as they want to get better at something. That particular philosophy of education was the way they raised me. Whatever it was I was enthusiastic about, they would get enthusiastic about, helping me carry it further. So I was an educational experiment, too, I think, on their part, and I have no objection.

It clearly worked well.

Worked fine. I was given—I think it was when we moved to 89th Street, but it might have been even earlier—a small record player. It was a 78-rpm record player. Actually, I think it was a Wurlitzer. It was a Wurlitzer for kids. It was built like a jukebox, it had flashing light and bright lights around the edge, and it could play regular 10-inch and even squeeze in, if you were very careful, a 12-inch 78-rpm record. Only played 78s. I was given that with a whole bunch of discs to play, of records to play. Most of them came from a small company called Disc Records, and they included songs by my uncle, Pete Seeger, by Woody Guthrie, some Mozart for kids, and then a whole bunch of other things. I really liked to listen to that record player. I would lie on the floor next to it, and the nice thing about it was that with all those lights on it, it was actually quite warm. So I could warm my hands on it and I could cuddle up to it and be warm, which in New York City in these apartments that are heated by steam heat where the heat all goes to the ceiling, they weren’t terribly warm in the winter, especially if you were lying on the floor. So it was really nice to have it. I could cuddle up to it with my records. There was a moment at which I had this deep embarrassment that actually I preferred the songs of Woody Guthrie to the songs of my Uncle Pete, my father’s brother, and I felt terribly guilty to have to tell him that. But I did. Woody had some amazing songs – memorable among them was one that went [sings]. It’s a whole bunch of questions that are preposterous [sings]. And it ends with the person asking [sings]. Great song, great song. Woody really wrote great songs.

Pete’s song that I remember from that same bunch of discs was something like [sings]. It’s all about the hard life of the farmers, which was fun. It moved right along, it was perfectly singable, and I enjoyed it. But Woody’s children’s songs were just another level of things altogether. Well, I would also borrow my parents’ records sometimes. They had 78-rpm records too. One of them I borrowed was an album—they weren’t noticing. I borrowed the album, something called Talking Union, which was a group of singers called the Almanac Singers, including my Uncle Pete and a number, Lee Hayes, who later joined him in The Weavers, and a couple of others. They were union songs, and I was playing one of those union songs. It was a fairly warm spring day, and I was playing it, and my father came storming into the room, and he slammed the window shut, and said, “Don’t you ever play those records with the window open again.” 1952, I think, ’51, somewhere in there. It really made an impression on me, because he was really angry, and I think he was really afraid.

Right. For sure.

By that time, my Uncle Charles had been unable to find a job in radio astronomy and had to leave the country. He found a job eventually. He tried to find a job, and he was offered a job in Sweden, but the Americans influenced the Swedes, apparently, and convinced them not to give it to him then, so he ended up with a job at Leiden in the Netherlands, spent twelve years there.

My Grandfather Charles, the other Charles, had his passport taken away from him, and since he was a diplomat, he just decided that he couldn’t possibly do his job, and so he had to take retirement when he hadn’t planned to retire. He basically was forced to retire by the State Department because of his writings for The Daily Worker and his activities for the Communist Party. Pete had been blacklisted along with The Weavers, and so they went from being number one on the Hit Parade to not being able to find any gigs anywhere. Pete was attacked in the Poughkeepsie riots. Those were hard times. My old clothes would go to my cousins, Pete’s kids. So the family was feeling the pressure, certainly, and I was fairly bitter about it. I was a fairly angry young kid about what I felt was happening to my family. For many years at Dalton I simply refused to sing the national anthem, I refused to stand up for it, I refused to sing it. Fortunately, being a progressive school, they didn’t care. My father had apparently been in the position of having to argue that the school should not refuse to have the child of Alger Hiss in the school. There was a question about whether Anthony Hiss should be allowed to continue at Dalton, even though they couldn’t afford to send him there anymore because they were having to spend all their money on other things, and my father stood up for him and said yes. So these were times that hit a certain group of people in New York especially hard, New York and California, probably. The artistic community that had been so united before and had all been singing together against Hitler, suddenly it was tremendously divided, with some people collaborating with the House Un-American Activities Committee in its investigation, some people refusing to collaborate with them. One of the notable people who collaborated because they really thought that there were Communists and there shouldn’t be, was Elia Kazan. One of the people who didn’t collaborate was my Uncle Pete, who instead of pleading the Fifth Amendment as many people did when they were asked about their associations, he said, “No, I’m pleading the First Amendment, the right of free association. You have no right to ask any American these questions.”

My best friend in Dalton was Nick Kazan, the son of Elia.

Wow.

My parents never mentioned it to me. Nick said his mother used to— [Interruption]

Okay. We’re back on.

So even though among our parents and the older generation, my parents were pretty careful not to let it influence my own life, since Nick—and I was going to school with people on both sides of this thing. I was going to school with the people who were being denounced and the people who were denouncing, Dalton being sort of a hotbed of the former liberal left and a sort of a bunch of “red diaper babies,” and a lot of my colleagues at Dalton were the children of refugees from the Spanish Civil War. So we were an interesting bunch.

How deep would you say your awareness of these issues really was when you were in school, what your level of understanding was?

Understanding the family I knew completely. Otherwise, I didn’t know a whole lot. My parents weren’t interested in telling me. As I said, Nick Kazan’s mother told him all about how evil the Seegers were, but my parents never mentioned anything about Elia, even though we’d all go down there and I’d meet his parents and we’d get snacks and things like that at his house.

Wow.

So I learned about the extent of it later. The big deal that happened for us and sort of from my perspective in about 19—whenever it was, 1953 or something, ‘54, and when the McCarthy army trials began, and McCarthy himself began to be put on the defensive, my family bought a television set. Before then, all my friends were getting television sets. We had no television set. We were listening to the radio and listening to radio dramas like The Scarlet Pimpernel and Gunsmoke or whatever it was, all these radio dramas.

Wow.

But they got a television for the McCarthy hearings. I mean, that was important enough for them to actually want to see. And it was a great triumph. I mean, I think of everybody—there’s a tremendous satisfaction of seeing the fall of that particular harasser of people and the particular sort of way that people had been encouraged to denounce people, whether or not they had any evidence for it or not. It was a very bad time. It’s one of the bad times in this country, and it made me aware at a young age that this country has a really crazy side, and that was one of them.

Yes, that’s true.

What I was mostly doing was having a good time at school playing with my friends and then spending my summers in Vermont. At first I was a camp pet, more or less, since the camp began at six and went through about thirteen, and so for two years I was just sort of hanging out as a little kid, and then I go to the first cabin at the age of six. My parents were thinking that was really too young to send your kids away for so long, so when I got to be seven, they closed the six-year-olds, and then I was seven for a year, and then the year after I left the seven one, they closed the seven-year-olds. So they sort of closed up the younger camp as I got older, and then expanded in the other direction because they felt that they could do better. They could do more with the children. They had more to offer. They were making the camp a little bigger. But I was definitely—my life revolved around being at camp and at school.

Going back to the music for a moment, you mentioned this Wurlitzer record player of 78s. What do you remember about, if anything, the first music you heard growing up, either in the house or outside the house, maybe before the acquisition of the record player?

Before the acquisition of the record player, I remember clearly, I think it was the New Year’s Eve concert of a band in Washington Square. I was put on my father’s shoulders, and it was a big concert and I thought it was wonderful. I loved it. The other thing I remember is my parents singing in the car. My parents always sang not just in the car; they sang lots of places. They just liked to sing together, and so they would sing. So there was some live music. There wasn’t much recorded sound. I don’t remember listening to music much on the radio. I don’t think my parents did either.

My mother, once record players came in, and long-play records especially, liked Broadway musicals. She liked to clean house to Broadway musicals, when she was cleaning at all. My father had subscribed to the collections of the Record of the Month that would come in of classical music. He’d learned how to play the flute. His mother was a concert violinist. He really did like classical music, and they had a nice collection of classical music records. At camp, all the music was homemade. My parents would sing at camp. Other counselors were encouraged to sing camp music. There’s sort of a long tradition of camp music that sort of follows the traditions of camps, and that’s been part of my life, too, ever since I was little.

What were your opinions of some of the music? I mean, you heard classical music and—

I liked classical music, and I had some of my own, too, that they gave me on 78s. I liked it. I enjoyed it. I later became a real fan of baroque music. I used to have very sensitive ears, and then they would get pained by loud noise unless I was outside. So I never liked the piano; it always was too bang-y inside. And I didn’t really like loud symphonies played loudly. In my youth I was also taken to the rehearsals of the symphony orchestra, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and things like that. They’d have them on the afternoons before performances. When they would rehearse, it was very cheap tickets for children, and so we could go in and listen to those, so I’d listen to those. I was encouraged to start the violin at the age of—fairly young, six or seven, something like that.

Pre-Suzuki.

Pre-Suzuki, yes. It was really uncomfortable.

I’ll bet.

I mean, the violins were much too big. There wasn’t this whole system apparently of starting with quarter-size and then working up. I had to start with three-quarter size, and I was never comfortable. It was always painful. My grandmother was a concert violinist, would come up during the hurricanes. She was living in Florida for most of the time that I can remember, and she would come up during the hurricane season and visit her children, because it was not a good time to be in Florida. So she would come and spend a few weeks with us and a few weeks with Pete, and then she’d go back down. So those were sort of terrifying times when she’d come up and see how I was doing. There would be a great intensification of the lessons when she came. It would be once a week until she came, and then suddenly she was giving me lessons practically every day. So the violin and I never really got along, but I certainly got a chance to give it a good try and to play something on it, and I was encouraged also. I think the first instrument may have been really early was the recorder or something like that. Almost everybody in Dalton got recorder lessons, and then some of us kept on and got private lessons after that. I played the recorder for a quite a long time, then the violin, and then eventually I learned how to play the banjo and guitar and things like that at summer camp when I was a camper, about ten or eleven.

And I read somewhere that you’re left-handed.

I’m left-handed. I think the violin and I didn’t get along partly because the bowing is really critical. The tone that you can get from a violin depends a huge amount on your bowing, and I thought, well, being left-handed was probably a good thing because I could actually finger better, but actually the trick is in the bowing. And I couldn’t stand to practice. Again, because of my ears, I couldn’t stand it. If you can’t get the right tone, you’re getting these horrible overtones that are extremely, extremely painful.

Yes. [Laughs]

So both at home and when I went away to boarding school, I was given a practice room that was maybe half the size of this and built like this with nothing but hard walls. There was nothing in it. It was a storage room. Wow. I just couldn’t stand to play in it.

Wow. Interesting. So you have this stream of the classical influence then, and there’s the folk songs and what we would consider more popular music. What about jazz?

The next playback I got was a multi-standard one that would play 78s and LPs, and that was a few years later. I got a whole collection of records, a Christmas present, a big bunch of small, 10-inch LPs at the time. They were small. I think Pete had bought them all, and so they were all folk music, basically, and it was an amazing collection of recordings. I still have them to this day.

Wow.

They made an immense impact on me. Jazz was—my parents had gone to speakeasies and things like that and they said things.

I was thinking about your ears.

But they never went to jazz concerts. They never took me to a jazz concert, so I never heard jazz at all. But I’d heard of jazz, but in my entire upbringing, jazz was not played or spoken about, as far as I can tell.

Interesting, because that was certainly really happening in New York when you were a child.

It was happening in New York.

You were in the transition from the Swing era to the Bebop era.

Right. Didn’t know anything about it.

That’s amazing. [Laughs]

When you live in New York, there are all kinds of things you don’t do that other people do when they come into town. I didn’t go to that many things on Broadway. My parents did, but didn’t take me for very many. I probably wasn’t particularly interested in going. I went to some concerts, but we didn’t go to massive numbers. We didn’t have a subscription to Carnegie Hall, partly, I’m sure, because of money but partly because they were busy doing other things.

Interesting.

And the same thing held with jazz. We didn’t go to that many clubs either. Even folk clubs we didn’t go to, as far as I can remember.

So what about these records that were so influential?

Well, they were amazing. They were put out by a small company called Folkways Records and another company called Stinson Records, which actually had an agreement with Folkways because Stinson had lots of materials to make albums on, and Folkways didn’t.

Interesting.

There was a restriction on vinyl. So they were Folkways and Stinson. They had some called Folksay, which were amazing. There were a lot of traditional musicians who come to New York and were playing, Josh White and Brownie McGee and Sonny Terry and Pete and Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston, a whole bunch of different musicians all playing sort of together, sort of jamming, basically, in the Folkways studio, and they’re amazing records, great songs, great playing, informal music. I was really impressed by that. I was impressed by Pete Seeger on Stinson things, some amazing songs on it. It’s an amazing—[sings “Go Down Old Hannah”]. It’s a work song about working in the hot sun, telling the sun to go do down, not rise again. That’s an amazing song, and Pete sings it on the album, and he learned it from, I think, a recording that Alan Lomax did in the prisons. Alan also liked the song. It’s an amazing song. So there are some memorable songs on that, and it sort of attracted me to a whole area of American folk music. There are also some great ballads.

My relatives at that point began to give me Christmas presents that were basically their most recent album. So every Christmas I would get an album from Mike, an album from Peggy, an album from Pete, and then some from my parents. So the music that was coming, it was very definitely family music, and so I was raised singing family. The songs of the family were singing, even though they weren’t family songs, since they hadn’t necessarily written them. They had learned them from Library of Congress recordings often. Pete, Mike, and Peggy were all deeply influenced by work that Ruth Crawford was doing in transcribing Library of Congress recordings and putting out songbooks with her transcriptions, which would accurately reflect what people were doing. I think it takes an avant-garde musician to really pay enough attention to what traditional or vernacular artists are doing with their sound. Most people, when they were transcribing the folk music, assumed that it was simple stuff and you could just put it on a piano and play it and it would be very simple transcriptions. Ruth would listen to it. She’d hear things that weren’t “correct.” They were a different musical system. And because she had, first, the ear to think that different musical systems could happen and were good and because she had the musical skills to actually be able to transcribe it, her whole approach to folk music was a totally different approach and one far more admiring and analytic of the musicality of it than most people's.

Wow.

That deeply influenced Peggy and Mike, who grew up around her playing these things over and over and over again and obsessing about how to transcribe them, and also Pete, who, I think, was the first intern at the Library of Congress Folk Archives, because he was paid by Alan Lomax $25 a week or something to come and listen to records. Alan and Pete’s father, Charles, we all think later were sort of in cahoots to get Pete focused on something because he wasn’t making it as a journalist. So they got him focused on actually sort of becoming a folk musician, a musician that played traditional music and excited about traditional music.

Interesting. That certainly paid off.

And it paid off. It worked. Sometimes a little parental intervention sometimes helps, and then that was the case in point, I think.

How often did you see or get to spend time with your uncles and aunt then?

With Uncle Charles, very little time, because he was exiled, basically, in the Netherlands. I never saw him there. I saw him because he came back eventually. I saw his wife because she stayed. And Pete, a fair amount. We have quite a few photographs in the family, the scrapbook my parents made for me, that are taken at Beacon at Pete’s place with us at various ages and Pete’s children at various ages. They’re usually reunion meetings that often Charles is in them, but his children aren’t. My Grandmother Constance is in them. So clearly we were going up there, but that’s not very far. He was living not too far out of New York. And there was no name on the mailbox. People were threatening to burn him out all the time. There was an X on two rocks sort of a ways down the road from his driveway that if you were in the know, you’d know sort of where you should make the next turn, and you’d go up to his house that he built for himself in Beacon. He made himself a log cabin and could live on very little money, which was how he managed to survive the thing, and he also survived it, I think, as he has said, with other types of income coming in as a musician. He was a songwriter as well. Even though he couldn’t be played on the radio, “If I Had a Hammer” certainly was, and “Turn, Turn, Turn” certainly was, and so he was getting royalties, songwriting royalties, from when he himself couldn’t sing his songs to a large audience.

Wow.

So we went up there a fair amount. Their children are pretty much the same age as I am. Their son Danny is within a year of my age. He lives up here in Topanga Canyon now. And their daughter Mika is about two years younger, and then their youngest daughter [Tinya] is almost the same age as my sister, Kate. So we had a good time, and going to Beacon was a nice outing for everybody. It wasn’t just the old folks talking. We got along with our cousins pretty well.

We haven’t really gotten into the birth of your sister.

Yes. Let’s see. So I was ten. I was going to Dalton. She was born in 1955. 1955, I think it was. Yes, 1955, in February. That was sort of a surprise, I gather, to everybody, and I was prepared for it, and I was told all about how I was going to get a little sibling. In those days, you couldn’t tell what the sex was going to be. There was no way of telling those things.

My sister was born, and it was sort of weird having a sister, and she smelled of sour milk, but there she was. It was perfectly nice having a sister, and I had gone through all the critical periods of my life being an old child. It didn’t really bother me having a sister, because by then I had my friends at school and had my own life of music and records. And my mother at that point actually stopped working for a few years, and so she was home a lot more, and she made cupcakes every day, practically. The summer camp was going fine, but it never made much money because it costs a lot to run a summer camp. If you keep it small enough so that you’re actually giving individual attention, you’re actually aren’t making a lot of money at it.

Right. You’re limiting your income.

But it did pay for the car and it did pay for a whole lot of cupcake mix. We’d bring back a twenty-five-pound thing or two of cupcake mix every fall, and my mother would work her way through it, and things that we bought wholesale that we couldn’t finish up by the end of the summer, we were finishing up all winter long. Or they’d buy extra and we’d finish up all winter long.

Now, were you still in that same apartment at this point?

Still in the 89th Street long apartment, so the garage apartment, and there was enough room in there. There was an extra bedroom. There were two bedrooms, so my sister could have one and I could have the other. I was really involved in school, and I really liked school. I was encouraged to like school, of course. Walked to school every day with my father, was about a twenty-eight, thirty-minute walk, and we’d walk there together. I’d call him John until we got to the gates of the school, and after that he was Mr. Seeger. I’d wait until the rest of the school was opened up so I could get into it and read a book.

I really liked English, and I wrote poems and I did lots of work. The Dalton system had something called the Dalton Plan. You were basically given your assignments for a month and encouraged to sort of take on big self-assignments and work away at them. The challenge of the Dalton Plan was that once you got behind, it was very hard to catch up. I remember writing a talking blues in sixth grade that went something like, “You’re behind in your work and you don’t know what to do. You work like the devil but you’re still not through. The teachers, they stare at you, they sneer and they smirk, because they all know you’re behind in your work. You can’t go down to the candy store or fool around with gals, in fact you work so hard that you lose a lot of pals. You know all this, but you just can’t stop. You’re behind in your work, and you got to catch up.” It goes through all the things that happen to you. Finally, “Walk into the principal’s office feeling mighty good, you know all the teachers didn’t think you could. But you’re walking out of the office, you’re still three weeks behind.” In a sense, they created a whole generation of young kids who were obsessed with deadlines and self time management and things like that, which I suppose is probably very good, probably helped me through the rest of my career. But it was a very different kind of school system than most people experienced.

What was it like having your parents in the same school you were attending?

It was a little strange because everybody knew my parents and were taught by them. They were both apparently very good teachers, and so I didn’t get much resentment or I certainly wasn’t teased or anything like that because of it. Even though my father was my teacher, he taught geography in the middle school, and so I had him for a geography teacher, and I did really badly in geography. I don’t know if it was a Freudian thing or if it was simply that I never could figure out where Constantinople had been or where Rome was and all those things. But he would draw maps and I never could figure out how things went. But he did instill in me a great curiosity, and he would tell stories. One of his keys to getting people interested in an area other than their own city streets was to teach about it and then to tell a story, sort of a narrative story, about a family that would travel there, or a story about something that happened there, like the Great Falls in Venezuela and all kinds of things. He was a terrific storyteller. He just would grab the class attention like that, and then that would carry them through the next going someplace else, because there would be a story at the end of it. A lot of people that I’ve run into—let’s see. Wallace Shawn, for example, Wally Shawn, for example, or Jonathan Schell, the China specialist, or a whole bunch of other students remember my father for his storytelling and would tell me over and over again, “Your father’s great. What a great teacher.”

Wow.

Then my mother was also a very good teacher, apparently. And that continued. The entire time I was at Dalton, they were teaching at Dalton. We managed it. I called them Mr. Seeger, Ms. Seeger, or whatever, Mr. and Mrs. Seeger as soon as we got inside. But as soon as we got out, I didn’t. So they weren’t teachers when we were at home; they were my parents. So it wasn’t confusing. It wasn’t confusing to anybody, except perhaps to some of the other teachers. So it worked out. It worked out fine. They were pretty careful not to interfere with the selection of teachers. I think that once they felt badly, I’d gotten a teacher they knew wasn’t very good at teaching math, and they knew they should have pushed to get me into the other class, but they didn’t and felt guilty about it for the rest of my life as I struggled with math.

Wow. So what kind of people were at this school, and maybe similarly or in contrast were around you in the neighborhood that you were living in at the time?

That’s a really good question, actually. People in the school were pretty much the children of wealthy people or the children of important people who weren’t wealthy but they were significant people. They might be famous refugees or something like that. A fair number of them were—Wally Shawn was one. Wally arrived every morning in a limousine. I don’t think there were a whole lot of people at Dalton that arrived in a limousine, but Wally got out of the limousine every morning, and I knew because I was there early and watching everybody show up. And other people were the children of lawyers, and my best friend, Nicky Kazan, was the son of Elia Kazan, and a lot of them lived nearby in the surrounding areas.

There were no school buses. You got there on your own somehow. They were wealthy and they were articulate. There was a fairly large number of New York Jewish families, liberal Jewish families with a huge amount of emphasis on education, a concern about the future of their children as scholars. Being a private school, people who didn’t make it just simply didn’t come back. There were some wonderful, charming, sweet people I really liked, but suddenly they weren’t there anymore. I think it was partly the charming, sweet ones that weren’t doing well, they were clearly told not to come back. So things happen at a private school that don’t happen at a public school, in the sense that a private school can choose who they want and don’t have to keep people if they don’t want them. Discipline was never a question. Our teachers were fairly frightening, I think, to all of us, and they did all kinds of really interesting things. I remember something that set me off, I think probably some of my enthusiasm for anthropology came from a wonderful Jamaican woman who was getting her master’s degree and was teaching at Dalton to subsidize it. She was a historian, and so she had us do debates, so we debated two things. I found debates terrifying because I didn’t like to speak in public until I got my Ph.D. Suddenly, I had a license to do it and then it stopped. But I was sort of a scared kid at class in speaking out. One debate was on the origins of the Civil War, whether the forces behind it were anti-slavery or whether it was simply an Industrial Revolution happening in the North that was sort of marginalizing the South and it was actually an economic system. So that was one debate. I can’t remember which side I took. I remember being very conflicted about it.

Then there was another one which was between the origins of capitalism. Was Weber correct in that it was a religious system and an ethos that came out of Protestantism that made capitalism appear in the form that it did, or was capitalism basically creating the religious system? It was basically Marx versus Weber for eighth-graders.

Whoa. [Laughs]

That was pretty heavy. I just remember being furious that I was on the wrong side, and I’ve repressed completely which side was the right side. But I think I probably wanted to be a Marxist and I got to be a Weberian, which actually sort of happened during the rest of my life. But that’s the sort of thing we were doing in that school that I don’t think most people were doing at that age. I also did my first ethnomusicology paper when I was in sixth grade. We were studying India for the semester, and everybody was given one of these long monthly assignments. One of our assignments was to write something about India, do some research and write something about India. Well, I knew all about this little company called Folkways. We had so many family records at home. So I went out and got my parents to take me to the store, and we found a classical and folk music of India album put out in 1954. I think I was writing at ’55, ten or eleven. And played it. A lot of it I didn’t particularly like, but there was an amazing rag for shenai and tabla. This is an amazing sound, sort of the free alap, the free variation, the free sound of the shenai, that nasal shenai, which I thought was an amazing sound. Then suddenly the coming in, the sort of the rhythmic, introduction of rhythm to it, and then the doubling of that rhythm was absolutely amazing.

I just thought the whole thing—I just played it all over and over and over again. My mother would call it her Chinese water torture music, which made it even more appreciated. I loved it even more, because, first of all, it wasn’t Chinese. Second of all, it was irritating her, so I’d play it even more. So I played that piece over and over and over again, wrote a pretty decent paper, apparently, for the teacher at Dalton on the music of India in the sixth grade. I must have been twelve. Then in the eighth grade, I wrote another paper for the music course. We only had to write one paper for music all the years I was at Dalton, and I was in the eighth grade. So I went out and bought a couple of Folkways Records of the music of Africa and wrote a paper on the music of Africa that I submitted with a tape that I’d made of playing back the recordings on my father’s tape recorder. That’s my first sort of multimedia project in my life.

Wow.

Dalton encouraged that kind of large project, encouraged sort of self-development and sort of gave you a fair amount of liberty in choosing where your interests really lay in something and freedom to go after it for pretty long assignments.

How much awareness do you think your fellow students or even the teachers had of that kind of musical experience and the resource of something like Folkways Records?

I think a lot of people knew about Folkways Records, but it was the Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie part of it. In terms of the world music, I didn’t get the impression anybody else was paying any attention to world music, and I didn’t really expect them to and I didn’t ask them to. In grade school, I was learning how to play the banjo by the time I was in the fourth grade and fifth grade. Sixth grade, I think I wrote my song about being behind in work, and had to sing it so often, I swore I’d never write another song. I had a fan club of younger girls who would scream every time they saw me in the hallways. Most of them were fourth-graders, fortunately a different level, so I didn’t have to go by them all the time. So I was sort of making myself as a performer as a kid, and I was performing for all-school assemblies and things like that. A memorable one for me was my first big performance for the all-school assembly was on songs of the Civil War. We had it on Lincoln’s birthday ceremony or something like that. It’s sort of fun to go back. We still sing in that same hall. The summer camp has a family concert there every fall, every Thanksgiving weekend, and I’m singing in the same hall I was singing in when I was twelve or something like that, giving my first concert.

Wow. Amazing.

So Dalton, those were fun years, and a lot of the children that I went to school with were actually coming to the summer camp. Dalton was a major recruitment for the summer camp. My parents knew all the kids, a lot of kids, they knew the families, and so quite a few of the kids I was going to school with were actually also in my cabins during the summer. The difference was they were paying.

What about the people in the neighborhood you were living in?

The neighborhood I was living in was totally different. I would be walking east down 89th Street, and as you move east off of—Lexington was still pretty elegant, but once you got to Third, which is where the El had been, the Third Avenue El, and then you went down the hill into Second, there were pretty much tenement houses. Then by the time you got to First and York, it was largely Italian neighborhood. None of them were going to Dalton. I mean, there wasn’t a single person in my neighborhood that was going to Dalton. There was one person who was about six blocks away that was in my class. He was the son of a lawyer who was living in a high-rise on the far side of all the tenements. So I never knew anybody. Then I just remember being asked once to be in somebody’s gang. I didn’t know anything about gangs. I never hung out with them. I’d go home and I’d do my homework and things like that and play. We had a roof. There was a roof on the building, so I had my whole playground up on the roof. I didn’t have to go out at all. So I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ll let you know about the gang next week.” I’d completely forgotten, or maybe I hadn’t, but we were leaving town that weekend, and it was going to be next week. So I never joined a gang, and they never asked again. I was never bothered. Once when I went home with somebody who—I brought a friend home from school, and we were sort of beaten up at that point, but I think he started it. Otherwise, I’d be coming back with my briefcase or whatever it was, and walking through this neighborhood where nobody knew me, and I was never bothered.

But I did not grow up—it was really different from Greenwich Village. I did not have a bunch of cohort. I did not have a cohort around me. I had friends that would sometimes come over, I would go to their house, but there was nobody around me, and I never got to know anybody around me. During the summer, which would have been a normal time to get to know people, we were never around. Every summer we took off for the country. In Dalton, later when I got to be sort approaching the eighth grade, in Dalton after eighth grade, the boys had to leave. They were considered to be too much of an interruption of real education, and so the boys were forced to leave. The women, the girls, could stay on until they graduated from high school.

I have to say that I’ve had the idea that something like that should be done for years, and I didn’t know anyone actually did that.

They did. They changed it later.

That’s really interesting.

So Dalton is now coed, but actually it was the girls stayed, and they had to wear, I think, in high school but not until eighth grade, as I recall, they had to wear smocks. So they were all wearing their blue smocks, all exactly the same colors. So the idea was you would diminish the sort of differentiation in terms of dress because everybody looked exactly the same. There were only women together, and the boys were sent off.

So approaching the eighth grade, it was sort of the end. That was when we graduated, in a sense. My leaving Dalton was after the eighth grade. So as we approached eighth grade, we were sort of in our final year and doing senior projects and things like that. We were all applying, we were all taking these tests, endless tests, achievement tests. Dalton didn’t give grades, so there were no grades to go on. They had test scores and things like that and our reports. My reports were never that great. A strange number of them always said, “He’s not working up to his expectations,” or something like that. I always thought that wasn’t fair, since how were they supposed to know what my capacity was? I was doing what I was doing. But the feeling of some teachers was that I was not working hard enough. I always thought I was working hard enough. My parents never criticized how hard I was working.

Where did you go then?

So I applied to one place because my parents recommended it. My Aunt Peggy had been there for summer school or something, summer camp. I went to a place called Putney School. Putney School is a boarding school in Putney, Vermont, which is way in the south, down by Brattleboro, Vermont. It’s a coeducational school, about 150, 200 students at the time, and it’s on the top of a mountain in Vermont. That’s it. There you are. They said, “You’ll like it there. It’s a good place, it has good teachers, and we think it’s a good place. Your Aunt Peggy liked it, and you like Vermont.” So I went, and it was a big change, because, of course, I was not living at home anymore. That’s practically a different chapter, and it was a huge break. My sister and I, we didn’t really get to know each other very well, because by the time I left, she was four.

That’s what I was about to ask.

We’d see each other at camp during the summer, but we weren’t really together then either. She was with my parents, and I was working or something by that time. So we didn’t see each other much at all. I didn’t see my parents that much from then on. I established residency in the state of Vermont. My parents built me a cabin when I was at Putney. They bought me eighty acres of land for $10 an acre down the road from the camp, to partly protect the camp, and built me a cabin on it to keep me from—I think teenagers are kind of hard to get along with sometimes, and I think I was probably reasonably teenager-like. I think they thought, well, if they could build me a cabin, I could go up there and have a place of my own and yet that would also be close enough so that we could both be friends and also separate. So it was a good decision, I think. It was a little one-room place with no water in it, but it was all mine, all my land.

Wow, that’s amazing. Where did your sister wind up going to school?

She went to another boarding school. She went to Buxton School, which was run by—you remember that my father had a friend from Harvard whose father ran a camp, Manumit.

Right.

Well, that particular friend from Harvard then started his own school called Buxton, and so my father was on the board of that school, and they decided to send my sister, Kate, there rather than to Putney, which was where her brother had already been there.

You mean to Dalton?

She went to Dalton. I’m sorry. She went to Dalton, too, all the way through.

I see.

All the way through I think her second year of high school, and then she went to Buxton or something. They thought it would be good for her to get out and see something else.

Wow.

But she was also at Dalton. Now, what happened after I left, my father took another job. He thought he’d like to be principal of Dalton. That didn’t work out, and so he became principal of the Fieldston Lower School, which is an Ethical Culture school in Riverdale, New York. My father began and was taking courses in education to get an Ed.D., and so he was taking one course a year at night at NYU, and he eventually got his Ed.D. and became a principal. My mother got an M.A. and became a sort of a teacher. She taught in the education school at NYU, so she also stopped teaching in the classroom, started to teach teachers, and did that for a fairly long time until she was pressed to get a Ph.D., and she didn’t feel like getting a Ph.D. for the work she was doing. She saw no reason to have a Ph.D. So she switched over to Hunter College and did the same thing there until they both retired. So they continued to be educators, but during my sister’s later years in Dalton, they weren’t in Dalton any longer, but they were through my whole career there at Dalton.

You also—and we’ll get into this more later—there’s a strong Harvard stream in your family, which we can talk about. But also I wanted to ask you, beginning with your grandfather, who really was somewhat the rebel and went the direction that was not encouraged at the time, sometimes it’s fairly common for people’s children to go not only in a direction that they don’t maybe prefer for them to go, but maybe even in the opposite direction. In the case of your family where there was so much strife related to the political situation and what I would imagine was an amazing amount of adversarial feelings about that, why do you think that no one in your family rebelled and went the completely opposite direction politically or otherwise?

We have one white sheep in the family. One of Charles’ daughters didn’t become a musician and sort of became, actually, I think, a very good executive secretary and worked for her entire life and now lives in Las Vegas. That’s Barbara Seeger. So she’s a really nice person, and she didn’t have anything to do music or education. She did something else altogether. The rest of the family, there wasn’t really much of a revolt against Charles. I mean, he’d already moved on to another family at that point. My Uncle Charles, not my Grandfather Charles, was a radio astronomer, so he wasn’t terribly a political activist. My father was a schoolteacher. He felt that he had very strong moral beliefs and held them up, but he didn’t consider himself sort of a propagandist.

Pete was quite different. He was using his music to actually move people politically. Peggy did the same thing. Mike didn’t. Mike Seeger carried on a musical tradition, became an extremely fine musician, but didn’t use his music to make political points; he used it to make musical points. Penny Seeger, who was the youngest, married John Cohen, who is a band member of Mike’s group, the New Lost City Ramblers, and Penny was actually a very good singer and began to sing later in life on her own. Barbara, Peggy, Mike, and my grandfather all appear on a Folkways record of the Seeger family in the 1950s or something like that, singing Christmas carols and children’s songs about the time that their mother died. Their mother died young. Ruth Crawford died fairly young of cancer at the age of fifty-three. I don’t know why we didn’t rebel. Neither my sister nor I rebelled either against our parents, partly because we became involved quite young with them in a family business that they gave a great deal of energy to and thought was good and that were they’re including us in and paying for participating in and rewarding us for participating in, training us in. And I think because they gave me a cabin, like sort of on my own, sent me to boarding school where I could be my own person, we didn’t have all those fights sort of growing up that you have to have. You have to somehow break away from your parents. But if you’re at boarding school, you’re breaking away from the teachers and the administration of the boarding school, and you can sort of have your parents as sort of as your allies in it, or at least you’re not fighting them in the process. Now, I wasn’t fighting against being at boarding school. I happened to like it a lot.

So we didn’t have that, and my sister didn’t either. I think she probably went to boarding school about the time they were beginning to butt heads at home, and so that worked out for her too. She didn’t get a cabin of her own. She had a playhouse of her own even younger, which is now the band room at camp for the rock band. So she had a place of her own, but she didn’t have her own cabin on the hill. But by the time she was wanting to go skiing and things like that, my family had a farmhouse across the road where they built a new riding program, so she had the farmhouse, which was much warmer than my cabin, I can tell you that. Also, the others became involved in their parents’ enthusiasms. Peggy, Mike, Penny, Pete were all involved in their—they didn’t rebel. John, when he decided to become a businessman, may have been honoring his grandfather, because my father spent a year or two in Paris with his grandparents at one point when he was young and exploring and going to school there and traveling around and wandering around the Metro and exploring Paris and things like that, which he remembered vividly. I think he really thought, especially before the Second World War, I think he was trying to please his grandparents. He then became a pacifist, declared himself a conscientious objector when World War II began, after which his grandfather never spoke to him again.

Wow.

There was a complete break, and even on his deathbed when my father went over to try to say goodbye to him, he was refused entry. So it was pretty dramatic. Well, you know, his son had been Alan Seeger, who died—

Who died in World War I, yes.

I don’t know. Charles never mentioned fighting with his father over his objections to entering World War I, but my father certainly got it. So my mother said they were never invited to dinner. From the day they were married, then she never saw him.

Wow.

So there was rebellion there, in a sense. I mean, you take your own stance, you follow your own beliefs, and let the chips fall where they do, and they fall sometimes.

It sounds like you and your sister had experiences that most or many kids have when they start college, which is that sense of moving away and into their own lives. You had it a little earlier.

Boarding school was great precisely for that. When I was in college, it seemed to me that a lot of my friends were having to do what I had already gotten over in high school.

Yes, I would imagine.

Not only were my classes really good in high school, because they were small and lively and we had nothing to do but be there, but also we’d already moved away from home. It wasn’t anything special to hang out all night with some girl somewhere, because we’d been doing that since we were in high school, since we were doing it out in the woods, because there was no other place, or the boiler rooms or some dorms or something.

So I’m a great believer in boarding schools, but I couldn’t convince my daughters to go to one. They wanted to continue at the same school that they were at, even though I took them to visit boarding schools and we talked about it. But it was a kind of a family thing. In Dalton it was assumed you had to go somewhere, and it was assumed by my parents that I would go to boarding school, because my family had a long tradition of going to boarding school. All of Pete’s kids went to boarding school.

Interesting.

My cousins who were raised in the Netherlands didn’t, but they have a different school system. But Pete’s all went to boarding school. Mike went to boarding school for a while. Peggy, I think—I’m not sure she did. But I think Mike went to the same one as my cousins at Woodstock Country Day School, where he was famous for what he—he rode unicycle.

Wow.

So he somehow took his unicycle and managed to make bicycle tracks all around the room in the dining hall, and so people were terribly impressed that he could go upside down. That’s about the only story I know about Mike at boarding school.

But they didn’t have any—either at the time or later, like, people who politically just flipped the other direction in some sort of reaction to all this?

No. No.

Interesting.

Not at all. We’ve all been quite consistent. I think there’s a set of beliefs that we can trace back perhaps to the Unitarians in the family about appropriate behavior. I mean, Karl Ludwig was Unitarian and Edwin Seeger was Unitarian. Charles Louis Seeger was brought up Unitarian. His wife was Unitarian.

Wow. That’s interesting.

He recalls in his memoirs that they were considered probably not Christians but at least since Jesus was always an important person, but just a person who wandered around and sort of did good things at the time, but they all had a strong, deeply held set of beliefs and attitudes that they followed in their lives. Charles, in recalling his own father, my Grandfather Charles recalling my great-grandfather, said that they instilled morality through their example, not through precepts. So they weren’t telling you what to do. They said what they thought was right and good and they actually did it. He said it’s much harder to argue with an example than it is with precepts. You can flout a precept, you can argue against it, you can revolt against it, but meanwhile, during this time the behavior system has been sort of instilled in you by the example of your parents. I think probably he picked that up, and I think he did it himself for all of his children, I think, and they probably did it to their children too. I think my parents, neither of them were religious, but they both were what I suppose we could call secular humanists. When I asked them once, said, “Do you have a religion? What is it?” They said, “Well, we believe very strongly in certain values, to respect other people and to behave in certain ways and to encourage people to grow and to be fair.” That was not something they just preached; it was something they did. So I think it was very hard—I don’t think it entered many of our heads to question it.

How much of a connection do you see in your lineage with the whole New England sort of Transcendentalist, Unitarian school of thought?

Well, there was certainly some of that up there. That’s probably where the Unitarian influence came from is certainly New England. Edwin was living in Springfield, Massachusetts, and his son Charles married Elsie Adams, who was certainly New England, and so I’m sure it was coming from there. And Transcendentalists, my Grandfather Charles for a while was hanging out in a yoga colony and learning about Eastern philosophy. My great-aunt, Elizabeth Seeger, was also deeply interested in the philosophy of India as well as its history, and so there was certainly a whole side there of that.

Interesting.

So perhaps there’s a stronger tie to that part of New England than I actually realized. You’re right. It could very well—some of this could definitely come from that side and from that area.

It’s almost twelve o’clock, and we’re at a pretty, I think, dramatically clear starting place for the next session, which is your high school experience in—

I think that would be great, yes.

—sort of being on your own.

It is big. It’s a big change in many ways in my life, so why don’t we stop here.

Being on your own in the woods. [Laughs]

Yes.

Okay. Thank you so much for today.

Well, thank you for your questions. [End of February 2, 2012 interview]

Today is March 1st, 2012. This is Alex Cline. I’m interviewing Professor Anthony Seeger in his office, which looks like it’s getting a little bit emptier and emptier gradually. Today is his first official day as a professor emeritus here at UCLA. And this is session number two.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Thanks for coming.

Hey, my pleasure, really. We left off last time with what we both seemed to agree was a good place to stop, which was your beginnings at boarding school in Vermont, the Putney School, and the building by your parents of your own cabin in the woods, one room, no-water affair, as I recall. This is, from my experience, something that is very unusual, and I have a lot of kind of maybe not exactly entirely biographical questions relating to that, which we’ll get around to. But you elected to go to this school. You said that boarding schools were something of a tradition in the Seeger family, in fact, and you also said that you felt that this in some way perhaps slightly mitigated the teenager syndrome in terms of your relationship with your family and that you got to essentially be by yourself, be away from home, be away from the family during some interesting years for us all. One of the things that I wanted to ask about, first of all, in relation to the Putney School is the fact that evidently they had—you couldn’t bring in any recorded music other than maybe what you heard in a classroom situation and that essentially there was very little in the way of distractions or entertainment, other than what you could create yourself in this obviously rustic setting. I guess what I wanted to ask you to begin with is how you felt that this particular experience ultimately affected and influenced you and the direction that you ultimately decided to go in, since, among other things, you actually wind up living in the Amazon jungle very far from any modern distractions or forms of entertainment. And I guess I just wanted your reflections on what this kind of formative period held for you.

When I was in grade school, I had a pretty big record collection. I listened to them a lot, and I really liked to listen to music. And my parents and I were listening to the radio, and during the McCarthy hearings, they bought their first television so they could watch the McCarthy hearings. Putney, at the time, was a farm school, still is, it’s still running, and the idea was that you actually worked at the school, and you also sort of engaged in the community activities, and you did so without outside distractions. There was, of course, no Internet. We did get daily mail, and I got The New York Times delivered also to my mailbox every morning. But we couldn’t have any form of playback material. We couldn’t have a record player or a radio, and that was pretty much all there were, partly because personal listening devices really weren’t very much “in.” There were speakers, but I’d actually never seen a headphone until, I think, my junior year there. They’d been invented, but no one was using them on a large-scale basis.

So what year was this?

This was 1959 I went, and so I was there from 1959 to 1963. We didn’t think much about it, but certainly it did mean that we made all of our own entertainment. There were weekly dances, which usually involved some sort of bluegrass or dance band coming in and playing, and we did square dances and things like that. I think we did the Twist once in our senior year or something, but that was about it. We had madrigal singing every Friday for the whole school. The entire school had to sit there and sing in four-part madrigals, and those were fun, because for teenagers, madrigals are really fun because they really are all about sex and desire and things like that and death and all these dramatic things. So the madrigals, you could get the entire school of adolescents singing madrigals and being really attached to singing madrigals in a way that was really quite remarkable. Then there was also an orchestra and chamber music groups. I played violin in the orchestra for a little bit, and then I also sang in the chorus. So there was a lot of music going on, and we had to make it all ourselves. Then, of course, I played the banjo. I played the banjo, and a bunch of my roommates played instruments over the years, and we’d play together, or I’d play with other people around the campus. One of my friends, Rusty Simonds, who was a year ahead of me, but I knew him from summer camp, wrote songs, and so we would perform them for the whole school. One was based on John Henry. John Henry is the steel-driving man who sort of faces off with an automated steel-driving machine and wins, but dies in the process. This was a song about John Horny, who was a shoveler of cow manure in the cow barn and was fighting against the coming mechanized cow manure cleaners that were just beginning to hit, so it sort of was the same sort of thing. But, of course, he dies with a shovel in his hand at the end. So we were also writing songs and having a good time, and I think that was certainly part of the fun of being there.

If we’d all been sort of in our own little acoustic spaces listening to different things, life would have certainly been very different for the community as a whole. I’m sure everybody does have individual listening devices now. I don’t think you can keep them out. But at the time, it was awkward to play anything. There was one very small one-room tiny shed, basically, that had a record player in it, that you could listen to if you wanted to, but there was usually a couple in there making out, and so, really, in fact, you couldn’t listen to anything, which meant that we did it to some extent when we went home. But for me it meant I was removed from popular music for four years and never listened to it.

Wow. Well, people now, who, of course, have such access to everything electronic all the time, I think often fail to reflect on how what the kind of life that you’re describing was for a very long time the kind of life that most Americans lived, right? [Laughs]

And all of humanity lived before 1877 when they invented the playback recorders.

Yes, right.

It’s only been a fairly recent stretch of history that we’ve been able to listen to music, and it’s only been a really recent one in which it’s so omnipresent and possible for everybody to be listening to something different at the same time in the same place.

Right. So you actually had to do things together as a community.

Right. That certainly probably affected my thinking about music and what I’ve written about music and the way I’ve used music, which is really to create a group out of a collection of individuals by their all singing together or thinking about the same thing or doing the same thing. I could use music for that way. Certainly Pete, Pete Seeger, my uncle, could use it for that, that way in a very effective manner. That’s gotten quite a lot more difficult these days as everybody’s listening to different things as they wander around.

Yes. Right. Not even really aware of where they are. Who exactly were the kinds of students who attended Putney when you were there?

Let’s see. Putney was a mixture of—well, I guess, Putney was sort of like Dalton, a group of “red diaper babies.” I mean, there were a whole bunch of us who were coming out of liberal-leaning families who had opposed McCarthy in some form or another. They were journalists. One of my best friends was Jonathan Lash, whose father was a columnist for the New York Post. His godmother was Eleanor Roosevelt. Another one was Parker Donham, whose father was a lawyer and very much on the left. And another one was Tom Fels. His father was the president of Bennington College. So it seemed there were a whole bunch of folks there. It’s a very interesting group of people, and it wasn’t the kind of prep school that you would send your child to if you really wanted them to go to Harvard or Princeton or Yale or something like that. Those were places more like Andover and Deerfield and a whole bunch of places that were really called prep schools. Putney wasn’t supposed to be preparing you for anything but life, and you were supposed to be doing that by cleaning the cow barn and killing the chickens on Wednesday for the Saturday dinner, Sunday dinner, and picking up potatoes in the fields for putting away for the winter and, in my case, shoveling tons and tons of horseshit, because I had a horse there, so my job every twice a week was just go up and clean out the barn, and then riding two days a week, and then one day a week was free to do whatever you wanted in the afternoon.

If you’re going to have a whole bunch of adolescents in a coed school together, you probably want to keep them pretty busy, and they did that at Putney. We had not only starting early in the morning with work jobs and things like that, we also then went pretty late into the night with planned activities of various kinds four days a week or five days a week.

Now, you had summer camp every summer, and that was in the country, but what was it like for what sounds like a lot of city kids to be out in the country doing those kinds of chores and things?

Most of them really liked it. It was part of, I suppose—I don’t know. It wasn’t really part of the Maoist ideal, that sort of the intellectuals would work in the fields. But it’s certainly the idea that physical exercise was good for you was, I think, held by a lot of people, not by everybody, but by the people who were having a good time it certainly was. People worked hard at their sports and their skiing and soccer and, for women, field hockey were sort of the big sports there. I had a horse, so that sort of gave me something to do all most of the year except when it was too snowy, and then I’d be skiing. But it was the sort of place where if you’re on the ski team, you didn’t use the ski lift. You actually had to run back up the hills on your skis after you skied down them, which, of course, builds you up tremendous muscles, but it made for fairly short runs, for one thing. Putney was not a place with long mountains. It had steep cow pastures, basically, that we skied in during the winter. It had one rope tow that was used for sort of recreational skiing, which didn’t go very far up, but it was at least fun to do and got you out.

Academically, what was going on for you at that point, and how much were you starting to get an inkling of where you might want to go after the Putney experience was over?

I’d had really good teachers in Dalton, and the difference at Putney was the classes were longer. I think they were an hour and fifteen minutes long. That meant that they could be extraordinarily boring, or you could get into things in much more depth and have better discussions. I remember some teachers that really were quite dynamic and encouraged discussions. Putney was also a place that people who got out of college would, since it was a private school, they didn’t have to have a certificate. If you were sort of interesting, they would just get out of Harvard or something and come and teach for a year or two or five at Putney in history or English or something like that. We had some really smart young teachers, among them John Wirth, who then eventually got his Ph.D. and became a historian, and his brother, Timothy Wirth—no, what’s his name Wirth? The other Wirth, W-i-r-t-h, who then became a senator for, I think, Colorado or something like that, and thus went into politics. Had some excellent English teachers and good history teachers. I think the science wasn’t as great, and I never got along with math that particularly well. I also didn’t get along with the math teachers. I don’t know which was which.

One of the things, Putney was a fairly small school, so that when I actually applied to college—I applied, among other places, to UCLA and Berkeley—I hadn’t taken enough science courses to actually meet the requirements of the state schools, but partly because they weren’t there. I mean, it was a tiny place. My graduating class was 35 or something like that, so we’re talking about a school of 125, maybe 150. So it was a small place and the classes were small, and I worked pretty hard, not terribly hard. I don’t think my grades were particularly stellar. I know that we didn’t have grades. There were no grades. Grades were kept, but they weren’t shown to the students. But one of my friends was on garbage duty and actually came across my grades in the garbage one morning, and so gave them to me. I was pretty appalled to see how badly I’d done. We were getting written reports every six months or every term, I guess, and those sort of gave you an idea of how the teacher thought you were actually doing without actually assigning you a comparative grade. Dalton had had no grades either, and didn’t have grades, so the only way you got into a high school was actually by letters. There were simply no grades. At Putney they had to have grades in order to apply to college. They had to keep your grades, but they didn’t actually tell you what they were, so that we weren’t really competing with each other at all for anything, except maybe to find the books or something like that and get a word in edgewise.

Interesting. Wow. So what direction did you kind of start to move in academically then?

Well, I got better and better at writing, and I think probably one of the things that distinguishes my career as a whole is I write a lot and I write easily, and I write fairly easy-to-scan sentences. So I think one of the reasons that I have become sort of the well-known scholar that I am is simply that I can write well. It’s easier to read my ideas than it is to read other people’s, and so they fall for it. Or somehow something gets through. Anyway, it can be very hard if it’s a bad writer or they aren’t clear about what they say and things like that. So I was good at Dalton, but I really got good at Putney. It was four years of basically writing a lot, journals and writing clubs at night and all kinds of things.

Wow. How often did you see your family?

Not very often. They were in New York. My parents were running the business as well as being schoolteachers, so they were busy every weekend, and so they came up really rarely. I would see them, and they’d take me up in the fall in September, and I’d see them at Thanksgiving and then at Christmas. There’d be a Christmas break. Christmas break was often quite long, because it was so cold in January they could save a lot of money by just not inviting us back until the end of January. So we usually had a one-month project to do in January, not a separate term, but just sort of stay at home, keep away from the place, keep warm, and don’t make the school spend a whole lot of money keeping all the dorms hot. So that’s when I saw them a lot, and then in the summer. But in the spring I don’t know if we saw each other at all. There may have been a spring week, but I often went skiing for that and went up to my cabin or something like that. So we didn’t see each other that much.

My sister is ten years younger than I am, so she was growing up there at the time, so in a sense she was another only child, because she didn’t have her brother around much. So she moved into my big room, and I moved into sort of the spare room, the guest room, and it was fine. But it was a long drive for them. They didn’t really like to do it. I fell off a horse my freshman year and crushed a couple of vertebrae in my back. I fell off my horse, worse yet. It was really sort of embarrassing. And ended up it took a while for them to discover what it was, and I was in a fair amount of pain. I ended up sort of in the hospital, and they didn’t show up, and I was a little annoyed when they sent a proxy to come and visit me that was living close by. I said, “Well, wait. I’m really in pain here.” But they did finally show up when it was clear that this was serious and I really needed to have my x-rays taken to Boston to be looked at by a specialist and to make sure I was all right. So when push came to shove, they would show up, but they really didn’t very much. That was partly their educational philosophy, which was applied at camp, which is that once the parents leave, they were not to come back except for once during the eight-week season, because, as they said, it just basically takes a while to get over having your parents around all the time, and the best thing to do is just to say goodbye quickly and leave and get on with your own life.

Interesting.

So they applied that in practice, and for the most part it was fine, except for that one time when I fell off a horse. That’s the only time I really resented their taking a little bit of extra time to come see me. So I thought I could use some help. I was unable to move.

Ultimately this experience comes to an end. You become a senior, a high school senior, a very different kind of high school senior.

A different kind of high school senior, playing a lot, reading a lot. Now, there was one of those many teachers who came through out of Harvard for a year, was teaching history there, he was there for two years, said to me and two of my roommates, “You know, it would be really great if all three of you went to Harvard.” I didn’t pay any attention to him, especially since I seen my grades and I wasn’t going to get into anything. So we did start taking tests, and I was a Merit Scholar on the basis of those quantitative tests and things like that, so obviously I had some smarts, but I was clearly not working that hard either, apparently. As it happened, the guy who thought we should all three go to Harvard actually went and worked on the Harvard’s Admissions Committee the next year.

Oh, interesting.

And all three of us went to Harvard. The other two were admitted on early admissions. I was admitted sort of on regular admissions later, and basically I really didn’t want to go to Harvard. I really wanted to go to Berkeley or UCLA. I wanted to get as far away from Vermont as I could. I’d been around a hill in Vermont for four years, which was great. I had a cabin in Vermont, which was great. But I really wanted to get away from both of them, and so I applied to Berkeley, UCLA. Then I applied to—what was my backup school? It was something, it was Haverford or something like that and I applied.

Then the college advisor wanted me to apply to the University of Vermont, and that was another time that my parents drove up. They said, “That’s an outrageous suggestion. Under no circumstances go to the University of Vermont.” My mother came, and I think it was at Thanksgiving, and she said, “You know, your father’s never going to tell you, but he’d really like it if you’d applied to Harvard. He enjoyed his years there, and he thinks it’s a pretty good school. So you don’t have to go, but if you could just apply, it would make him happy.”

Interesting.

So I said, “Oh, all right. That’s an easy thing to do. I can certainly apply.” Well, as it turned out, I got turned down by UCLA and Berkeley and went to Harvard instead, which is a great line to tell people around here. I say, “I wasn’t accepted at UCLA, so I had to go to Harvard.” And Harvard was a really different experience.

I can imagine.

I mean, that was a very different kind of people. People who went there were the ones who usually went to the prep schools and definitely a place of privilege at the time. I think I got into Harvard because my Grandfather Charles had gone there. His brother, Alan, had gone there. My great-uncle, Ailee [Edson], had gone there and apparently earned his way through college playing poker, is the way he said he went through Harvard.

Wow. And Pete went there, right?

And my father went to Harvard. My Uncle Pete went to Harvard. So it was sort of another one of those family traditions. I went to boarding school like they did, and I went to Harvard like they did. It pretty much ended. That kind of privilege ended at Harvard sort of about the time I got there, a little bit later, and so the student body, I think the number of people who are legacy admitters, admittees was a lot fewer now than it used to be, unless you’ve given a lot of money, I suppose, or something like that.

Right. Well, speaking of money, I was going to ask, private school, Harvard, this is something that usually affluent people have access to.

Well, my parents were both schoolteachers, but they also ran a summer camp business. And the business didn’t make much money, but it did mean that when you’re running a business, you can pull more money out of it some years than others. So I imagine that when I was going to college, they’d give a few less scholarships or they just began to cut back in the other expenses and pull more out. At Putney, I got there because they were schoolteachers. I got some sort of fellowship for part of the tuition; I think a third of it. At Harvard, my father thought he couldn’t even ask for it. He said it wasn’t fair to ask for it, so he didn’t ask for any support, and he just paid the whole thing. He, by that time, was a principal of a private school, and the camp was going fine, and so they just paid. No loans, and I never had to work, and I was extremely fortunate for that. Looking at my students now who have to work twenty, thirty hours a week, I don’t know how they get their—well, I know they don’t get their reading done, many of them. Some do, but it’s really, really hard. And I had my weekends totally free.

When I went to Harvard, my father was concerned that I might feel sort of overwhelmed by it or something, so he said, “All you have to do is work forty hours a week for me. I’ll pay. You do forty hours. The rest of the time’s your own.” Forty hours really isn’t very much, as it turns out. I can finish forty hours in four days, and most of Harvard’s classes were Monday, Wednesday, with a Friday optional, or Tuesday, Thursday, with a Saturday optional, and none of the professors taught on Thursday or Friday, and most of the sections weren’t then either. So I would take off for Vermont on Thursday afternoon and go horseback riding and hiking and things like that, so for the first two years almost every weekend. The nice thing about Harvard was it was close to Vermont, I mean in terms of time. It’s a lot closer now with the freeways, but it was pretty close then. So at forty hours a week, which is what I did, I was not overworking myself. I was also not going through the same sort of crises that most of the people there who hadn’t gone to a boarding school were going through, you know, how to relate to women if they’d gone to an all-male school or something like that. They were dating for the first time. My experience with women was very different. My experience with living away from home was very different. So it seemed to me that Putney had prepared me well for going to college, because there was a whole lot of things that everybody else had to adjust to that I had already done.

Right. What about the cultural contrast?

Harvard at the time was—that was another period, and the country was very careful about things like diversity. So I got a letter in the summer saying, “We’ve assigned you roommates that includes an Indonesian, an African American,” I think they said an African American, and someone else, and, “Let us know if you have any questions or concerns. Well, I had no questions or concerns, so I had four roommates in Wigglesworth dorm, and we were a diverse group, and it was great. I think the reason they put us all together is we all played instruments and sang and made music. So one of them was a guy named Sandy Davis, who has been a friend ever since. We just liked playing together so much, for the first week in which you’re supposed to get acclimatized to the school and get tours, we never left the rooms. We just played all the time. So I never found my way around Harvard with comfort, because I never took a tour, and then I skipped the whole orientation week, and he skipped the whole orientation week, and we just played music. So I felt as though I fit in here. I was happy at Harvard, perfectly happy at the start. I could make music. The food was okay. I didn’t have to work. I really liked the bookstores. It was nice to be off the mountain in Vermont. In Vermont, I really loved that mountain in Vermont that Putney’s on and had a great time hiking and riding all around it, but I was sort of ready to go to places that had bookstores and serious readings and classes and things like that.

And I was very fortunate, I think. My father also said, “Take pre-med courses until you decide what you want to do.” I had no idea what I wanted to do. Most of us didn’t back then.

That’s what I wanted to ask you.

Most of us couldn’t care. You know, the idea of a career was really far from anybody’s mind, from any of my colleagues’ minds, certainly, except for maybe the Indonesian whose father was in oil, and I had the feeling he thought he was going to go into oil, the oil business when he got done, and he did. He majored in economics and took courses from Henry Kissinger and was very smart and has done extremely well in the oil business, living in Indonesia or Hong Kong or wherever it was that the job took him. But the rest of us, we really didn’t go into it. The idea of going to college was not to get a job at the end. It was just because it was sort of what you did and to learn what you wanted to learn.

So what did you want to learn?

Well, that’s what I didn’t know. I didn’t have the faintest idea. I took a test in my second year, because my father was beginning to get worried, and it showed that I had great talents in biology, in which I had no interest, and in sales. I could be a salesman, in which I also had no interest. So I thought that was a great waste of time. But one of the things that happened to me in freshman year was I took a course in anthropology, and my father had also taken courses in anthropology, and they were some of his favorite courses when he was a student there. I took a course in anthropology that was really quite spectacular. It was given by a fusty old gentleman who I swear was reading the same notes he’d been reading for fifteen or thirty years. He seemed very dated and things. The course was basically about anthropology, but it was built around, I think, seven different book-length ethnographies that we had to read, and they were absolutely spectacular. They were spectacularly written, and they were interesting in themselves.

The other thing I liked about it was that I thought the T.A.’s were really quite good. I will say I always thought the T.A.’s at Harvard were better than the professors, actually. Not in every case, but in quite a few cases, in the large lectures classes the T.A.’s were more engaged with the students, of course, and more engaged with the material and actually were closer to our ages, and their enthusiasm carried over, I think, in a way that I hope it does here. We had large lecture classes like we do here, and I’m not sure that’s really a good way to transmit any knowledge. Can be a good way to transmit enthusiasm and dedication and real sort of fascination with something, and so I think those courses served their purposes. Harvard must have paid a lot of attention to people who were good showmen, because they had a lot of good showmen giving these classes, I mean people who were extremely eloquent teachers and very good teachers lecturing to classes of five hundred, eight hundred, in these huge auditoriums. So the anthropology course really marked me, and there was a particular book in it by Claude Levi-Strauss called Tristes Tropiques, which is a book about sort of a philosophical novel of the self about going to Brazil and exploring the country and sort of with this trip into the interior in which he finds increasing remote Indians until he finds a group he can’t talk to anymore, and then they’re just looking at each other. Then he sort of pulls out of the jungle and gets out. It’s an amazing book, it’s beautifully written, and it was based on his own experience doing research in Brazil. So I thought Claude Levi-Strauss was really interesting, I thought the book was interesting, and that’s probably one of the main reasons I went to Brazil to do my research as a graduate student.

So I spent two years there taking these distribution requirements we had to take, and I really wasn’t sure what my major was going to be. I wasn’t sure I found very much that I really liked. Took a course, I think, in folklore, and I decided to major in something which didn’t exist anywhere outside of Harvard. It was a unique-to-Harvard major called social relations. If you major in something called social relations, it really sounds weird when you tell somebody, “Well, I’m a major in social relations.” It sounds like a pickup line, you know.

Right. [Laughs]

It was a strange name for something, and it was important for my training. It was a combination of sociology, social anthropology, but not the linguistics and physical anthropology and archaeology, and social psychology, but not the experimental psychology and the brain psychology and things like that. The idea was that by putting those together, you would actually get a much broader understanding of social processes. You would get both the social, the social psychological parts, which is sort of the individual’s reaction to things and social life. And also by putting anthropology into it, it meant that you weren’t just looking at the U.S. here and Europe; you were looking at the rest of the world.

Right.

So it was an interesting major, and it was sort of the brainchild of a sociologist named Talcott Parsons, who was teaching there and sort of created the department and created the program. The courses were good, and the people in it, I thought, were quite good. I took a course in small group dynamics, which my mother was very interested in because she specialized in small group dynamic work in her own work, in which you sort of would sit in a room in front of a one-way mirror with graduate students behind it, and sort of these roles sort of naturally would emerge in the process of whatever was happening, and it was interesting to see. I wasn’t very comfortable in it, necessarily, but I learned a lot about small groups and the dynamics of small groups and how they can be affected by certain people doing certain things. Also took a wonderful course in the sociology of religion from Talcott Parsons and Robert Bellah, who were two very fine sociologists there, and that marked me, certainly. Another nice thing, after your freshman year at Harvard, you have to move from the freshman dorms into what’s called a house, which is a bit like a college in Europe. Each house has its own tutors. And we moved into the houses. At that time, they were still all male. The women were going to a school called Radcliffe. They would come to our classes and had classes, but they couldn’t live in the dorms, which they started to live in the dorms the year after I left. So these were sort of cloistered places. I went with two of the roommates I’d had in the dorm, and we found we were sort of admitted to or recruited to Kirkland House, where we had a wonderful set of rooms on the top floor of one of the L’s of the dormitory, with three bedrooms, a very large living room with a working fireplace in it, and sort of another study, which was a hallway study, and that worked out really well. It was a gorgeous set of rooms. It was a sort of fun place, and we outfitted it reasonably nicely. For my graduation present from high school, I’d asked my parents for an electric typewriter, so I able to type really fast and all the faster with an electric typewriter.

Kirkland House also had this amazing old building, that was this library with all these different levels and steps. It was a sort of a maze of a library, full of great little nooks to work in and things like that. So my roommate, Sandy Davis, and I would usually get up early, go to classes and do our work, and then we’d take a nap from about four-thirty to five-thirty, get up and have dinner, and then both of us would work or study. If you take a nap in the middle of the day like that, you basically have two days for every day; you double the amount of time. So I’d get up fresh, and I could work really solidly hard until about eleven o’clock at night. After an early dinner, from six to eleven was my second day, and I got pretty good at working hard at Harvard. They threw a lot at you, and basically you could either do it or not, but it seemed to me if you were going to—forty hours a week I was working pretty hard, but that’s how I get to forty hours in four days. It was really easy. So at the end of my second year, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I had taken a lot of courses. I had an idea sort of what the options were, but I decided to take a year off, and decided to take a year off with one of my high school roommates, Jonathan Lash. Jonathan’s father had connections with a politician in Alaska who had connections with a union, and so we thought we could get working cards and we could just go up and work in a cannery for a year or something like that.

So we thought off to Alaska we go. We were sharing a motorcycle at the time, so we got ourselves a great big Bultaco motorcycle and got a trailer and put it behind his father’s old station wagon and took off for Alaska via California, where some of our high school friends were. The idea was that we would get a chance to think about what we wanted to do, since he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, and I certainly wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and we could go camping and we had sort of a destination to go to. It was a fun summer getting there. But when we get there, we were in the middle of the Vietnam War, and it was really ramping up at that point, and so the draft was in effect. And I was told that I would have to—I was a conscientious objector when I registered. In those days, when you were eighteen you had to register if you were male, because you could be chosen to fight in the army. It’s a volunteer army now. It’s a very different kind of experience. But I registered at eighteen. That was one of the things I did at Putney, was I did a fair amount of thinking about being a conscientious objector, reading up on Quakerism, and looking at my family. My grandfather had been against the entry of the United States in the First World War, and my father had been a conscientious objector in the Second World War, my Uncle Mike in the Korean War, so it wasn’t a hard sell. Vermont was notable for giving the minimum sentence to conscientious objectors who were convicted of refusing to go into the army. It gave one month at an average. California gave five years at an average, just to give you an idea of sort of how different states were being at that point with respect to people’s belief systems.

So there I was, I was being told—the draft board sent me a letter saying, “If you’re not going to go back to college, you’re going to have come fight this case.” I think, “Well, if I’m going to go back to Vermont, I might as well go back to Boston. It’s only three hours further. Maybe I’ll just have to give up on this idea of taking a year off,” and that’s basically what we both did.

In what year was this?

This must be ’65, the summer of ’65. We got to Alaska. We had a wonderful time helping [State] Senator Kilcher and his family bring in the hay and things like that, but then we just basically packed it in. I had applied to go to Limerick to study folklore in Ireland, but they couldn’t do it fast enough for me not to have to go back anyway, so I just thought I’d go back. It was a good thing I went back, actually, because when I got back to Harvard, I decided at that point that I really was going to turn my attention to academics and I was not going to even consider being a musician anymore, and I was going to be a person who studied music, and I was going to be an anthropologist. So when I went back in that third year, I had sort of one of those determining moments in your life when you finally figure out what it is you think you’d like to do, at least for the next few years. Before that, I didn’t have it. Coming back, I had it in spades and began to work closely with a folklorist named Albert Lord, who was a famous folklorist for studying the Serbo-Croatian epics.

Wow.

The epic singing in Yugoslavia, especially among the Muslim population of Yugoslavia where because of Ramadan they would sing long epics. They would continue night after night after night, a bit perhaps like the Greek epics had been sung. So he was studying styles of epics. He took an interest in me personally and he was sort of recruiting me to his folklore program, which he was just trying to get started. There were two of us, me and somebody in another field, I think it was comparative literature, who were sort of being recruited by him. And we did. My minor was folklore and my major was social relations. I took a lot of courses in folklore and really finally got direct contact with a faculty member at Harvard as opposed to with a graduate student. The graduate students had been great. I’d gotten some terrific courses from the graduate tutors and things, but the contact with faculty started in my junior year.

Okay. But before we get further into this, I wanted to ask you, since we’re now up to about 1965, a couple of things. First off, what do you remember about the assassination of President Kennedy, and where were you when that happened?

Let’s see. I think I was at Harvard when that happened. I mean, one of the things perhaps more marking with President Kennedy was actually the Missile Crisis.

Oh, yes.

For the Missile Crisis, Putney brought in a television. It was like my parents getting a television for the McCarthy hearings.

Oh, wow.

Putney brought in a television. We watched it for day after day after day during that crisis. That was a pretty scary crisis. I was marching against nuclear proliferation and things like that in local peace marches and anti-armament marches. It was very powerful and very depressing to have President Kennedy killed, and I think that was during my freshman or sophomore year. Where was I? I was at Harvard. I think more disturbing still was the assassination of Martin Luther King followed by the assassination of Robert Kennedy. I mean, it was revealing a kind of armed resistance to liberal ideas in this country that even exceeded what I’d experienced in the fifties. I think it’s still right there under the surface around here right now.

Yes.

It was pretty awful, and I think though a lot of us were fairly idealistic at the time, our idealism was sort of shattered. I think I went to Vermont at that point to spend a few days just thinking.

Then also this is a time when popular culture and music in particular is really starting to accelerate in the public consciousness. I mean, we have The Beatles and we have a lot of rhythm and blues and this kind of music becoming much more in the public eye. What do you remember about that, and if at all did that have any sort of impact on your personally?

We were sort of snobs. We thought that was all sort of commercial dross, and it wasn’t really very important or very significant.

[laughs] Right.

And we wanted nothing to do with it. At least it was certainly true in my own family. I think the Seeger family held that in spades, but if it weren’t sort of socially committed and if it was just entertainment, then it really wasn’t worth spending any time on thinking about or listening to. I really never did start to listen to the radio after I got out of Putney. I did have a record collection and listened to my own recordings sometimes, but it was a very focused collection. I really only listened to and discovered popular music when we took that trip to Alaska because there we had a radio in the car, and there was nothing else you could listen to. In those days, all you could do was either listen to nothing or listen to the radio because there were no other devices in the car. Suddenly I heard “Ain’t got no satisfaction,” just sort of followed us all the way across, all the way across the country, because everybody had it in high rotation on every single station. As we moved out of one area into the other, it was the same song. But neither of us were at all interested in going to any of the concerts that were going on in Berkeley or anything like that, and so we just sort of ignored it.

Interesting.

So partly, I think, from being out of the habit of listening to it and not being at all interested in it personally, I just ignored it, and also not feeling it was politically activist, which I thought music was supposed to be. There’s probably a bit of Seeger snobbism there, and, I think, that’s why I say we were sort of snobs. But we were selective, and so on me it had absolutely no impact, absolutely no impact.

Interesting.

And didn’t affect my music style, my performance style. We had a small group that performed and did gigs around town, but nothing in a very serious way. But we had a good time doing it. It gave us an opportunity to practice. And in my junior year I also met my wife sort of romantically. We apparently met when I was one year old or one month old, and she was a little older, and then she was a camper at my family’s summer camp, and then later she was a counselor at my family’s summer camp. But we both had other friends and other sort of romantic involvements, and it was only in the Thanksgiving of my junior year, this year that I was sort of refocusing my whole life and sort of paying attention and sort of finding myself, I guess, I also found her or we found each other. She was a senior at Radcliffe and I was a junior at Harvard, and that meant that we were really close together. She could visit Harvard from four to seven in the evening. Those were called parietal hours. Then I could visit Radcliffe from seven to ten. Or vice versa, I can’t remember. But it was a really bizarre system of sort of control of social intersexual social life. But we sort of wound up famously on a bridge. We got out and where we were looking at a bridge after we were coming back from Thanksgiving. We were looking at the water going under the bridge in some place in Vermont. We sort of discovered that we really liked each other after having spent Thanksgiving together. It was over a different river, but a bridge in Vermont that my Grandfather Charles had sort of realized he had fallen in love with who became his second wife, Ruth Crawford. So there’s something about those rivers in Vermont you either want to avoid or court, I don’t know which.

Anyway, so we went back and we became engaged in the spring of my junior year. So I sort of was deciding what my life would be like as a person as well as a scholar in that junior year.

And this did not include studying music?

Did not include studying music.

Why not? [Laughs]

I had a problem with music. I’d taken music sort of history courses and sort of beginning theory courses where you’d learn how to do a bit of real simple counterpoint four-part stuff, as much as you can do when you’re a junior in high school and doing it on the guitar, because I didn’t play the piano. I played the violin, which isn’t really helpful when you’re doing counterpoint and things like that. So I was at Harvard, and Harvard wouldn’t even let me into the courses, any course, unless I took keyboard first. I said, “I don’t want to do keyboard first. I can do it on the guitar, and if I can’t do it on the guitar, I’m not going to do it.” So I told my parents that I was having this. “This is the problem. I want to do some music, but I can’t. They won’t let me do it.” And so they spoke to my Grandfather Charles, my father’s father. And Charles said, “Don’t let him near the music department. They’ll ruin him.” [Laughter] So I don’t remember them telling me my grandfather had said that, but I do remember getting absolutely no pressure at all to take any courses for music, and therefore I wasn’t ruined. I stayed away from music, and I was encouraged to stay away from music, clearly. My parents could sort of communicate their ideas without necessarily having to come out and say it heavily. So, yes, so I stayed away from the music department. I stayed away on good authority.

Interesting.

My grandfather, who got his M.A. there, his B.A. and his M.A. from that very department, thought it was an extremely conservative department and to be avoided at all costs and told them I should.

Wow. Paul Hindemith was there and—

Well, there were composers there and things like that.

—Mel Powell.

But they were deeply involved in their own kind of composition, and Charles sort of lambasts the whole thing in his memoires. There was one ethnomusicologist there, but he was constantly being put upon. They had a very stodgy vision of what music history was. They had some famous music historians, but they were fairly traditionally European-based classical music. He just said, “Don’t do it,” and I didn’t.

There you go.

So my approach to music was through social sciences, and that wasn’t unusual at the time. Three of the four founders of the Society for Ethnomusicology were all actually anthropologists, so it was perfect. I mean, I didn’t know that at the time, but going through anthropology was not an unusual route to study music if you were going to study music outside of the western canon, which was all that music schools were teaching.

Yes, right. So now you’re in this folklore—

So I’m in the folklore major, taking courses in all kinds of different kinds of folklore, and I was pretty good about that. I found it interesting. I read massively, folktales, whether they were Tsimshin from the northwest coast or Irish or Norwegian or whatever, and enjoyed meeting the other professors in the major. I’m a sucker for free food, and there was a folklore tea every month, I think, held in the Faculty Club at Harvard. So it was a very elegant little building and a very elegant little room, and the tea was served out of silver-plated teapots. It wasn’t your sort of the way we serve tea around here. It was a very elegant little tea party with lots of cookies, and that sort of decided for me that this was a real interesting major, that and there would be a talk every once a month, and they were good. I thought they were interesting, so I became a member of the American Folklore Society as a student and became a student of folklore. At the same time, I was also taking advanced courses in anthropology, and took a course from a man named David Maybury-Lewis, who himself had studied a group in Central Brazil called the Shavante, and he had basically started a group project with a number of his own graduate students and researchers at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro to restudy the Ge-speaking Indians of Central Brazil. When we talk about indigenous peoples in Brazil, we tend to identify them by their languages because their languages also involve a lot of other aspects of—and sort of if somebody speaks a certain language, if there’s [unclear] they also often have a certain type of social organization, a certain type so you can sort of identify types of peoples by their language.

The Ge extend from almost the Amazon to the north pretty much to the southernmost part of Brazil inside, in the interior, not on the coast, which is where the Tupi speakers were or in the interior rivers where the Tupi and the Aruak and other groups, and Carib, to some extent, were, not to the north where the Caribs were. So they had their own region. They had a fairly complicated social organization. Claude Levi-Strauss had written an article in 1952 suggesting that somebody really needed to restudy the whole group of Ge because the data on them was conflicting, curious, and worthy of a comparative study. And David Maybury-Lewis came along in the sixties, basically, and was doing that comparative study with the help of a colleague in Brazil and their students. I heard about the Ge project there and I got to know David a little bit, and so I decided—that’s the other reason I went to Central Brazil. I mean, Levi-Strauss’ other article, in addition to Tristes Tropiques, was sort of the romantic vision of going to Brazil and finding uncontacted groups and sort of the adventure of doing it, there was also an ongoing project that I thought it would be interesting to be part of. So that was my senior year. I also did some myth analysis on computers. I got interested in computers and took FORTRAN, and they were huge. I mean, the computer room was immense. It had this great big huge thing, and I basically spent many hours typing punch cards and sort of creating a dictionary of oppositions. So I did this for a computer project to analyze myths. It was a crazy idea, but it was really interesting, and the idea that you could actually create something that would then give you a different kind of view of the same sort of material that you were working with with other ideas was really fun and really interesting, and I got quite excited by it.

I’ve always been a person who has thought that we can use machines to also think differently and to do things that we can’t do with our own minds or our ears, in the case of my Grandfather Charles, who invented a melograph in order to be able to see things that he couldn’t actually hear. Similarly, I was using a computer in order to be able to analyze things in ways that I couldn’t possibly do on a scale that I couldn’t possibly do myself, because you could run all the myths through. All the myths that somebody else had already entered for another reason, I could run through my own little program and see different things. So Harvard, the last two years at Harvard were really good. I stopped going to Vermont so much. I was in town working hard on the weekends and the days, and I think it was probably what my father was hoping, was that if he didn’t force me to work very hard in the beginning, when I finally found what I wanted to do, I would be unstinting, and I pretty much was. My wife graduated in ’66, and that left me with a senior year, sort of. She went to work in Portugal for a while and then Spain.

When did you get married?

We got married. So I spent the senior year also sort of going full blow and that’s when I—then she came back in the second half. So we were together in the spring quarter. She’d rented an apartment down in mid-Cambridge somewhere, and we weren’t together, so I had to live in the dorm. You had to have live in the dorms all four years at Harvard, because it wasn’t a dorm; it was a house. It was a community. I was with the same roommates the whole three years that we were in that place, so it really was home.

We had to decide about going to graduate school because we figured that if we wanted actually to be married and live together in the same place, we’d better go through that process together and sort of think through the process of going to graduate school. We planned to get married. We did get married instead of going to graduation at Harvard. There was a week between the end of the end of the term and graduation, as there is here, and so we had a big party and wedding during that week in Vermont at the family camp because it can feed and sleep 130. So it’s a really great place to have a big party, because people can just go there and spend days there, and it’s really fairly easy to do the whole thing. So we just got married there and didn’t go to the thing. My parents had no intention of going down to Cambridge. It was much too hot, and they had much too much to do at camp anyway. So my mother said, “I’m not going to go to your graduation, so you can do whatever you want.” I said, “We’re going to get married instead.”

Wow.

So in the spring quarter was really the time we had to define what it was we were going to be. Because I could have gone on in sociology, I could have gone on in anthropology, could have gone on in folklore, and, in fact, I applied to all three in a sense. My wife, who’d gotten her B.A. in—I guess it was Latin American studies, had to decide whether she wanted to go on in history or go on in romance languages as a sort of linguistic and cultural area, or comparative literature. She pretty much decided to go on in romance languages, in the study of the literature and ideas of the romance languages, which are, of course, those that are French and Spanish and Portuguese and Italian and Romanian, I think it is, and a couple of others that are romance languages.

So then we applied to a whole bunch of places, and my father came up to me at one point sort of apologetically and said, “You know, son, I can’t afford to support you after you’re married.” I said, “Actually, I think I can make this work. I think we can actually make enough money to live as graduate students without your having to pay anything, and if it doesn’t work, I’m going to give up the idea of going to graduate school and go to business school, and I’ll take care of us that way.”

Now, let me check in with the year now. What year are we in?

We’re in 1967, winter and spring of ’67. I guess the fall of ’66 is when we had to apply.

So this is a really very literally revolutionary time culturally in not only the country, but in the world. How are you plugged or not plugged into that, the whole counterculture and the ramping up of the Vietnam War? How was this affecting you?

Not much. I mean, you might think that my year in Alaska might have actually turned me into a hippie or something like that, but I came back to Harvard and was so deeply involved. I was, of course, subscribing to I.F. Stone’s Weekly and writing my congressmen and protesting in marches and things like that, but I wasn’t stopping everything yet. It really hit my education and my activities in 1968 in graduate school. In ’66 and ’67 it hit the college campuses a little later. It hit Harvard the year after I left. It hit Harvard in ’68. It hit Berkeley in ’68, and we knew ’68 was coming. In ’67, it was that I was deeply involved in my own life and marriage and deciding on what graduate school to go to, because it was clear that if we didn’t go to graduate school, I’d have to go do the whole thing over again with the draft board.

That’s what I was wondering, yes.

So I couldn’t take a year off without having to go fight the case again or instead, and so I figured, well, I could have, but why bother? I mean, since I really like to write, I really like to write, I like to study, I was really enjoying going to college. If it had been after my second year, I might have said—if it had been like that, if I didn’t really think I liked anything very much, I might have decided it was better to fight the case and take the month in jail, but that wasn’t the case. I had extremely strong recommendations. I did a B.A. thesis comparing the myths and social organization of the Aranda of Central Australia with the Ge-speaking groups of Central Brazil based on some of the same myths I was analyzing with my computer and also the very same people that were studied by late nineteenth-century scholars in Australia. The Aranda have a somewhat similar social organization to the Ge, so here you are in two halves of the globes apart, half a world apart, but very similar social organization, somewhat similar stories. And the question is why, and how the stories relate to social organization is what I wrote my thesis on.

I met once a week with an eminent professor of anthropology, Evon Vogt, who patiently worked with me every week for half an hour, going through my writing, going through my reading, and sort of helping me think through the issues for an entire year. The thesis itself was 140 pages long. It was a pretty big piece of work since I had to type it several times because there were no computers or word processors then. You had to type it and cut it up and put it back together again, type it over again. So I finished that. I was working on that and we were applying to graduate school, and I applied to Berkeley to go for folklore with Alan Dundes. I applied to UCLA to study anthropology as sort of my backup school. I applied to Harvard to study folklore with Albert Lord. And I applied to Cornell because I was particularly interested in the work of a scholar named Victor Turner, an anthropologist who I read a fascinating article by him, and I thought, well, he’d be really interesting to work with. And the other reason was that one of Professor Maybury-Lewis’ students, Terrence Turner, had recently accepted a job at Cornell University, and he was part of the Harvard Central Brazil Project. He’d worked with the Kayapo Indians, and so it seemed to me if I was going to work in South America, I had a great opportunity to work with an anthropologist I thought was really great, plus a specialist in South American Indians. So those were my four choices, and my wife basically applied to the same places in romance languages. She wasn’t admitted to the graduate program at UCLA, and I didn’t get any funding here. It was the only place I didn’t get any funding, so once again I struck out at UCLA. I got wonderful funding at Berkeley, but she didn’t. Harvard came through with a small amount of funding. But Cornell came through with four-year fellowships for us both and all expenses paid, plus a pretty nice stipend for those days, so basically that’s where we went, and we both thought they were fine programs. It was a fine program and we went there, and that’s probably how our graduate students pick their own places, since one of the frustrations being that UCLA is even our best offers are not nearly as good as the offers that can be placed by private universities.

Yes, right.

So we just consistently lose some of our top picks to places that are also top picks, if they have top picks at Chicago, Cornell, Princeton. Columbia picks up a lot of them. At Harvard, there’s not much we can do. We may be good, but you can’t ask people to have to pay money when someone’s going to pay them.

Right. Even across town, it’s more inviting in that sense over at USC. They can do that.

Yes, they can do better than we can, because they aren’t restricted by the state funding guidelines. And it’s particularly hard for people coming from out of state here to come to graduate school, and if they’re coming from out of the country, then it’s impossible. I mean, they remain out-of-state people for their entire time here, and the departments can’t afford it. So we were on the good receiving end of that, and my father was so pleased, that he built a kitchen off one end of the one-room cabin and a bedroom off the other of the one-room cabin. Since he didn’t have to pay for us anymore, I think he must have put some money aside to help us with graduate school just in case, but since we obviously didn’t need any help, we got a wonderful, improved house for our wedding present. We took my wife’s, all of her savings, and sunk a well 300 feet deep and so then we had water.

Wow.

So by the beginning of our marriage, we had a real house on fifty acres of hillside and with water, and then we took off for Cornell, which was reasonably close, so we could actually go back for holidays and things like that to our own house in Vermont. That starts sort of another moment. But looking back at Harvard, it was not a very political period of my life compared to both Putney and perhaps graduate school, but it was certainly a very interesting educational experience and one that I don’t regret at all.

So ultimately the professors at Cornell that you went to work with leave Cornell. Isn’t that right?

Cornell was interesting. I took a GRE at Harvard in sociology, and I thought, well, this is really strange. There wasn’t an anthropology GRE [unclear] sociology. This is crazy. I’m going to get a sociology degree, and I never took sociology as such. I was taking social relations. I was in the 99th percentile in sociology. But I came out of the exam thinking my professor must have written this exam. I mean, I knew the answers to everything, and I didn’t—so I was pretty good at sociology. I really wasn’t very good in anthropology in the sense that I hadn’t really studied that many anthropology courses.

So I went to Cornell, and it was an anthropology department, and I just studied anthropology. I took just all anthropology courses except for one. I took a wonderful course in the Divine Comedy from a professor of comparative literature. But Victor Turner and Terrence Turner were sort of the two people I went to study with. Vic wasn’t teaching that quarter that year, but he was giving his seminar in his home every Thursday night, and it was by invitation. You couldn’t just sort of sign up for the class. You had to sign up for the class with the permission of the instructor. It wasn’t by invitation only, but you had to—so I went and talked to this guy and convinced him that he should let me in, and I went. We went every week. It started, I think, at seven and went till ten, maybe eight until ten, and then it would go to midnight if things were really good. And we would meet in his house, and somebody would read a paper. He was writing a book at the time that he was reading chapters out of, but he also invited visiting scholars to come, and it was a really stimulating alternative way of learning. New York State at the time had an eighteen-year-old drinking age, so beer was served after the paper was given, and we would talk and drink beer and hang out until we would discuss something. As the discussion went, the discussion would just keep going. I met a lot of interesting people there, and you could take the seminar over and over again. There was no limit on the number of times you could take it because it was different every time. So I was in that seminar for four years. It sort of provided a kind of thread that went through my entire graduate career from the first year of graduate school till when I was writing my dissertation, I was in Vic Turner’s seminar with people coming to talk and discussions every Thursday night.

He’d modeled it on a seminar that his professor had given at the University of Manchester, and that professor had modeled it on his professor’s series of lectures, and his professor was Bronislaw Malinowski, who actually had a famous Thursday night in-house seminar, in which he invited important people who were coming through to give talks. Then Max Gluckman had done the same, and then Victor Turner was doing the same. So in a sense, it was a style of learning that was really quite foreign to me since most of my learning had been in houses, sort of in classrooms, and it was quite exciting. I met there somebody who was part of the Ge Central Brazil Project that I had never met, named Roberto Da Matta, who came and gave a lecture there one night, and then Roberto would then become my mentor in Brazil. So in that seminar I not only learned a lot, but I met the very people that were going to be instrumental in my future career. Terrence Turner had a very different approach to things. He was a very analytic—still is a very analytic thinker and writer and tremendous reader. He could read things and then sort of pull them apart, take them apart, and taught us how to take things apart in really interesting ways. I had a lot of other wonderful professors, had a wonderful year. My wife was having a good year, too, and we were enjoying living together for our first year in a house in which our landlady lived, and she was quite threatened by having a Seeger in the house and by the mail we were getting.

Wow.

She once called me up and said, “You know, I have a gun down here. If you sneak into my house and stop my clock again, I’m going to shoot you.” I said, “I’ve never been into your house. I don’t know anything about your clock.” But that was the level of paranoia. She called the FBI on us, and apparently that’s what she said she’d done, and, lo and behold, a big huge car appeared out from with some guy sitting in it for weeks, and we’d see him as we left, and we’d see him when we came back.

Man.

That was odd, and so, you know, things were heating up, clearly.

Now, when you say the mail you were getting, what is it you were trying to—

I was getting I.F. Stone’s Weekly, which was famous among the John Birch Society for being a communist sort of outlet, and for us it was where you actually got the news, because you couldn’t trust the papers. And he sort of would do research on the stories and pull stories in from all kinds of places that were really interesting. It was only about eight pages long. But I think that was one of the things that sort of set her off. Living in the house with us was a little odd. Then a bombshell hit, I think it was in February or something, that both Victor Turner and Terrence Turner were leaving for Chicago, and I’d come to Cornell to study just with them. I mean, that was the reason I was there. They were both going, and they were both going to the same place, and they suggested I fly to Chicago, come with them, which I’m very grateful for. If I’d gotten there a year later, having come to study with them and found neither of them there, it would have been a bitter blow indeed.

So I did, I applied to Chicago, and it turned out that I and three other people were actually part of the package, that basically had negotiated to be able to take some of their graduate students. They couldn’t actually just take them. We had to apply. We had to be admitted. But apparently admission and funding was understood.

Oh, okay. That was what I was wondering.

I was extremely fortunate, and I arrived in Chicago. So my wife and I—she also applied. She got in to the romance language department, but she didn’t get funding for that first year, so we had to borrow money from her parents for the tuition, and we basically scraped by on what we could earn during the summer at the camp and on my own one fellowship. But that was a very important move, too, very fortunate, and we were deciding when to go out there. We worked at camp all summer, because by then—my parents were also very generous. They didn’t give us money to go to school, but they certainly paid us well to work at the summer camp, and we had a lot of seniority, so I don’t think they paid us that much better than anybody else that had been working there for twenty years or fifteen or however long it was by that time, ten maybe, but they really did pay us well, so we had a fair amount of money to go back on with.

Wow.

So we decided, well, we’ll wait until after the Democratic Convention to go out there.

Oh, golly.

Well, we missed the fun, but we did get there. We said it’s going to be too crazy, because the traffic is going to be bad, everything is going to be, so we’ll just wait until it’s over and stay in Vermont where the weather’s a little cooler and got there right after. By that time, suddenly the theater of politics and the powerful, the powerful repressive forces were clear, and the powerful opposition to them was also mobilizing. So Chicago, the two years I spent there in Chicago were very different years than the ones I spent at Cornell. Those were years of protesting bombings, shutting down the university, occupying the Administration Building, and it really did sort of—those two years were like one year, really, in terms of how much I got to think about anthropology, and the other year was basically spent sitting in endless meetings organized by Students for a Democratic Society and singing protest songs out in front of the occupied Administration Building to audiences and very seriously suited gentlemen with tape recorders who were probably FBI or somebody else. Those were tough years, but I didn’t get hurt. I got reasonably paranoid. But I think in the sixties, paranoia was a reasonable thing to be. I was pretty worried. A number of people I knew were being imprisoned for drugs, even though I thought that what they really were were political prisoners. But if you pick somebody up, you could either plant drugs in their car, or you could find that they had them because they were also counterculture drug users or something like that. So if I were at a party where drugs began to be used, I’d just leave, and I became totally clean and totally paranoid about being stopped by the cops. I just made it very clear that if anybody ever stopped me and planted something on me, I would have enough character witnesses to say that actually that that had never been something I did, that I could probably fight it. I sure didn’t want to go to jail for something I didn’t believe in, and that would be the case of being caught with marijuana.

So I figured if I was going to go to jail, it had to be for something I really cared about. The police in Chicago were corrupt. The famous case of sort of the gun battle with the Black Panthers downtown in Chicago was that there was a door they were shooting at each other through, and when they took the case to court, they presented the door wrong side around, to argue that most of the shots were coming out from the inside from the Black Panthers, and they’d only shot a few shots which went the other direction. But then the case blew up with they showed that actually that wasn’t the way the door was on the building, that it was actually the other way. Most of the shots were coming from the police. That was the level of aggressive and corrupt policing that I think was going on in the 1960s. It was a very grim time for American political procedures and justice, and I could see that. But on the other side, I had great professors at Chicago, and my wife had good professors, and we were having a great time. We lived comfortably, we had places to stay, and had summers in Vermont. I liked anthropology because where else could you find a place where they would actually pay you to go somewhere else and live for a year or two to do research? It seemed like a good idea. So the graduate school was also fun. I confess I’ve had a really good time in all of my schools. I mean, I really enjoyed something about them. So we get to 1968 at that point. We arrived in Chicago in ’68, and we spent ’68 and ’69 there. In 1970, I defended my master’s paper, and I wrote it on The Odyssey, working on ideas of Albert Lord’s, because I decided since I was going to do my Ph.D. research in Brazil, and I’d already written my B.A. paper on Brazilian Indians, I wanted to find something different for master’s. I wanted to think about something else, sort of a refreshing, like sort of having a bit of lemon between tastes of something to clear the palate, basically.

A little ginger. [Laughs]

Yes, a little ginger. So I cleared my palate with that and then passed my qualifying exams and, lo and behold, there was money in the grant also to go to Brazil—I mean in my fellowship. Is there anything else about college?

One thing that I wanted to come back to, you mentioned the King and Robert Kennedy assassinations in ’68 as being particularly upsetting, and by 1969 it seems that a lot of the peace-and-love idealism in the country was yielding to anger, violence, disillusionment. You’re kind of maybe—I don’t know how consciously, but you’re preparing to leave the country during this time. What were some of your thoughts and feelings at that point since you were clearly involved in the—

I was never in the peace and love part of the sixties.

Right.

I was in graduate school and working hard. I always thought I was the unimaginative one among my roommates at college. I just sort of plodded ahead and went to graduate school. One of my high school roommates, well, several of them went into communes and—

Oh, wow.

—one became head of a commune. One became a guru, and another one went to grad school for one year, dropped out, and did other stuff. Another one went to graduate school for a year, dropped out, and sort of lived on his family fortune in the hills or something. So I was the only one of most of the people I knew, probably all of them—I don’t think there’s a single other person in my sort of immediate cohort in college and graduate school actually went to graduate school and went straight through. I always thought that was rather unimaginative of me. They were doing such neat stuff. But it’s what I cared about. I was the only one married straight through, I think.

I was wondering about that.

So we also had a commitment to each other, and we had a plan, and I don’t think—again, we weren’t thinking really about jobs, though we did actually know we had to be able to pay the rent and put food on the table and things like that for ourselves. So I was sort of plodding along, and the only thing that I think I can defend that with was I was not politically unaware, and I was at the university. On the other hand, I also had my own priorities, and they did not involve dropping out or sitting in a commune and thinking about things. I was thinking about things just fine, thank you. We had this place in Vermont so, you know, there were places. We already had a place where we could go sit in the hills and just sort of think and do something very different if we wanted to.

Well, I guess what I’m kind of picking up here, and maybe I’m off, but you can correct me, is it seems that there’s a sense of stability and commitment in what you’re doing and the way you’re living your life at a time of great instability and a lot of change and turmoil. I was wondering how much of that you think may be an outgrowth of the kind of upbringing and schooling that you had, which was somewhat different from, I think, most people’s mainstream education and family experience.

Well, I think you’re right. I really didn’t have a family to rebel against, because my parents were strongly against the war, too, and I’d gone to schools that weren’t the system, that were actually sort of against the system right straight through, that was until I got to Harvard. But Harvard is a funny place, you sort of do whatever you want to there. But certainly in high school. So I think you’re right. I came with a fair amount of stability. I knew what I believed and knew how I thought change should be implemented, and it didn’t involve dropping out, no. It involved going to meetings. I went to endless meetings of the SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society, and I was very bitter about the way they ran those meetings, because it seemed to me that you would be there to decide something. Then they would just sort of futz around and futz around and debate and debate and debate until most of the people left because they had to get back to do their work and get to class the next day. Then the SDS operatives who were there would then make the decision and have a democratic vote. It simply wasn’t democratic at all. You drove out half the people there before you even got to a vote. So I lost my faith in their ability to represent anything besides their own intentions pretty quickly. I supported the things that I thought they did that I could support, but I certainly didn’t support the party or that particular line of thinking as representing anything besides a particular line of thinking of perhaps a few dedicated people.

It was, I think, probably the same feeling that people who were working with the Communist Party in the thirties felt. I mean, they were professional operatives and then there was everybody else, and everybody else, if it suited the operatives, were ignored by the Communist Party doctrine. Victor Turner had also been a member of the Communist Party and then became a Catholic.

Wow.

So I had this sort of model of someone who was deeply political, who then decided that the Communist Party had done so wrong in a number of—first with the Stalinist-era Gulag and then later invading Poland, that it was really that you couldn’t trust a political party to get you out of anything either. It had to come from a much more selective approach to issues.

Interesting. Wow. So you’re gearing up to leave the country now, you have this fellowship, and how was that shaping up?

Well, to do research, you really have to decide what your questions are. I mean, in fact to go to graduate school, you sort of have to decide what your real issues are. My issues come from an old sociological debate that actually I had in eighth grade in which we were debating which was the founding principle of capitalism, whether it was Karl Marx or Weber. I think we referred to that in my first talk.

Right, right.

Well, I was still interested in that question, but now after four years of sociological and ethnological research at Harvard, the question was still sort of in religion and things like that. Is the religion the way it is, do people think the way they think because of material circumstance, or is material circumstances really an outgrowth of what they think? I mean, that seemed to me then that was the question, and it didn’t go away in graduate school, so I thought, well, I’ll study that. One place to study it is not in a capitalist society, which Marx had already done and then Weber was looking at, but in a non-capitalist society, in a society that actually wasn’t influenced by selling labor and by commodification of things, but it was different. And I thought that if I wanted to study the relationship of music to society, I’d like to study it in a non-capitalist society, because I have a feeling the relationship would be different than it is in Adorno’s thinking and sort of a bunch of other people’s thinking about music and capitalism. That required that you find a place in the world where a group is not part of a capitalist system. Even then there weren’t a lot of places around the world that did, but there were some tribal societies, small-scale societies that had been fairly recently contacted in Papua New Guinea, Australia, Brazil, Ecuador, a couple of other counties are sort of parts of Peru, that apparently were reasonably isolated from and weren’t selling their labor. But ideally I would find a place where they were not only not part of the capital system, they weren’t selling their labor and sort of buying commodities and things like that, but there also had been no missionaries, because if you want to study the relationship of economic life to religious life, you’ve got to find a place where religious life hasn’t been sort of truncated by missionaries. Then I had to find a place where they had music. And those were sort of the three requirements of the place I was going to work, was relatively little missionary activity or none preferably, no working for the [unclear], and music.

Well, it’s really hard to figure out if anybody has any of those things. So I wrote all over, and I was doing research and writing to people in the field, asking them where might be a good place to go. My wife reminded me, and, I mean, we both thought that it would be good if we went to someplace where they spoke a romance language so that she could at least be working on and thinking about her own romance language work. So that ruled out Papua New Guinea and Australia and a couple other places. My advisor, Terrence Turner, helpfully said, “Well, there is a tribe called the Suyá, I met one once, and we don’t know anything about them. But there they are. They might be interesting, and they are a Ge-speaking group that no one has really studied very carefully and who certainly none of the Ge Central Brazil Project had really studied them. We don’t know if they have music, but if they’re like the Kayapo that he’d worked with, they probably do,” and they were in an area where no missionaries were allowed and no missionaries had been allowed ever. I wrote to several other people in other places, because it seemed to me I didn’t want to just sort of do what my advisor thought I should do, and they all, when I presented them with sort of the options, thought that working with the Suyá was probably going to be my best bet for the sort of questions I had.

So I went to Brazil with these big questions, but I had to go a particular place to address them, and that’s sort of the odd thing about the way we work in anthropology and in ethnomusicology. We go to very small places to talk about big issues. Philosophers could just sit in their offices and think about big issues, and they may address those big issues in very small pieces of speech, but they can get that speech without going anywhere. They just imagine it or they get people to say it for them. We have to go somewhere, and we have to figure out how we’re going to ask the questions we want to ask and understand the answers we’re going to presumably elicit. So I had to take courses in how to learn an unwritten language and how to understand and to create sort of your own grammatical understanding, how to create your own phonological diagrams, and courses in field techniques. Some of the worst grades I got in graduate school were actually in field techniques and things like that, because I was arguing in my final paper that basically field research was like Dante’s Divine Comedy. It started in hell you went through, and you had no idea of what was going on, and you found your Virgil, who then took you through the inferno where people only told you partial stories, and then you got to purgatory, where you sort of learned more. You sort of switched your advisor, in a sense, and your [unclear], so you switch and you learn more. Then finally you got to paradise, and you were getting an increasingly full vision, and finally you had your blinding vision and went home and wrote the book, which was sort of what Dante did. I mean, that’s the way he sort of structured the whole thing.

Well, I got a really low grade for that one, because the person was really into much more empirical things like counting the number of people in mass demonstrations in Paris and things like that. But I’m actually convinced to this day that that paper actually had something to do with the way research went or goes with anthropology and ethnomusicology. So I was supposedly fully prepared to go to the field, and we got a fellowship. The one thing that no one had told me was that I was walking into a country that was a military dictatorship. Somehow I had not studied Latin American studies, so I had no idea. I knew endless amounts about the kinship systems of Central Brazil, and absolutely zero about the country in which this all was taking place.

Wow.

So my wife and I arrived in Brazil. We knew where we wanted to go, and I went and saw Roberto Da Matta, who I’d met in Victor Turner’s seminar, and he was delighted to have us there. He said, “Well, just fill out the papers and I’ll sponsor you, and your papers should come through in a month or two. Just go to the beach, wait, work on your Portuguese. It’s not very good,” and gave me a place to sit and read. We waited and waited, and nothing happened. Our papers never came through back from the Brazilian government, who was supposed to be giving us clearance to do the research in the Xingu with the Suyá. After months with further plodding, they said, “Oh, you can’t go because it’s raining.”

And we wrote back and said, “Well, it’s going to be raining. We’re going to spend two years there. Didn’t you read it? If it rains half the year, we’re going to be there for two rainy seasons.” And they said, “I’m sorry, we can’t do it now because you don’t have the right documents or something,” and so we were constantly being put off. Time was passing, and we ran out of money. The whole budget that I’d gotten, which was a fairly generous grant, but the whole budget had been predicated on one month or two months in the city and the rest of the time living in the jungle fairly cheaply. Months were passing in the city, we got thrown out of the apartment we were in because Carnival was coming. We had the money actually to pay, but they wanted us out. So we went and crashed in some other graduate students’ houses, and then finally we had a letter of introduction to some people in São Paulo from a business friend of my father-in-law’s. We took the letter there and were invited to Sunday dinner, and we stayed with them for three months. It was the most fortunate piece of letter of introduction I’ve ever had. They were sweet people, they were very nice and very generous, and it was a big sort of extended family. We had a letter to an elderly gentleman who had adult children, and one of his adult children had just come back from getting her Ph.D. in the United States, and they had two little children and an extra guestroom and two maids, and so it was no trouble really for them to put us in one of the guestrooms and the maids fed us, and so it wasn’t as though we were making their life that much more difficult, and they enjoyed having us.

So we just kept on fighting for permission to get to the field. I began to get worried that I was never going to get there. We were living in São Paulo now, so I started to do research on other groups that I might go to, and I began to meet other anthropologists, and I met Brazilian anthropologists. My Portuguese was getting pretty good now. Both of our Portuguese was really good. We’d been living now in Brazil for six months. We went to a party of Brazilian anthropologists, an anthropology party. It was being held at the University of São Paulo. It was a great party, nice people, and our story was told. We sang. We always sang and played. Whenever we went to parties, we always were asked to sing and play, and so we would always take our guitar and banjo and sing. One anthropologist was explaining to another, Ruth Cardoso, what our difficult problem was, we just couldn’t get into the field, and the time was passing, we were running out of money, and we were just sitting there. Isn’t this a tragedy? And she said, “Oh, that’s terrible. Let’s see what my husband can do.” And her husband was a sociologist who’d been forcibly retired by the military government and was, I think, supported partly now by the Ford Foundation, which was sort of supporting some independent research. He was also a politician, or had been a politician. He came and he heard our story, and he said, “Well, that’s really too bad. I have some contacts. I have some friends. Why don’t you take this letter to the head of the Folklore Institute in Rio de Janeiro and see if he can help you.” Then he wrote a letter for us asking this gentleman to help these poor anthropologists who were trying to get into the field and something strange was happening. We were being told it was raining, or we were being given other excuses. Could he do something to sort of help us out?

So we went, and the person, the anthropologist’s husband, was a friend, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who later became president of Brazil. So, yes, he did have connections. I mean, at the time he was persona non grata with the military, but he wasn’t so non grata that he had to be out of the country. He still sort of had all these contacts. One of his contacts was this former professor. Well, the guy was wonderful, he’s a very sweet, elderly gentleman sitting in the folklore museum in Rio, and said, “Sure, I’ll tell you what. I’ll write to one of my other former students, who is minister of agriculture, and I’ll see if he can help out.” He sent off a letter within a few days, and within two weeks we had our permission. He said that the minister wrote to the head of the Indian Bureau and said, “Liberate this case,” basically. So it was one of those cases. There’s a word for it in Brazil, which is called pistolâo. You need a pistolâo. A pistolâo was literally, in Portuguese, a big pistol. You need an intermediary who will make a personal case for you, because Brazil uses bureaucracy to be obstructionist. We never got a no from Brazil. We just got, “You can’t go yet.” But they were starving us, basically. You can’t go yet, and there was no indication of ever being able to go. One of the reasons they don’t say no is because if somebody gets enough influence, suddenly you don’t want to have said no, because you get in trouble. But if you only said wait, you don’t get in trouble, and then pressure comes down, and off we went. That’s what the modus operandi was in lots of parts of Brazil at that point. I mean, it was pretty frustrating, and we were pretty worried that we were never going to do the research. I mean, here I’d prepared years to do this research, and it was looking like we’d never get there.

Well, we got there. We got there, and about eight months after we got into Brazil—we got there in June of 1971 in the field, and I think we got into Brazil in September or something of the year before. But we spoke pretty good Portuguese, and we’d met a lot of people and had a lot of support. Probably I should talk about field research next time, because it’s sort of a big topic. But the field research was certainly dominated by the questions that were coming out of my scholarship. I was interested in the relationship of music to social organization and cosmology. My suspicion was that based on Levi-Strauss and also on a whole bunch of sociology was that there was going to be a coherence between the way the music was performed and perhaps the music sounds themselves and the structures of the ways people thought about the universe, in terms of space, time, and things, and also the way they organized themselves. But that was the question I had. I didn’t know. I had no answer. I mean, I didn’t think I should—I mean, I could have sat on the beach and written a wonderful description saying just that, but that was not what anthropology is supposed to do, although it has done it on occasion. I decided I would go off to the field, and we finally arrived in June of 1971, and basically stayed in Brazil until June of 1973. So while we were in Brazil for almost three years, we were sort of in the field mode for about two of those, spending times in the field and then going back out to the cities to sort of recover or to buy things or to do whatever to rest up for a little while, and then I think perhaps we saw my family one Christmas, and then we’d go back into the field.

But the lessons learned in the field were different kinds of lessons, but the focus that I had was just about as single-minded as it had been in terms of junior year in college. I knew what it was I wanted to do, and I knew where I wanted to do it, and I had a good reason for doing it there. I just was determined to get there, and we finally did. We got there, curiously enough, through our music and through our ability to sort of win friends and communicate with people. We were very, very lucky.

Yes. So let me ask you, you had all this time to prepare yourself intellectually. What, if anything, did you do to prepare yourself physically for this endeavor?

Not much. You know, no one really told me how tough it was going to be, and I don’t know—well, I do know. For a lot of them, it wasn’t that tough. When you go to a society that’s beyond the capitalist system, you’re going to a place where there are no stores, there’s no money, and so I was forced to go hunting and fishing. I was forced to be physical in a way that none of my colleagues that I had ever talked to actually were, and none of my professors either, as far as I can tell.

Interesting.

So I didn’t know I had to be fit. I was pretty fit, because I was a horseback-riding instructor, I rode a lot and hiked a lot, and I knew a lot. I mean, to a certain extent I really think fieldwork for me back in the jungle was like one big long camping trip at summer camp. As I tell my students, as it happens, a lot of the skills I learned at summer camp are things that have carried me through the rest of my life, and among them were camping out, being uncomfortable but knowing you can live through it.

I was a good shot. I was a very fine rifleman. I was a twelve-bar sharpshooter or something like that, and I was a pretty good shot at target practice, but I could also hit a deer. I’d been fishing as a kid, and I knew about archery. But there was one thing I would have done more of, knowing what would happen to me, I would have practiced my archery a lot more. But otherwise, the skills, I was in reasonably good health and reasonably good shape. I took all my wisdom teeth out before we went, because three of them were impacted, and I figured the last thing I needed was to suddenly have a crisis in the field.

Right. A dental emergency.

So we did take some physical steps, got rid of wisdom teeth. We didn’t do what some people do, which is take their appendices out. That seemed a little bit unnecessary to me, and I wasn’t sure anybody was going to pay for it. I didn’t really want to have it done. You don’t get appendicitis very often, and if you do, well, that’s really tough, but what’s the chance it’s going to happen in the next two years? So we were preparing ourselves sort of physically in the medical sense, in terms of training, in terms of shots, in terms of all kinds of things, and also we were reasonably well prepared physically. Although after eight months living in Rio, we were not as well prepared as we had been actually when we arrived because in Rio and São Paulo, there wasn’t a lot of exercise to be gotten in either place.

Right. My other question before we stop today is that now you’ve been married a little while, and how did this adventure figure into your potential family plan?

Well, we decided that we didn’t think having children in graduate school was a very smart thing to do, especially if we were going to go to the jungle. It didn’t seem like a very safe thing to do for the kids. David Maybury-Lewis, on the other hand, just said, “Have your children as soon as you want. They’ll never be convenient. Just have them.” I said that was easy for him to say, and he’d done it. I mean, he’d also been to the field with his wife before and then also taking his children to the field, as we eventually would do. But we decided to wait on having a family, and we decided to until we were both done with our Ph.D.’s. My wife decided she would come with me to the field because it seemed like an interesting thing to do. I mean, how often do you get a chance to do something like that? I really wanted her to come. I didn’t really want to do it by myself. I thought it was much too hard and much too lonesome. So our plan was that she would come with me to do my research, and then she would go back and finish her last year of classes at graduate school, because she’d been put behind by the move from one school to another, from Cornell to Chicago. Then she would do her dissertation, and then we would talk about having a family.

And nothing unplanned happen in the interim?

Nothing unplanned. We were pretty driven, organized people. At the very beginning when I said the Seegers were sort of driven, I was one of those driven Seegers too. I mean, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and I was determined to do it. She thought it was a great idea, and so she was determined to do it too.

We just basically were enjoying being married, and I think our experiences together, certain doing our research have bound us together in a way that a lot of marriages aren’t. In addition to having known each other since we were kids, we also having worked at summer camp together, which is when you see some of the worse sides of people.

Interesting.

We went to the field together and saw, of course, the worst sides of each other as well as the best sides under really trying circumstances, and so all the other, the separations and things like that that have happened since really pale in comparison with sort of the strong bond that’s forged by going to a country together and sort of making a career there and doing research in very odd places and dealing with all the challenges that come up together.

And you had a lot of common experiences just growing up.

Had a lot of common experiences just growing up.

Amazing.

As my wife said, it’s really hard for her to advise our daughters on how to find a spouse since she married someone she met when she was a year old and we worked at summer camp together. So all of those things are hard to reproduce. It’s not as though we met at a singles bar or on a dating service or something like that. We really had very strong ties from the very start. And we still do. It’s quite lovely.

More of that stability and commitment that seems to run through your life.

Yes. I was one of the lucky Seegers, and, you know, my father was too, and Pete was too. They both married women who were, as I said last time, I think, extremely able and interested in making a project together as a couple, a business project or a political project, Toshi being Pete’s manager, and my mother helping out with the summer camp, I mean really being the manager of the summer camp for a lot of the time. Both Pete and my father were visionaries, and both Toshi and my mother were the ones who made the practical things actually work, to make things happen, and to a certain extent, Judy’s like that too. I mean, she’s more practical than I am, and she remembers everybody’s name, so whenever I need to remember who it was I spoke to, she knows and also often what we talked about. So we were fortunate. Again, I think a lot of anybody’s career is just luck and good fortune and running into people at parties or whatever and not running into police in the wrong places, you know, or not being there when people are shooting and not stepping in front of a bus. I mean, I’ve always been certain that the way I was going to die was sitting in a taxi or something like that, speeding down with some crazy motorist, some crazy taxi driver and some other crazy motorist deciding to have it out on the street. So it hasn’t happened yet.

Excellent.

It could happen any moment.

That’s right.

So we’ll have to see each other in fairly short time.

Well, next week.

Next week.

Next Tuesday. Okay?

Yes.

Thank you very much. [End of March 1, 2012 interview]

Today is March 6, 2012. This is Alex Cline interviewing Professor Anthony Seeger in his office here at the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. As he was saying when we were testing the mics, it’s kind of an overcast day today, a little cool, rather pleasant. Not as pleasant as Hawaii, where you’re going soon to do a lecture and enjoy some time, but we’ll take it. Good morning.

Good morning. Good morning.

We left off last time talking about your experience going to Brazil and how difficult it was to actually get to the field where you needed to get in the jungle. You told the story of the interesting connections that were ultimately made and appeared to be needed to get the wheels turning to make this happen. I had asked you about some preparation that you had done or needed to do for this trip. I guess really what I’d like to do to start out this part of your story is to ask you simply here you are, you’re about to embark on something that only a tiny handful of people in the entire world could ever possibly have the opportunity to do, which is to go live with people who are essentially what they call uncontacted. These are people who don’t have anything to do with the dominant culture out there. They live an essentially isolated existence in the Amazon jungle and living in a way that people in most of the world would not recognize as being familiar, something that they would associate being purely with the past, maybe the very distant past. So in preparing for this, we talked a little about the physical preparation or lack thereof, but mentally preparing yourself for what you’re going to encounter and what your life is going to be like, how exactly did you go about doing that? You obviously studied to some degree in order to know what to expect, but how does one really prepare for that kind of cultural shift in experience before actually getting there? And what were your expectations?

That’s a good question, and the reason I stopped speaking last time, and I’m starting with this now, is that in ethnomusicology and anthropology, actual field research going somewhere and meeting people and learning their language and talking to them in the language that is theirs rather than an interpretation is a fundamental part of the research, and it’s a very tricky and complicated thing, extremely exhilarating, quite pleasurable at moments, quite desperate and filled with despair and sadness at others, partly because it’s difficult and partly because things happen that you can’t anticipate or control. We didn’t prepare ourselves at all psychologically for it. We figured that, well, we’d worked at summer camps before, we knew something about going out and doing unexpected things and camping. And it was so hard just to get all the graduate schoolwork done and all of the preparation to go to Brazil, all of the paperwork and the chest x-rays you needed to get to get permission to get into indigenous areas and things. There was just a lot of bureaucracy, and then just waiting around all those months, for six months, before we could even get permission to get in. So we mostly were thinking about much more practical and immediate things. We didn’t really think much about what it would be like to be there.

The group we went to visit were very isolated, but they had made peace with the Brazilians about twelve years before, and they’d had contact with Brazilians for maybe a hundred years, a little bit more, because they’d met a German—they were living in their village when a German explorer came down the river with his dogs and his team and saw them and pulled over and tried to talk to them and described their village and spent one night camped on a beach right across from the village and wrote wonderful descriptions, very useful descriptions for somebody who hadn’t seen them. Then no one else really saw them again until about the mid-1950s. In 1959 they made peace with the Brazilians and entered into contact with—well, there was nobody there but doctors and administrators of the indigenous area and things like that, because there was nothing else. There was nobody else in the region to talk to besides each other and the other Indians in the area, and they stopped making war on the other Indians. One of the reasons they were contacted was the other Indians were getting worried they were going to attack them. They had planes that could then fly over the central part of Brazil, and they found the village. The Brazilians decided they wanted to contact them before anything else happened, either ranchers killing them off or other Indians finding them, or their finding other Indians. So they sent a young man who had been captured by one of their enemies up with them, up with a bunch of other Indians, and basically they did the contact because they could speak the language. And then they brought a bunch of presents up. They brought ax heads and machetes and all kinds of other sort of presents and gave it to them and said, well, there were some nice white people down the river that had a whole more presents and that if they wanted to wait and if it was okay with them, they’d come up and visit.

So that was how the first non-indigenous people actually saw them was in the second trip, in a sense, where they went up again with a whole bunch more Indians, but a whole bunch of presents and made a contact. At that time, the Suyá described hearing them, hearing a motorboat coming for a long time, because the river winds so much, you can hear it actually for a really long time. It’s going closer and farther from you as it winds its way slowly up the river, and they heard this hum going on and on and on. And finally, they all ran into the forest and held onto trees because someone had told them if you didn’t hold onto a tree, you could be blown away by the rush of air of the motorboat and the sound. So they’re all holding onto the trees, and the motorboat finally arrived and stopped at the edge of the village, and they stepped out from behind the trees and said hello and did some trading. Then the Suyá sang for the Brazilians and their team, and then that evening the Brazilians pulled out a guitar and sang for them, and that was sort of the ceremonial musical aspect of that first contact in which each side was sort of proclaiming its passivity and its agreements of its nonaggressive stance. The Indians were not on a raid. They would sing before but not during it. Then the Brazilians were singing with a guitar rather than military band, so, of course, they all thought they were being peaceful on both sides.

Now, that wasn’t that long before I got there, but it was a number of years, and a number of people had passed through their village and visited them, including a National Geographic photographer and a Brazilian anthropologist who was there for a short time and then didn’t go back.

It’s kind of an appropriate setup for you really, especially the musical part. [Laughs]

Especially the musical part, and there’s no point in being the first one. I mean, there’s no point in trying to get to a totally uncontacted group, because they probably don’t want to see you, for one thing, and, secondly, they may all die while you’re there. The problem that they had was really with diseases for which they had no resistance, and so a lot of the older generation died actually fairly quickly after that contact, in spite of the medical care that they were being provided with, or the intermittent medical care. So we got there. It’s hard to imagine today how difficult it was then. There was a weekly flight, a weekly Air Force plane, an old DC-3, a C-47, a two-engine prop plane that started in São Paulo and sort of bounced along from Air Force base to Air Force base along a whole series of Air Force bases up to Manaus, and it would sort of resupply those bases on the way. It would stop for gas, stop overnight in small towns, and sort of people would get out and stay in the place and stay in the local homes around, and then get back on the plane and go on the next day. It would take them a couple of days to get to Manaus at least, and there was one a week. Researchers could get special dispensation to ride on the Air Force planes, but you could only carry a certain amount of stuff. They didn’t have unlimited kilos. So I think they allowed us sixty pounds of material that we could bring along with ourselves, and with that we had to take everything that we needed for six months because there were no stores. There was no money. Once we got there, if we forgot something serious, like if our tape recorder broke, we had to leave the field or something like that, or we just had to do without.

So what do you take for six months in a place you’ve never been? Well, you fill up with—we were told to take lots of presents for the Indians. That was one part of it. They were used to be sort of given gifts by outsiders from the very beginning from when they first made peace. So we brought, oh, fishhooks and fish line and bullets and .22 bullets and shotgun shells and cloth, a few pieces of cloth, six, I think, pieces of cloth, because we were told that some of them liked cloth. Then what do you take for yourself? Well, you need some soap and some salt, but there was no—we couldn’t take food because there was really no weight for it, and we stuffed our pockets with beads and things like that. We were told to take beads and mirrors because, I mean, these were things that actually sound sort of stereotypical, like buying Manhattan Island with beads and mirrors. But, in fact, they really loved the beads and mirrors. They were very specialized. They were specialists in beads and mirrors because they’d been getting beads since the German explorer went there in 1894. They really liked Czechoslovakian beads, as that was then Czechoslovakia, Czech beads. So we packed all that in, finally got on an Air Force plane that was finally going there and flew a good part of one day and stopped in a place called Xavantina, which the plane just stopped, everybody got out. We were booked into a local sort of hotel, and somebody ran around the backyard and killed the chicken, and we all had dinner, and the next morning we got on the plane.

After we took from Xavantina, it was really impressive, because we took off in the early, early morning, and there were still pockets of mist below, but there wasn’t a single straight line anywhere. Everything was curved. There were no more roads. There were no more—it was all forest. It was all pretty much green with occasional small savannahs. It seemed to go on and on and on and on and on. On that second part, sort of the notable piece, there was a lot of stuff for all those Air Force bases, but sort of one of the notable one that got on at Xavantina was the carcass of a steer, that was sort of all dead and skinned and sort of in big pieces sitting in a big vat, so we had the big thing right in front of us as we sat sideways along the edge of the plane. We arrived at an Indian post, at sort of an Indian administration post, which was the only stop, so to speak, in the Xingu region, and it would be where we would wait two weeks for a motorboat to take us down the river to where we would then wait for a while for a canoe to take us up the river to the village. We got out, and it’s really weird. It’s hard to get out in a totally new place. It was quite sort of daunting. There were all these young indigenous men looking at the plane, sort of coming out to greet it, and a jeep came out and picked up the stuff, and we were taken back to the administration post, which had sort of a small barracks that we could sleep in and put our stuff. Among one of the things that took up the weight and space on our trip were our banjo and guitar, and that night we were invited to dinner at the post. The post did provide sort of basic rice and beans for meals for those who were—again, we had this research authorization from the ministry, and so we were allowed and expected to sort of eat and participate and asked to sing, and we began to sing practically every night. Even though our songs were in English, they were immensely popular with the indigenous people and with the Brazilians, who really liked them, and we could speak Portuguese and explain what they were about. But they really liked the music, and so we were sort of a hit. I mean, not too many people came along and actually provided their own entertainment.

So we had to wait, though, because the small boat went down with the administrator for that part of the part that we had met on the plane, and he said he would send another boat. He would send it back for us in a while and after he had talked to the Suyá and found out if it was okay with them if we came. We waited and waited and waited, and there was a radio at that place that could talk to São Paulo and then it could talk down to there at the time, down to the other administration post. So we just waited and kept singing. We were invited one day to go watch some dancing and music at a neighboring village and went in a nearby village and got our tape recorder out and recorded them, and they were interested in the tape recorder but had seen them before. Then we went back, and they invited us out the next day, and they said, “Well, today you sing.” So they said, “The trouble with your singing here in the administration post is that when you sing at night there’s the constant thudding of the generator, and so it’s really distracting to us. So we want to hear you without any generators around.”

So we went, we saw them dance again, and then when they were all done dancing, they said, “Well, get your instruments out and sing.” So we pulled them out, and people came from all the houses to do it. From one of the houses, completely painted in red paint and black paint on his face and wearing nothing but a pair of dark glasses, a young man came out with a tape recorder and started to tape-record us. That’s when we discovered that we were going to be the subjects of investigation as well as the investigators. They liked our music. They recorded us. They used that tape and sent it to other villages all around, and so we became well known throughout the region because we liked to sing, and there was a great introduction. It was a great introduction to them, and it was a pretty good introduction to everybody, because people, as soon as we came, would say, “Sing for us.” And it was much better to be asking to have us sing for them, to give them presents or something like that, of which there were a very finite number. There was an infinite number of times we could sing the same song.

[laughs] Wow. Interesting.

After two weeks, a large boat finally showed up, large enough for about twenty people, and so we went on down the river. I think it was the last trip that large boat ever made. It was just sort of rotten and falling apart, but it made it downriver anyway, and we got off at a place called Diauarum, which is an indigenous word for jaguar. So Diauarum, it’s an old place. In fact, it was the very place where the Suyá had been living in 1884 when the German explorer came through. So it fit the description I read in the book perfectly. There had been the village, and there was the sandbar, and some Suyá were waiting for us as well as a whole bunch of other Indians from other places. They were all gathered together because we were going down with a team of doctors that was checking them for—I think giving them vaccinations and checking them for tuberculosis. It was part of a sort of preventative medicine trip.

We stayed there for a few days because they were there and were introduced to them, and they had agreed that we could come and stay with them. So we eventually, after a while, got in a very large dugout canoe because we were pretty inept in canoes. The dugout canoes generally ride really low in the water. There’s only about an inch on either side above the water, and if you’re really good at it, that’s plenty, but if you’re not very good at it, that’s not enough. So they put us in a larger motorboat, in a larger hollowed-out log, and with only a couple people in to paddle us up, and everybody in a flotilla. Canoes went back up to their village, which wasn’t too far away. It was about, oh, three hours’ paddle, I think. We walked in and thus began the research, began with a misunderstanding that sort of was characteristic of what the problem was, would be for a long time, was that they didn’t speak much Portuguese at all. Only a few men spoke a little bit of Portuguese they’d learned on expeditions to contact other Indians, since there was no one else to learn it from. So they said, “Have you ever eaten tapir before?” And tapir is a great big huge ground-walking animal, got lots of meat on it.

Right, right.

We said, “No, we’ve never eaten it before.” And that was the end of the conversation. So there was a tapir they’d just killed, and they all cut it up in lots of pieces, and a piece went to every house and cooking away. The piece of tapir was cooking at our house, and they all ate it and didn’t give us any.

Ah-oh.

And we said, “Oh, wait, did we answer that question? Did we even understand the question? Did we answer the question right?” We assumed they thought that, later as we reflected on it, that there were other Indians in the upper Xingu that don’t eat the meat of any ground-walking mammal, so they don’t eat tapir. So they asked us if we’d ever eaten tapir, and as adults we’ve never eaten tapir, then, obviously, we had a taboo against it or we had a food restriction. So we never answered that way again, but that was a hungry first night. They did give us something to eat. We had sort of manioc flour pancakes and things like that. But food would turn out to be a major problem. After feeding us for about three days, they stopped feeding us altogether, tapir or no tapir. I don’t think they expected to have people coming and staying with them that hadn’t brought their own food, because—

They always did before.

—no one else had come and stayed for so long. Every Brazilian that had visited them had brought their own food or brought their own food, basically, or must have. Since we were staying for six months and couldn’t, we basically had to figure out what are we going to do and not die. How are we going to live long enough to ask our first question? And I think that’s the question that every field researcher is going to have at some point in their research is, well, how do we make ourselves interesting enough to the people we’re with that they’ll put up with us and get involved in our research enough to actually want to help us with it.

The other is, how are we going to live? How are we going to actually physically survive? All I can say is that after the time in Brazil, we have a sort of an immense debt to humanity for all of the kindness we were shown and the patience the people had and the generosity they generally had, as in São Paulo, where we went to someone’s house for Sunday dinner and stayed three months in their house or different parts of the family’s houses. So we went to the Suyá and ended up spending ultimately two years there. They had their own terms that they were willing to have us on, though, and they made those quite clear by not feeding us after a little bit. So the solution sort of arose one night after we were hungry and they were all eating away, and we’d gotten one nut to eat each for the whole day. So somebody said he was going fishing, would I like to come, and I said, “Sure, I’ll go,” and I got out my fishhooks. I’d brought some for everybody, but I’d also brought some for myself, and went out and, with tremendous good fortune, caught two very large fish. I had been fishing before, it wasn’t my first time fishing, but I’d never fished for that size fish or been able to catch any. So I brought them back to the house, and everybody was very happy in the house. Our fish were put in a pot, cooked up into a kind of a fish stew and distributed to all thirty people who lived in the house we were living in, a large thatched-roof house of the chief and his brothers and their wives and his sisters and their husbands and all their children. There were about thirty people in it. And there was one fireplace that all the food was cooked on, and then it went to everybody in the house.

So after going fishing, we got some food. We got some of that fish. The next day, I thought, well, I’ve got to be an anthropologist. I have to ask questions and things like that. And we still got fed, but the next day when I was continuing to be an anthropologist, we didn’t get any food. So then it’s sort of a very primitive—not primitive, very sophisticated sort of psychological system of rewarding you when you do what people want you to do and then they’re not rewarding you when you don’t. They basically trained me to go fishing every other day, and then when the hunting season came, to go hunting every other day. So that’s how I spent a fair amount of my time, because for me to go hunting and fishing, it was actually pretty exhausting since I hadn’t spent a whole lot of my life paddling or sitting extremely quietly or running through the jungle or whatever it might involve. So it was pretty tiring to go, and it was frustrating because when I’d go out of the village to spend the day out, usually the people I wanted to talk to weren’t there, but the next day when I was around and wanted to talk to him, they were out hunting or fishing, because they didn’t go every day, but they did go pretty much every day, every other day at the time. So I lost about thirty pounds in the first four months, and my wife didn’t lose so much, but she was helping with the women with the production of manioc, which is the staple starch, and we were both learning the language, and we were both just trying to figure out how we were going to live and how it was going to work. And it worked. I mean, a fair number of misunderstandings but a reasonable amount of patience, and there were times when we just thought, oh, we’d give anything to be somewhere else eating some food.

Right.

But there was no place to go, and there was no else. There were no stores, and there was no way to get out. I assured my parents that there was a shortwave radio that we could get to so we could call in an emergency plane if something happened. The radio stopped working after about a week of our being there, and it was still a four-hour paddle down the river. It would have been there, but it wasn’t there because it stopped working and didn’t work most of the time we were there for that first trip.

Wow. So let me ask you a couple of just very basic things.

Sure.

You were living in this place with about thirty people. Clearly, there’s no privacy, and you’re living with people who have a completely different lifestyle from what you’re used to. First of all, in terms of just basic conditions, what were you sleeping on? What was the basic climatic condition like in terms of how you dealt with just the elements every day, and clothing? Which I know is not something that’s big on the agenda for the Indians in the area.

Well, it was a tropical climate. I mean, we were at 11 degrees south, and so it was hot during the day. We arrived in the dry season, which is the time of year when it doesn’t rain much at all. It’s one gorgeous sunny, hot, really sort of day after another with cold nights, and how cold the nights are depends on sort of whether there’s winds coming off the Andes and sort of stuff coming down from Argentina, because it’s wintertime. The dry season is actually in South America’s winter.

Right.

So we arrived, and we actually knew how we were going to sleep, because we had talked to other anthropologists who had worked with other groups in the region, and so they’re the ones who really gave us a lot of help. Ethnomusicologists generally learn through anecdotes from their own professors about sort of what their research was like and what to bring, but my professors, actually their anecdotes had nothing to do with what I encountered. I was no help at all. No one else seemed to have encountered a group that made them go hunting and fishing all the time and participate in their economic life quite to the extent that we did, that I know of.

Interesting.

At least they didn’t expect it. So we were sleeping in hammocks. We bought hammocks. A lot of Brazilians in the northern part of the country sleep in hammocks. Hammocks are indigenous originally, and we learned how to use them from the Indians, and they have the great advantage of allowing air in underneath at night, which is nice when it’s hot. It’s pretty cold when it’s cool, because there’s no way—when you’re sleeping on a mattress, the mattress is warming up under you, and then it protects you from the cold. But hammocks can be quite cold, so usually we had one blanket that we would wrap around ourselves. We each had our own hammock, and we basically had sort of a small section of the house. They put us in two hammocks.

We arrived, and one of the first things they asked after asking if we wanted tapir, the next day they said, “Do you want us to build you a house, or do you want to live in our house?” We thought we would probably learn the language faster and be much less an imposition to just say, “Well, we’ll live in your house.” So we did, and they put us sort of way out at the end of the house on one side and next to a young woman whose lover came and visited her every night and sort of away from the rest of the people in the house, pretty much. It was a long house, had lots of room in it for thirty people and more, and we slung our hammocks there, and they built us a small table to put the rest of our stuff on so that it didn’t get chickens in it, and everything that was sort of wandering around inside the house, including the children.

Yes, I was wondering about the critters, was one of my upcoming questions.

Critters and the children. The house was swarming with cockroaches, and the nice thing about hammocks is that cockroaches come straight down the walls and then would go onto the floor and clean up all the food off the floor, and then they’d go straight back up. Because of the nature of the strings on the hammocks, they didn’t necessarily infest your hammock, but they did come into them. Cockroaches were one of the sort of disagreeable nuisances, but they didn’t do much. They didn’t bite like the fire ants and biting ants that would show up every once in a while, and the army ants would pass through. You just couldn’t even put your feet on the floor then. If you had to go to the bathroom, you just had to wait till they went away, because as soon as you put your feet down, they’d be at the top of your head in an instant and just biting all over.

Wow.

So ants were a real disagreeable nuisance. It was a big room, one-room house, and everybody would go in back of the house, sort of into the bushes to go to the bathroom. We had no outhouse. They didn’t use outhouses. We just went off in the bushes like they did. That was a little hard to learn. There were about seven houses at the time surrounding a large cleared space, and at night when women had to go to the bathroom, and children, they would go out in the front in the cleared space. In fact, men did, too, if they felt like it, because you were less apt to step on a snake.

Yes, that’s what I was wondering.

The critters were less apt to be there, and since they didn’t have any flashlights, that was the easiest place to go. We usually stepped out back and tried to make it a little further. We had a flashlight and didn’t. The problem with going in the front it that it sort of began to smell after a while, but such is life. As I said, there was no way to preserve food. There was no refrigeration, and you couldn’t really store things for very long without the ants taking it, carrying it off, and things like that. So they didn’t do a lot of storage of food. They kept on making it fresh every day, which was nice, on the one hand, but it did mean that there was no way to sort of put stuff away for the rainy day, so to speak, and you just had to get it. And we decided just to live like that. We didn’t make a whole lot of special requirements for ourselves. We just thought, well, we could manage the lack of privacy, because they actually gave each other a fair amount of privacy. There’s only one room, but you weren’t spending your time staring at other people’s spaces. It was sort of a psychological distance. Very often people who have certain relations actually talk to one another but don’t look at one another, so there isn’t a whole lot of gazing. You could be looking at something else and having this long conversation with somebody. And some people you never talked to at all who were living in your house, your in-laws and things like that. So you talk to your wife, but you never talk directly to your father-in-law or your mother-in-law if you’re a man. So it’s very different from living in, I’d say, a dorm. In UCLA if you had thirty people in one room, life would be really different than it was there.

We also thought it would be the fastest way to learn the language, because we were hearing it spoken around us all the time. It was certainly faster than we would have if we’d been off by ourselves in a house. The other advantage was we were in the house, rather than having people outside staring through the cracks at us, we found that when we went down to the Indian post where we were given our own house, other Indians, not the ones we’d lived with for all the time, but would come and sort of peer in to see what we were up to inside. We felt much more intruded upon when we couldn’t be intruded upon, in a sense, elsewhere. So we basically settled in for—the first trip was about four months long, and I lost a fair amount of weight, but I learned how to go hunting and fishing. Judy didn’t lose that much weight. I did a lot of basic language research. I was trying to learn how to speak it and write it down. Then I began to ask questions, and the answers were very strange. I’d ask several people. I’d get a different answer from each person. Or I would ask a question and then would get a very unclear answer. I wasn’t sure at the end of four months whether they actually knew anything, in my sort of hubris.

So after four months it was getting into November, and we knew that we wanted to go back and see our family since we had been away by then for a year and a half, since it had taken us so long to get into the field and we hadn’t seen the family. So we agreed we would go back for a visit in late November, and we had to leave ourselves about a month to get out because we’d have to wait till we heard there was a boat going up the river and then someone would come and get us and go down to the local Indian administration post. The boat would take us up to the next one where the airplane would land once a week, if it landed. And if it didn’t land, we’d have to wait there for a week for the next one to come by, because sometimes during the rainy season especially, which began in October, so November was rainy season, it would just circle above the clouds and take off again, just to show that it was in the area, couldn’t land, and it would maybe pick you up the next week. We got out, and I saw my advisor at the meeting of the American Anthropological Association. There were just so many people in one room. There were, at the time, I think about seventy-eight Suyá living in those houses and a few other Indians that were related to them. There were thousands of American anthropologists all over the place. I couldn’t move without my back against the wall. There were just too many people. It was just absolutely crazy to have that many people in one place.

My advisor kept on asking me all these questions about what I’d learned, and I hadn’t learned anything. This is really embarrassing, a year and a half after I went to the field. I said, “Well, I don’t know whether it’s them or me, but one of us doesn’t know anything. I’m getting these very strange inconsistent answers.” My parents didn’t say a word about my being thirty pounds lighter than when I’d left, and fed me up and off we went back again in January. That made all the difference. It was going back that really made it possible. Very few people would go there in the rainy season. It was the malarial season, and it was very unpleasant and filled with clouds of mosquitoes all the time and periods of sickness and hunger, and so they were really surprised to see us come back at all. But they were gearing up to doing a ceremony which they’d told us about, and all of a sudden they did sort of one of the first of their ceremonies that I’ve ever seen and actually was the subject of my book on Suyá music because I saw it three times. It was called the mouse ceremony, and they had a song. They taught me a song. They sort of were happy to see us. We brought back the presents that they’d asked for, because one of the frustrations for them was they wanted things but they had no way to get them except for by asking for them. Most people would say, “Sure, we’ll bring it,” and never come back. Well, we said, “Sure.” We didn’t say, “Sure, we’ll bring it,” lightly, but we said we’d try to find it, and we actually came back with the needles that some people wanted, and the special colors of beads that other people wanted, and the special type of cloth that yet other people wanted, and a particular type and size of fishhook that they thought they would be useful for that time of year. So we came back showing that we really had listened and cared.

My language began to improve a lot more, and I discovered that the reason I was given inconsistent answers was probably the same reason that you’d give one to them. If somebody asks you why is the sky blue, and you know they don’t understand you well enough to understand the answer, you probably just say, “Well, because it is,” or, “It’s been that way since I was born,” or something, and you wouldn’t say anything about the refraction of light and air and things. I was getting similar sorts of sort of incomplete answers, I think partly because they just didn’t think I was going to understand, or they couldn’t figure out how to say it in such a simple way that I could understand it. But the longer I stayed, the more interesting their answers got and the more I did. I tell my students that the best thing to do is just stay as long as you possibly can in the field, because you keep on learning more and more and more as time goes on. It’s not just because time is passing. Some things only happen once in a while, so if you weren’t there for a pretty long time, they will never happen. It could be somebody being born, somebody dying, someone being pretty sick with a certain thing, and all of a sudden people being cured, or funerals are happening, or whatever it is. But the other thing is people respect your spending time learning, and they will keep teaching. We stayed the first time three months. We stayed the second time, I think about seven months, but my wife went out by herself to go shopping, because the less weight you had to bring back, the easier it was to get on the plane. So she was by herself and bringing back sixty kilos. It was a lot easier than if there were two of us trying to bring back the same sixty kilos. So she went out and I stayed, but we’d do three- or four-month trips, and we’d usually have to end them when we ran out of something or we got really sick.

Oh, okay. So that did happen.

I didn’t get very sick. I got malaria, all three kinds of malaria. My wife had malaria. We were warned to just work as hard as we could till we got sick, because it was hard to recover in the field, and that was pretty much true. You can get sick or you can get better, but to actually recover your energy, it sort of was hard because there just wasn’t that much food, and you couldn’t recuperate by lying in bed and sort of not doing anything.

Wow.

The Suyá continued to be fairly exigent. Again, I think this is a part of the fieldwork that I don’t think people recognize, is that you really have to have a fair amount of humility if people are going to put up with you. There are ways and ways to impose yourself, and if you’ve got lots of money, you don’t need humility. But if you have nothing but a few songs and some beads and mirrors, I certainly need a lot of humility. So they at one point said, “No, you can’t speak English to each other. Where you can understand us, we can’t understand you, so no more. English is forbidden in this house.” So we would speak English to each other in our garden, which was a private place about a twenty-minute walk out of the village. They cut down a garden, and we helped them plant it with things that were a lot of sort of basic things. There weren’t a lot of them, but there were enough so that we could take them back and give them to other people, because the basic thing was to set up networks of exchange, so that if you gave something to people they would give you things back. And everybody knew that I was a pretty lousy gardener, but we did have sweet potatoes in the sweet potato season and sweet corn in the sweet corn season and some bananas to share. In fact, we ate very little of our own food. We most gave 80 or 90 percent of it away and then would, of course, get return reciprocity. But the other thing that happened after coming back in the rainy season was that garden we planted in the dry season was full of crops, and so we got more food partly because we were able to establish all these networks.

Oh, interesting.

My wife was the one who was sort of—women do most of the network establishing through exchanges of food, and so she had this whole network of people. So these wonderful bananas would come in, and there’d be two left after they’d gone out. It seemed like very small, but I guess that’s what kept us alive. It was a society in which there wasn’t a lot. It wasn’t divided into haves and have-nots. As soon as a lot of food came in, it was distributed to relatives, and then the relatives would distribute it to their relatives, and so it would sort of would go all over the village. It was a remarkable system that I, of course, admired tremendously, and has a lot of lessons for how you can actually create a society that operates differently from ours.

Right.

Where some people just seem to want to have forty bathrooms in their house and they don’t care if anybody doesn’t, is sleeping under the bridge or something like that. There, if anybody, has a fish—a lot of food comes in. Almost everybody gets a little bit of it. That made it possible for people not to have to go every day, and I didn’t have to go every day either, because if I was contributing, even by trying to go hunting—I didn’t have to bring any fish back, because they had days when they didn’t catch fish either. But if I didn’t go, then we didn’t get fed. But as long as I was making an effort, then whatever I got would go into the pot, and then whatever anybody else got would go into the pot, and the same pot just fed everybody in the house, except the uncooked fish that went to the other houses.

Wow.

So it was a very different economic system. It’s a very different size of society. It was very small at the time. We got quite used to it and felt ourselves tremendously privileged to have had a chance to live there.

The relationship that we had, it changed over those fifteen months that we spent there during our first field research. And finally I just got tired of doing field research. It finally got very hard to just keep on pushing. So we decided that, well, it was probably time to leave. I could probably write a dissertation on the basis of what we’d learned.

I see. Now, your wife was not an anthropologist nor an ethnomusicologist, and yet here she was on this adventure. This is something that clearly was very much an aspiration of yours that you were realizing, and for her, what was your sense of what this was like for her as something to get involved in, something maybe she never imagined ever doing? But she seems, by your description, to be extremely down with the whole thing, I mean, very, very—

Yes. I was really fortunate. She actually enjoyed the whole experience. Most anthropologists or many anthropologists actually do field research with their wives; at least our advisors or my advisors had. Victor Turner, his wife always went to the field with him. Terrence Turner was married on his first trip, and Clifford Geertz was married to his first wife on his Indonesian research, and so there are a whole lot of people that seemed to be sort of the model, and so it wasn’t unusual. We both thought it was a really fascinating thing to be able to do. She did put her graduate research on hold, her own graduate studies on hold while that happened. But we figured that was just going to take that long. I was really fortunate she did come. While I was out hunting and fishing, food would be arriving from these food networks, and if she hadn’t been there to sort of take it and stash it away, I don’t know if I ever would have seen any. She is a very different person than I am. She’s much more sociable and not quite so—well, she wasn’t having to be an anthropologist. So she decided she was taking notes and keeping a journal for about a month, and then she decided, “I’m not going to do a journal. I’m just going to live here. I’m going to just be here, experience this, and live it, and write letters to my parents and things like that and keep the information there.” So her whole life was devoted to living and enjoying and learning from people and learning the language, and the women were desperate to teach her, because they’d never been able to speak to any woman about what life was like for women in European society, because the men could speak a little bit of Portuguese, could speak to other men, but the women had never been able to ask anybody all the questions they wanted to ask about life and sex and things.

Wow.

So she learned quite fast. They were very busily teaching her. And I was learning, but I was also having in the moments of whenever I could, I was having to write journal entries and writing notes and taking things out of a little notebook I had in my pocket all the time to write them down and then write them out and then do questions and then do interviews and check the equipment all the time. It was hard work, and I didn’t probably have as much time to be quite so involved with other people as she did. So she went along, she liked it, we liked being together, and it certainly was part of our relationship and part of our life together has been based on the kind of trust and patience you get when you’re with someone that far away from anybody else that’s like you, any of your other relatives. The Suyá were wonderful hosts. When I brought those first two fish back on that first successful day of fishing, the oldest woman in the house, the chief’s mother, said, “You can call me Mother now.” She was very happy. She said, “Wonderful. You brought back fish. You can call me Mother.” I never called anybody by any kinship terms. Many anthropologists in indigenous societies actually, when they’re asked to start calling people by kinship terms, called them by kinship terms. I decided not to because politics is based on kinship in those groups, and I figured I’d align myself. By calling the chief’s mother "Mother," that made the chief my brother, and that suddenly made other people my [unclear] and I couldn’t talk to them. This kinship family that I was living with was the most powerful faction in the village, but it also meant that I was really aligning myself with them in a way that I felt was probably not smart. But it probably would have been smart to do it, because I probably would have eaten better if I’d been related to everybody. Other anthropologists managed to, but I decided not to, just sort of pigheadedly. So we weren’t related to anybody else.

I see.

We were ourselves as a unit, and, as I said, some people who went without their spouses actually often learned the language faster because they were brothers to the men and sisters to the women or the women were their sisters, and they sort of fit right into a family system with all of the food obligations that go with it. But we decided not to, but we did. It’s very hard to go back without her because we are an economic unit, and we’re also a social unit, and they were very sad whenever I go back and she’s not with me. I’ve recently, because she teaches at colleges, she hasn’t been able to go with me when I’ve gone on a couple of recent trips in other times of year, and I’ve taken one of my daughters instead, and that cheers them up considerably.

In this kind of situation, especially for people who aren’t familiar with the sorts of requirements and boundaries involved in doing this kind of work in the field, what was your sense of what the boundaries were or expectations were for you and your wife in terms of really kind of blending in with, taking on sort of the lifestyles and the expression of the people you were living with or remaining somewhat separate or distinctly in this case, you know, American, European, whatever culturally outside of the tribe?

That changed over time. I think the expectations changed, my ability to do things changed, and also my relationship with the Suyá changed. I have written about field research, so this is my only attempt to explain it. But it’s a very complicated process, and basically the Suyá were the ones who decided it. They were very clear that I had to go hunting and fishing, and they were also perfectly welcoming. They gave me songs to sing in the ceremonies, and I would paint up and dance in the ceremonies. My name Tony is actually a Suyá name as well. It means “little armadillo,” and so by just having that name I had a whole set of ritual relations. I didn’t have kinship relations, but I had a set of ritual relations, because I had people who shared the group of names that I had a part of. That made me part of a certain ceremonial group that gave me a certain sorts of songs to sing. So quite by accident I walked in with a fully indigenous social identity and used it.

Interesting.

They had me use it. They thought that was totally appropriate, so I was invited to participate in all the ceremonies and to go with them on everything, and they decided there were certain things they were not going to record for me. There were certain songs that were so dangerous that if any enemy heard them, they would attack them and then kill them. So they decided that those songs they would never record. I never heard them. But otherwise, they were pretty patient. They treated me like a twelve-year-old, pretty much, which was fair enough, I thought. After fifteen months, I could speak like a twelve-year-old in the sense that I could say almost anything but not very well and not very elegantly and certainly not with the poetry and oratory of an adult. I could paddle about as well as a twelve-year-old, and I could probably hunt and fish if I had all good equipment about as well as a twelve-year-old.

They also didn’t want me having sexual relations with any of the women, which they thought was something that all Brazilians wanted to do and something all outsiders probably wanted to do, and they just wanted to make it very clear. When we were in situations where that might be possible, I was a twelve-year-old, not supposed to be doing it.

Wow. Interesting.

But it was also very clear to them—they treated us very differently. They called us their white men, or something like that. There’s something in anthropology called “going native.”

I was going to use that phrase.

I think it’s more an attitude than anything else. I think going native would be for an anthropologist to do what my wife did, basically stop doing research, just live, living and just staying. There are all kinds of ways that this sort of plays out in literature, and there’s this book called The Lost Steps by Alejo Carpentier, about a writer who goes back and finally finds the ideal society, and he goes in and he finds true love, and everything’s wonderful. But he runs out of paper and ink, so he leaves to get some more paper and ink, sure he can find the way back. He never finds the way back again.

Oh, golly. [Laughs]

So that’s sort of a classic example. Do you stop being a writer or do you keep writing? I decided it was clear that I was the anthropologist, my wife was not the anthropologist, and so we sort of did both options. Neither of us thought we would live there for the rest of our lives. On the other hand, we both thought we had other—my wife had her career to do as well, and I was really planning to get back on my dissertation. I was not a hero. There were all kinds of dangerous things I wouldn’t have thought of doing. I never went into the jungle by myself because I figured they didn’t think it was a good idea, I certainly didn’t think it was a good idea. They were very clear about it was very good to walk in their footsteps when we were walking in the forest, very good to walk in their footsteps when we were walking even in the water, because the water had freshwater stingrays that would come up and stab you in the ankle and really give you very painful wounds. So I basically was doing what they told me to do for the whole time. It seemed like a much safer thing to do, and, yes, it was. We lived much longer. We lived to tell the tale. They never thought of us as like them. On the other hand, they thought of us as being possible allies. They never told us really that the whole debate about whether they really wanted to have us there in the first place. When we got there, they were very insistent that I write things down correctly. This one people, they were very insistent that I learn things the right way. I’d never heard of a group that was so insistent on making their anthropologist actually learn things right.

After about six months, I discovered that the head of the post had gone down, the Brazilian who made peace was sort of the person behind making peace with them, and had helped them a lot when they were sick and things and were deeply trusted by them. He told them that we were Americans, and we were coming down to learn their language and their music, and then we were going to write a book, and he was going to read the book, so they should tell me the truth, I mean make sure that I got it right, because the book was supposed to be a good book. So that was sort of the first month or so was sort of this intensive concern with my getting it right. It wore off after a while. The [unclear] came from that. He also said that if they didn’t like us, not to kill us, but just to take them back to him, he would send us away, we would never come back. He also said that Americans were very fierce people, that we were dropping firebombs on Vietnamese and sort of having warfare all over the place, and therefore they should be a little careful with me, but not to kill me. So they weren’t obliged to have me, which I think was actually very nice that they didn’t feel that they were obliged to have me, have us. Then only about thirty years later, in 2008, I think, when they came to the—was it 2008? In 2006 or ‘07 when they came to the Smithsonian, when I brought five men to the Smithsonian to perform music at the opening of the National Museum of the American Indian, did I find out that actually the chief had decided that he didn’t want any more. He didn’t want a white person coming to live with him. He said he was tired of having people live with him, he was tired of whites in general, he didn’t like them very much, and but that he’d talked it over with a leader of another group, a man named Raoni, who actually the leader toured with Sting on rock tours and things like that. 00:52:18 Raoni was a very, very astute leader of the Kayapo Indians who the Suyá were afraid of but also admired because they’re very fierce and very, very large number of them. Raoni had said, “You know, whites can be useful. I think if you take this one, he might actually prove useful to you later on.” So that was the decision. So the young chief, the chief was about my age, so he was about twenty-five when I got there, and his father had died recently, so he’d just become chief. So he was sort of casting around for advice. He took the advice of Raoni, who was only a few years older. So that was the reason, it turned out, that they accepted us. It might also explain why they weren’t so sorry to starve us and things like that. So it was a more complex initial situation than I first realized and that they ever told me about until we actually had gotten completely out of Brazil and were sitting in Washington, D.C., when he had lots of time to sort of rethink and sort of explain things that had happened a long time ago.

Wow.

So who knows what was—you never know what’s in somebody’s minds. I thought something was in their minds, and I was right about some things and totally uninformed about others. They were ultimately really very helpful, and I found that some people were very good at some things and other people were really good at other things. I had one person who was married to a woman from another tribe and had been to live in her village and learned some of her family’s language, and he was my best linguist informant, I mean, or assistant. He was really good with languages, he was really good at teaching languages, and he could understand. He could actually generalize and help me with sort of general statements about things, because he was dealing with it himself. He was having to learn another language himself, so he had a lot of experience in learning language.

Somebody else was really great on telling stories. Somebody else was a little scandalous, and he had a wonderful sense of humor, and I could ask him anything, and it would not shock him. So there was one person I would try out the most crazy questions on just because I knew they were so crazy they would completely nonplus some people, but I thought no matter what, he would have something to say about it and at least enjoy my attempt to get an idea out and things like that. So I used different people for different things. My wife and I would make a round of the village every morning with our medicines, because there was no medical aid in the village, and we were asked by the Brazilian who was in charge of the region to administer medicine so that they didn’t get so sick that when they arrived at the post they were dying. There’s a whole lot of things you could cure right there in the village, and most malarias responded very quickly to the anti-malarials we had to give out. My wife would boil up a syringe and give antibiotic injections because an injection at the right time can also just sort of solve a very nasty infection. So we would go around every morning and visit every house, and that sort of gave us a reason to be at every house and see everybody every morning and find out who was around. Then I’d go back and look up the people that I wanted to talk to that day and take notes, do some recording. I had very few batteries, so I couldn’t record much. I was saving the recording, the batteries, for important events where music was happening. I couldn’t really use them for many interviews. And do some recording and then get hot and sometimes food would be coming in around noon. People would be getting up before dawn and then going out hunting and fishing, so sometimes there was food ready around noon. Sometimes we’d eat. Sometimes I’d just lie in my hammock and write notes in the heat of the day and sleep a little bit, along with everybody else.

Then in the evening it would get cooler and much more pleasant, and we’d sit in front of the houses, and about dusk the men would move into the center of the village, the exact center of the plaza, looking from the doorways of four particular opposing houses, and that’s exactly where they would set the night fire. And the men would then sit around for an hour or two or three, depending on the weather and depending on the number of mosquitoes, to just talk and tell stories and things like that. My wife would sit with the women in front of our house, because the women tended to stay in front of their own houses, and listen and talk and got a very different perspective on the village looking at the whole village into the center rather than in the center thinking about the rest of it.

Interesting.

So my day sort of ended at eight o’clock, it would be late and dark and cold. Eight-thirty, nine, we’d turn in and then get up at four or five in the morning for day after day, week after week, interrupted only occasionally by motorboats coming to get the Suyá to get treated or something like that.

Interesting.

It was a very quiet time, and the village has changed immensely in forty years, I guess it’s been this year. In forty years, the current village is rarely quiet in the sense that there’s almost always somebody passing through. There’s an NGO coming. There’s a doctor coming. The days when you just would sit for a whole day and nothing would happen except for maybe a mango falling off a tree or kids playing or something and totally predictable have really passed. It’s really hard to imagine how quiet and how isolated life was even at that time.

So then when you went back, when you left the first time and you went back, and, for example, you were at this conference with a thousand anthropologists, what was it like for you too? What was reentry like?

It was really hard that time, reentry, because for one thing I know I was really thin and I was blacking out. I was having spots in front of my eyes when I was getting up and things like that. I was really hungry. So there were a lot of things that were sort of shocking. We would lie in the field and we both would have dreams about—I would dream about these tables all set up to eat and with tablecloths and filled with foods, and never ate any, but we would sort of dream of chocolate and pasta and all these things that we didn’t have any of. We had no sugar, I mean, basically even. So we would get back and when we got back, it didn’t taste as good as you thought it would, because you can only eat so much chocolate and you can only eat so much food. After a while then you’re feeling kind of bloated, and that’s not quite the sensation you expected.

So it was hard. That was hard. It was really hard sort of getting out of the day-to-day fight to sort of survive and understand, and into a place where anthropologists were only intellectualizing sort of at the nth degree. I mean, there was sort of a mental disconnect. My advisor actually came over to my apartment, to my family’s apartment in New York City, so that we could actually talk because it was too crazy in the place, and he’d gone through the same thing. So he was pretty understanding about it and was basically sort of boosting my enthusiasm for going back and helping out. But it was hard. Since we were going out and we were sort of going then in the future, because we stayed down in Brazil for another year and a half or so, and our three-month trips we’d go out and stay with friends or stay in a hotel in São Paulo. We usually stayed in a hotel right by a sort of inexpensive hotel called the City Hotel, which was an old elegant hotel that had fallen on really hard times so it was really cheap, right next to the old train station. We often found we couldn’t cross the street during the first two days, so we would stay on the same side of the sidewalk because the streets were terrifying and the cars and things like that.

Oh, wow.

So, fortunately, we didn’t have to cross the street to find a restaurant, and we could stay and have breakfast in the hotel, and we could sort of slowly just sort of recover from the absolute shock of leaving a place that was totally quiet and totally small and to a place that had millions of people living in it and speeding cars and a totally different experience.

Yes, an incredible intensity shift. Then where were you at in terms of assessing where you were with your research and getting what you needed? You said things got a lot better when you returned. What about when the second leg of the fieldwork was done?

The second leg of the fieldwork was a lot better, and things were getting better, and I was understanding things better, and my language was better. It took me about nine months to really get better, to get good enough at the language even to carry on a decent conversation. That’s a long time. I mean, when you’re going to do research, it’s a really long time. You have to wait that long to ask hard questions. At my advisor’s suggestion, I started writing reports to him every month, and I started with the most concrete things at first, garden size and gardens and layout of the village and things like that, which those I could talk about because they were right there. Then I had sort of moved slowly into kinship, social organization, for which there were ways of eliciting data in anthropology, and so that was also reasonably I could figure out how to do that. Then when it got to cosmology, and then I really needed all the language. So as my language got better, also my attempts to write about more complicated and less present obvious things, less physically present things became better. What I found very depressing, and it was that actually doing fieldwork then became more like being a bureaucrat, I was pushing paper all the time, lots of cards with people’s names on them, and vocabulary cards, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of vocabulary cards, and lots of pieces of paper. And there’s no desk. All I had was a hammock, and when you’re sitting in a hammock everything sort of falls right underneath you. So it’s really hard to lay things out.

So one of the reasons that we would leave the field was just to rest and also to be in a place where I could get a big table. The hotel had a big table or a bed and just be able to lay things out and actually sort of sort things, then put them into boxes again and do them. There’s a lot of writing, a lot of writing and filing and memorizing, and that’s often left out, you know. I tell stories about the hunting and fishing, but I don’t tell stories about how constant the effort to write things down was. And it’s just as well, because you don’t remember things the same way later, and the later trips were all so different, so that if I hadn’t written things down at first, I would not have my first impressions. The first impressions were really very different from the later impressions. Going back and having people welcome you as long-lost friends they’d been waiting for for a long time is very different from arriving the first time and seeing the sort of silent people observing who you are and wondering if they’re going to like you and things like that and wondering whether they should even keep you. So I was pushing more and more paper, and finally I sort of felt—we did a couple of breaks, we did a couple of breaks, and we had friends in São Paulo. The same families that had put us up before were very patient about putting us up. We would arrive with an invasion of cockroaches.

Oh, golly.

We’d shake out all of our stuff several times before we emptied the suitcases, called the chickens over to empty everything before we left the village. Then when we’d get to the Indian post, we’d do the same over again, and then we’d get to the thing, and we’d try to do it before we even went in the houses. But even still, they were really patient to put up with us and our invasions of cockroaches and our starved—you know, we’d eat them out of house and home. Well, we wouldn’t eat them out of house and home. They were very generous. Then we’d do some work and then we would disappear again and then go back.

Ultimately, this sort of phases gone through is the initial [unclear] has finished its initial stage, you stay in Brazil.

What happened was I got to the point where I was feeling like an ambulance chaser. People were dying or something would happen, I’d always be there, and people would be crying and I’d be writing down sort of who was crying and what they were doing, and I really sort of began to hate that. That part, sort of the observational part of anthropology was getting to me after all those months of living with them. So I had an invitation to come out and teach an anthropology course with Roberto Da Matta, who was sort of my Brazilian advisor in anthropology, and he’d had some money for the Ford Foundation to sort of use however he wanted to. So he said, “Here, I’ll pay you $500 to come out and teach, and that way you can rent an apartment and teach a course, and we’ll have a good time.” I had nothing to do at that point, so it seemed like a great idea, so we went out to Rio. As I was organizing all my data on the thing on the bed in our new apartment, our furnished apartment that we were renting in a beautiful part of town in Leme, a nice quiet part of town, I discovered there’s some questions that I really wished I’d asked, and I didn’t think I could write my dissertation without the answers for.

So my wife agreed to go in by herself with my list of twenty questions and a bunch of tapes and things like that, and went off and spent a month getting in and out and staying in Brazil in the village and other places. She got to visit some other villages and all kinds of things happened and got the answers to the questions without which I couldn’t have written or finished my dissertation. Meanwhile, I was teaching a wonderful course with Roberto. We were having a great time, and I got to know more of his colleagues at the National Museum, and we played banjo and guitar at their parties and met a lot of students and really, really enjoyed those months. I had terrible attacks of Malaria, I couldn’t beat it, and so I would sometimes have to crawl up the whole ten flights of stairs because the elevator wouldn’t work, and I would get malaria on the days, and I’d be so sick I couldn’t go to the doctor then. The next day I’d go to get my blood tested, and they wouldn’t show up because the malaria hits your bloodstream off and on an every-other-day basis, and when it was hitting, I couldn’t move. When Judy was away, I had these visions of all kinds of hallucinations. It was a little scary. But the course went well. I didn’t get sick on the course days anyway. Then she came back, and we went up to Vermont to the summer camp and taught boating and sort of got our weight back and got our equilibrium back. Since we didn’t have to go straight back to a large city, actually being at the summer camp was about the same size as the Suyá village, and it was sort of like it, and it was lots of space, and it was quiet, and it was a fairly reasonable way to go back.

I had applied for and been given a dissertation write-up fellowship, which meant that I had a year in which I didn’t have to do anything but write, which was a huge, huge advantage. What had happened was my research money had run out finally. They said, “Well, you couldn’t get any more.” Well, fine, I was ready to leave and spent the three months in Rio. We flew up to Vermont, worked during the summer and went and started writing. It took me about six months to—took me to about December to just organize everything, catch up with the reading that I hadn’t done in the years I had been away and then write the outline. Then I wrote four pages a day. I just sat down and wrote. I had a nice outline, and I would write four pages, and then I would crash, because four pages is a lot when you’re having to pull everything together and find the resources and find your notes and things like that. Then the next morning I would get up and I would review those four pages, edit if they needed it, and write four more, and I finished it in three months. There are ways and ways to write dissertations. Some of my students can do that, and some of them do it differently, but I just decided that the only way I could finish was by just writing it and that I knew it was going to be hard. Those were the days before computers. They would cut and paste and the pages would get very long, and then I would retype it myself, and finally had it typed by a professional. My advisor was away on a postdoc, so he was out of town, but my other advisor, Victor Turner, was there, and he was helpful, and I think he was a little surprised when I just sort of dropped the whole thing on his desk one morning and said, “Well, it’s done. Here it is, 450 pages of it, 430 pages of it. When can you finish it by?” Most people now turn in chapters, but I didn’t feel I could do a chapter.

So I wrote a whole book and this sort of—I was telling my wife and others that I had just as I’d written, The Divine Comedy was a good model for my experience, that I’d arrived, we went through hell, and I’d lost weight and was sick and didn’t understand anything because the people I was talking to either didn’t tell me or I didn’t understand what they were actually thinking about the nature of the world. Then I went to purgatory, which was sort of a long time just going around, around, around, around, around, and waiting, waiting, waiting for a final understanding, and I said, “But I never had the final understanding.” I never had that sort of flash vision that Dante describes of sort of seeing the whole universe. Then I had my sort of paradisiacal moments in which things were really getting quite nice. But then she said, “But look at your dissertation. You have completed the dissertation and actually put it all together.” I put together an analysis of their social organization, their cosmology that showed how they were interrelated in ways that were apparently quite convincing. I had a very successful dissertation defense at Chicago. Defenses are different around the world. At Chicago, the whole faculty, the whole department was involved, so all the department gets a brief five-page summary of what your dissertation is about, and they have the defense right after the faculty meeting, and basically anybody who wants to come can come. So I had physical anthropologists asking me questions and social anthropologists and about twenty people around the room, sort of around the table, and then a lot of graduate students came to listen. These are public. These are open defenses. And more attended mine than attended any others.

I’d attended every defense that year because I figured there must be something I needed to know about how to defend a dissertation, and so I think I figured out a pretty nice way to do it. I wrote my five-page outline in just such a way that was leaving great big holes in certain places that I knew I could answer. So, lo and behold, they asked about the holes, and, lo and behold, I had a great answer for every one of them. Then some students asked questions, which had never happened that year. Then the faculty took me off to lunch in the Faculty Club, which is sort of a ritual incorporation into the teaching faculty, which I thought was also very nice. Anthropologists not only study ceremonies, we do ceremonies, and they thought they did the ceremony pretty well. The dissertation I wrote won an award as the best dissertation in the social sciences for that year. Actually, I shared it with a geology dissertation because they were so different. They figured they were both superb, as they said, and there was no way to compare them, so there was no way to judge which was better. So that’s how the dissertation got written. Without the help of the Suyá, I never could have written it. Without the help of my colleagues in Brazil, I probably couldn’t have done it either without Roberto Da Matta’s help, even though he couldn’t help me with my permission, he certainly helped me on the way out and in teaching. Also without the tremendous generosity of the Brazilians that put us up for month after month in their houses or put us on their airplanes with beads weighing down our pockets or whatever it was, we were able to accomplish this with an immense amount of generosity and goodwill on the part of a lot of people.

And weren’t your children born in Brazil?

That was a little later. [Interruption]

So there I was, I’d finished my dissertation and graduated, and as I writing my dissertation, Judy was finishing her last year of classes, coursework, and passing her qualifying exams at the University of Chicago. I was looking for a job that year, too, and decided there were not going to be any jobs in anthro. I read an article that said basically all the jobs in anthropology were being filled from four major universities, from Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, and Ann Arbor. Those were people were hired from there by all of the sort of—I wouldn’t call them the second tier, but the other universities. But those people were not being hired by the other universities to teach anywhere, it seemed like, to look at the article. And it seemed to me, well, if I was going to be graduating and looking for a job, I didn’t want to prepare students that could never find a job. We were already in another downturn. Then we were in another downturn. In ’72 the inflation rate was taking us, and 1974 or ‘75 the inflation rate was taking off.

Right. There was the energy crisis.

Energy crisis. So I decided I was only going to apply to undergraduate institutions. I had a friend that I met, one of my friends from graduate school the year I spent in Cornell, was actually teaching at Pomona College. He wrote me and said, “Would you like a job at Pomona College?” He wrote me in the field and said, “We’re looking for someone next year. Would you be interested?” I wrote back and said, “Sure. Keep me in mind.”

He said, “I can’t give you the job but I can at least tell you when it’s going to be advertised.” So that’s what happened. I got told it was advertised and applied and ended up going to Pomona College on a tenure-track job, which was a very plum job at the time, and it solved my sort of ethical problems of going to a place where I’d be training students to be professional anthropologists who couldn’t get jobs, which I was certain was going to happen. It didn’t happen, actually. Lots of people got jobs after that. But I had a very strong ethical reaction to sort of the situation as I saw it. And I was having a good time at Pomona. Pomona has some really smart students, and I was working really hard, because I’d never taught. Chicago didn’t believe in undergraduate and graduate students doing much teaching, because they thought that the teaching should really be done by the full faculty, by the full-time professional faculty. So most undergraduates were taught by full professors and not by T.A.’s and things like that.

Right.

So I was working really hard, and I was there, and I got a call from Brazil, from Roberto Da Matta. He said, “Look, an amazing thing has happened. I’ve gotten five positions to really establish this program in social anthropology at the National Museum. And I’ve got four Brazilians right here who’ve been working in it that I’m going to hire, but I’ve got one position left. Would you like it? We really need someone. We’ve talked about it, and they all agree that you’d be the best person because you work with indigenous peoples, you speak an indigenous language, therefore you can understand linguistics, and, furthermore, you understand what language is and how it works. And furthermore, everybody likes you. You should play the banjo.”

I said, “Roberto, I’m really flattered, but give me just a little bit of time here, because I need to think about this. This is not something I’ve been planning.” He said, “Well, you’ve got to hurry because I have to turn this in very soon.”

Oh, golly.

“I may lose this fifth position if you don’t give me an answer.” So I got off the phone with him and called up my two advisors. I called up Terrence Turner and said, “Terry, should I take this job?” This is what it is. Terry said, “Well, you’ve got kind of a nice job as it is, and, you know, you might get to Brazil and find there isn’t a job. You know, things don’t always work out the way you expect them to work out. Sometimes things don’t happen.” I said, “Well, that’s true.” So I called up Victor Turner. I said, “Vic, here’s the thing. I’ve got this job offer. Should I take it?” He said, “Oh, stay where you are. I’ve got lots of some really wonderful colleagues in anthropology who went off to work in African universities and disappeared. I mean, they’re fine, they’re in Africa, but they can’t get to meetings and they’ve sort of lost touch with the mainstream of the field, and they aren’t really participating in the international anthropology scene and development of ideas.”

So I called up David Schneider [phonetic], who had taught me kinship, but, of course, I’d hated it at the time but appreciated it in the field, and I said to David, “What should I do?” He said, “You’ve got a great job. You’ve got a tenure-track job. What are you leaving it for? Stay there.” So I called Roberto back a couple days later, said, “Roberto, I’ll take the job.” But I did try to avoid the problems that each of them foresaw, and so I made sure there really was a job, and Roberto worked very hard to be sure there was a job. I was able to get a special visa to Brazil, and it was called sort of an Einstein exception, which was someone who has certain qualities that are simply not to be found in the country and could therefore get a working visa, a working permit for Brazil. And I got one for my wife, too, so we both were able to go to Brazil.

So she was okay with this?

She was okay. We were living in Pomona and then Claremont, and having an okay time. It was really hard, but she didn’t have a job, and she was actually going to start her research pretty soon, and so she was ready to go because she was thinking of doing research in Brazil. So it would actually be easier for her. Her courses were over, her research was ready to go, and she was applying. She got two very nice fellowships to do research.

So we went off to Brazil in the fall of 1975, so the summer of 1975, late summer, and I became instantly promoted to associate professor with tenure at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro for its graduate program in social anthropology at the National Museum, which was a small group of professors. There were about five, and then there were a few others that were around. So there were probably eight of us altogether with Ph.D.’s from a number of different countries. All of them were Brazilians except me. In fact, I was the only non-Brazilian, I think, in the museum at the time in all the academic staff. We were teaching a Ph.D. program, an M.A., and then later a Ph.D. program in social anthropology only to graduate students. So we were only teaching seminars, and the teaching load was one seminar a week per quarter, per semester, and that meant I would teach three hours, and then I would have the rest of the week to write and do research. It was absolutely heaven. It was like a seven-year postdoc with really brilliant colleagues, great students. Brazil was much more a very different place. People were much less tense about children and having children, and so my wife got pregnant with our first daughter, our first child, and she was born in Carnival and the drums beating in the background.

Oh, golly. [Laughs]

Shortly after she was born, I think when she was six weeks old, we started looking for field sites for my wife, and she went up and did research in a fishing village about 400 miles north of Rio, a pretty long bus ride, an overnight bus ride from Rio.

Then our second daughter was born, and so both our daughters are Brazilians as well as Americans, and they’re both born there. Before the second one was born, we went back to the field taking just the older one there, and she was then, I think, what, two maybe. When children learn their first word, she was whatever that age was, and she could walk around and could sort of understand things. But she hadn’t learned to speak. Her first therefore was in Suyá. It just happened that that was her first word, the word for monkey. Kukuoí was her first meaningful word. Then her first language was Portuguese because my wife was doing research in the fishing village by herself. There was no way you could speak English to anybody there, so Portuguese was the language that was her first language. English to her was that strange language that her parents spoke that she didn’t understand, and so that was our secret language to each other, was English.

I really wanted specifically to ask you about this experience of taking your young daughter into the field. I mean, I think people find it challenging to travel with a child that age anywhere, and the conditions clearly are pretty challenging. What was that like for you at the time?

We decided we wanted to go back to see the Suyá for a number of reasons. One of the reasons to go back to Brazil was to actually continue the research, because I hadn’t finished with music, for one thing. I didn’t think I understood it, and I wanted to turn the dissertation into a book. So while we were there, I got research money, we went, decided to go to the field, and I didn’t want to go by myself. That’s no fun.

Brazilians were absolutely horrified that we were going to take our daughter into the jungle. They were absolutely horrified. They just couldn’t. They thought it was really dangerous. They thought it was a terrible thing to do. But we were crazy foreigners, so, yeah, crazy foreigners. But we picked the dry season, we picked the best time of year to go, the safest time of year to go, when the travel is pretty easy and there are very few mosquitoes. We packed up a little bassinette for her to put between the hammocks, and packed up as much stuff as we could to sort of please her and went off to the field. She was, what, two, and the Suyá were delighted to see her. They were delighted we finally had a baby, because they were very worried. They thought that was very strange.

I wondered about that.

We’d been living together for so long and not had any children, so then that was really weird. Elisa, our older daughter, just sort of fit right into the system where the older children in the house took care of the younger children, and so she would disappear for much of the day and be taken out in canoe rides or do things and play with them all day long and then come back and show up every once in a while and eat or sleep. Or not eat. We got really worried. She wasn’t eating. Well, we mentioned this to the Suyá, and they actually said, “Well, actually she’s been eating this house and this house and this house and this house and this house.” She couldn’t tell us because she wasn’t speaking yet. But we did find out that she was eating, she just wasn’t eating the food that we had for her.

So she had a really wonderful time, and she would get tired in the evening, but had a very healthy and really interesting time, and it was really fun. And we learned a lot more about how children are, and your perspective changes when you’re a parent. Suddenly you see what children are doing in a way you weren’t noticing before. Then we went back and invited the—the chief said at that point, “You know, you’ve been to visit my village for a lot of months, and I’ve never seen your house. I want to come to Rio and see your house.” So we invited him. “If you can find a way to get there, we’ll be happy to host you.” He was able to talk the Brazilian government or the Brazilian officials into getting him to Rio de Janeiro, and we put him up in our apartment with one of his wives and two of his children and showed him around Rio and tried to show him not just the glitzy side, but also had someone take him up into the favelas and the poor parts of the city. He came back from that pretty disgusted. He couldn’t believe anybody would live in such smelly conditions. So he went straight to the shower with all of his clothes on and sort of spent hours there, sort of a really long time getting himself clean and actually couldn’t believe that—he said it’s not that they were living in dirt floor houses, didn’t bother him, not that they were living in shacks, because his house wasn’t a primitive house either, but that people would live in sort of that kind of aroma disturbed him. So on the way out to the airport as we were driving him back, we got stuck in traffic, as always in Rio. Like Los Angeles, Rio has epic traffic at times. They were sitting in the back seat, he and his wife, and he said, “I’m going to go back and I’m going to tell them that the city is an interesting place, but we should stay where we are. We shouldn’t come and live here.”

So I thought that was a pretty successful visit, actually, and took him to the airport and sent him back. So it set up a different kind of exchange living in Rio, because we were closer to them, and now that we both had children, it was easier to exchange the thing.

I have a question. Now, this is just a real mundane question.

Ask.

You mentioned that he was disgusted and got in the shower with all of his clothes on, and what was he wearing?

Oh, in the city?

Yes. [Laughs]

Well, in the city he was wearing—we bought him city clothes.

I see. Okay. And how was that for him?

His city clothes were blue jeans and a pair of hard shoes and sort of a short-sleeved shirt. I mean, Rio is pretty hot, but I think he had long pants on. I think he mostly wore long pants in Rio because the people who wore short pants were generally the poorer people. So we would wear short pants to the beach or around the place, but I think he was wearing long pants. But so we did buy them clothing. It was one of the first things. We didn’t want them to be an object of total curiosity either.

So we hosted a number of people over the years in our house in Rio. But when they came out to get medical treatment in São Paulo, we’d sometimes bring them to Rio when they got better, have them pay a visit. Our younger daughter was born, we went back with two children in 1980, I think it was, and that was harder, because when you have two children it basically multiplies the challenges by about fifty, because they would both get hungry and tired at the same time, and that really interfered with my ability to be with the men at the men’s circle learning anything at the time. Also, they collaborated a lot with one another. They were very cute with one another, and they had a very good time, I think. But they got hungry. Elisa decided she wouldn’t eat anything but—she would not eat fish. She would only eat game. She would only eat fowl. So she was on a hunger strike, and that made her very cranky. And the younger one was drinking soymilk, and we took twice as much soymilk as we thought we’d need. But she was drinking four times as much soymilk in the village as she was drinking at home, because she didn’t have the other food that she was accustomed to. So we were running out of soymilk. So I sent a message down to the post that said, “Look, could you tell the next person who’s coming into the Xingu to please bring some soymilk, because we’re running out of soymilk here, and our daughter can’t drink powdered milk.” By then there was powdered milk around, but we couldn’t get any. We couldn’t use it. So about three days later, motorboat comes. We here [demonstrates], much further away, so it’s coming to a more distant village by now. And finally arrived, and out of the motorboat stepped a colonel in the Air Force with a whole case full of soymilk, dried soymilk, dried soy powder. He said, “Here it is. We got the message.” The Air Force had come to save the day, and they had, actually. They did save the day, but it was a little embarrassing, that whole Air Force plane sort of delegated to bring me the soymilk that we needed. On the other hand, it was really sweet of them. The Brazilian Air Force was filled with great idealists who really thought they were doing the right thing and were there to help the population of the interior as well as the military bases, and so they showed up with the soymilk.

Since then, that was when, I think, they were by that time the first one’s one and a half maybe or one, and the second—so the older one would have been three. That was the last trip that they made, and I made one more trip in 1982, and then for twelve years never went back. I left the National Museum. I took a sabbatical in 1980. After teaching there for five years, I took a sabbatical and got a grant from the Social Science Research Council to spend six months at Indiana University studying ethnomulsicology. I figured if I was going to write about music, maybe I should actually take some courses in it, because there was no ethnomusicology at the University of Chicago at the time when I was a graduate student there. So we went up and we had a good time, and the grandparents got to know their grandchildren a little bit. They were a little shocked that they couldn’t speak to them because they didn’t speak English, and so the kids began to learn English. We thought, oh, maybe we should move back. Maybe it’s time to go back to the States, for a number of reasons. My wife was finishing her research, she was writing her dissertation, so then we would both want jobs, and we didn’t see another job in Rio for her particular specialization. And the grandparents really did miss their grandchildren, as well as their children, I suppose.

So I was offered a job at Indiana University and went to Indiana. So we left Brazil. We left Brazil, moved back to the States, moved the two kids, and that was a culture shock. That was a super culture shock.

Yes. That’s where I’m going.

I was moving back to the United States. I thought I knew the country I was moving back to. But I had never lived in southern Indiana before, and leaving Rio with all its very live people sort of moving in the samba beat anyhow suddenly getting to Bloomington, Indiana, where a lot of the undergraduates were farm children. They’re sort of great big people who didn’t move lively at all, just thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. And surrounding the university was all of very conservative southern Indiana, and we thought, “Wow, what country have we moved to? We don’t recognize this place.” It was really very strange, having to be careful about—

Were your parents—sorry.

The one thing, we had to be very aware whenever I was talking about evolutionism.

Oh, golly.

That a whole bunch of people in the room didn’t believe in it and that they were probably reporting me to somebody. I was teaching anthropology, so there were some things that never emerged in Brazil. I was having to worry about spies in Brazil, too, but not for that. So it was a big change. You were asking about my parents.

Was your family still in New York on the East Coast?

My parents were living in New York City, and Judy’s parents were living in Houston, Texas, but they came and visited, and we visited them. It was much closer, of course, than it was from Brazil, where it was a major hassle to get four people out. I mean, getting four of us out was a really expensive proposition to go visit.

So you’re in another foreign culture now. [Laughs]

Another foreign culture. That was when I realized that the United States isn’t one thing, it’s many things, and it was not New York City or Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Chicago, Illinois. It was very different. And we’ll probably stop there because—but let me just take a couple of minutes to finish the bit about field research.

Okay.

So for a couple years we didn’t go back, and I’d said goodbye in 1981 when I went there. I said, “I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to come back because I’m living so far away,” and we all were very sad, and I left. We would send messages. I’d send tape recordings down, usually, because they couldn’t read, and I wasn’t sure anything would ever get there. But I sent tape recordings of family concerts and things down to them, and occasionally I’d get a tape recording back or news from an anthropologist who met one of them somewhere or another and was sending a message back.

About twelve years later, I was working at the Smithsonian, and in sort of 1994, I guess it was, I got a fax from the Suyá, dictated to a Brazilian, and they said they were having a problem with people invading their lands, and before they did anything drastic, they’d like to talk to me, and could I please come down. Well, I was running Folkways Records at the time, so I couldn’t just sort of hop on a plane. I had to sort of, first of all, look for money and found some grant money, and then I decided, well, what would help avoid this problem with land invasion? What would help avoid the violence? And I thought, well, one thing that would help would be for them to have a motorboat so they could actually patrol their rivers and make sure that no one was invading them, and another thing that would help would be if they had video cameras so they could actually film people. Instead of having to expel them themselves, they could take the films to the federal police, whose job it is to enforce the Indian rights to their lands, and the federal police could take the chance of being shot up as they went to move them out. So I wrote the Grateful Dead, I got a grant from the Grateful Dead to buy them a motorboat and a video camera and training in how to edit videos and make videos.

Oh, wow.

And went back to Brazil in 1994 to talk with them about the land problem they were having. But I decided to take the whole family, because it seemed to me also if it were tense, it was probably better to go back not as a single man, just yet one more sort of agent of violence, but to actually go with back with the whole family. The girls by that time were, what, they were in the teens, in their early teens, and they thought that would be a good idea. Judy thought it would be a great idea, so we all went back for the first time in twelve years.

The Suyá had by that time gotten very impatient, and they’d just invaded all the local—they did the drastic thing. They invaded the local ranches. They took hostages. They took four hostages and put them in a hole in the ground next to the village, and said they wouldn’t release them until the Ministry of Justice agreed to review their land claim case. So when I arrived in Brazil that time, it was a pretty tense situation, and the Brazilian government agency that was in charge of Indian affairs had never been so happy to see me than they were then. I got their permission. Instead of having to wait six months, I got it instantly. They wanted me to go talk to them. The Suyá were asking for me. They didn’t want to talk to anyone else. So we went to the village. We didn’t have to get on an Air Force plane now, because the interior had changed completely. There were roads into the region now. So we got onto a bus and went to a place whose nickname was “Bang Bang,” Sâo José do Xingu, “Bang Bang,” because it was such a violent such a cowboy-type place. The Suyá met us there, and we went off and visited their village. So since then our relationship has changed a lot in the sense that we went back as invited guests and continued to go back as invited guests. The research I did with such care in the 1970s actually became the basis of their land claim case that they won, because I had actually written down what they used all the land for, and I’d written down who was buried in which place in which village, and so they could actually prove they had dead in former villages inside the ranches that had occupied the territory, and that was all they needed to get their land claim.

Interesting.

Because by Brazilian law, they were entitled to land that was theirs. The question is how do you prove it and who do you believe. The Brazilians would not believe the Indians, who were an interested party, but they did believe the data that I’d already published in my dissertation and the further data that I could supply from my field notes. So in a sense I became very useful to them, and just in the way that Raoni had told the chief I might be, and saying, “The whites might be useful to you sometime in the future,” and it turned out that I was, and they were extremely grateful and appreciative. So our relationship has really since then has been much more of going for short visits that are pleasant. I learned about new things. I learned about their conflict with the whites and I learned about other things, but I wouldn’t say that I’ve been doing continual research with them in the way I was in the previous, before that, before 1994.

And I think we’ll talk more later about the whole situation down there with indigenous people.

People who talk about field research often are the people who just started doing it, so you’ve got a lot of books that talk about people’s first field research. You don’t get a lot of books that talk about, well, what is it like doing research over a period of forty years and how does—because fieldwork changes as one’s own identity changes, as one’s age changes, as one’s interests change, as the situation in which you’re working changes.

So I think it’s worth thinking when one is writing about field research and thinking about it that one’s perspective does change over the years and over the decades, and it certainly has in my case. I was there last in 2010, and we were going to go now in May, but the various circumstances arose that will keep us from going now as a family, but I suspect we’ll all be going down for yet another visit as a whole family because my wife hasn’t been there in a while. But it does change, and one’s first field research is just the beginning of a whole process that might last for a long time with one group, or it might continue by doing field research with different ones.

Wow. And just a couple questions. What was it like for your daughters going back, especially being teenagers and then later adults?

It was life-changing. It was really life-changing. They went back as classic teenagers, interested in materials things. They had experience in Bloomington, Indiana, and the suburbs of Washington, D.C., in Chevy Chase. While there was a lot of diversity in the schools, life is really different in the interior. They took lots of weaving cloth, weaving string, and things like that, so they could make presents and teach people how to make bracelets, so they had something they could do. They were just amazed by what they saw. They were just amazed by how people lived, and they were amazed by how all the guys were such hunks. They said, “Dad, how come everyone here is a hunk?”

I said, “Well, I guess if all your friends had to go hunting and fishing all the time, they’d probably be in pretty good shape too.” And, of course, they also weren’t wearing many clothes. So they were deeply impressed by the guys, and they were deeply impressed by the village. They taught the young men and girls how to do the Electric Slide, which was a popular dance at the time, one, two, three. Counted one, two, three, four, slide, slide, slide, or something like that. So all the young guys and girls were saying it in English, “One, two, three, four, slide, slide, slide.” And the chief said to us, “You know, when you first came, you were lots of fun like that. Now your daughters are fun.”

Interesting.

And everybody really had a good time doing things like that. So that visit changed their thinking. It gave them a whole new orientation. It made them proud of being—it sort of enacted their Brazilian identities because they used their Brazilian passports for the first time. So it was really wonderful for them, and it’s given them both a really different perspective on life and a really different perspective on sort of adulthood, and it changed them. It really did. They were writing papers about it for school for years after that.

I can only imagine. And they were still bilingual at that point?

No, they both refused to speak Portuguese while we were in Bloomington, Indiana. I got there a few months later after they were with my wife and my grandparents, and I would speak Portuguese, and they’d roll on the floor and laugh but they refused to answer. They just decided that they were going to opt for English. Everybody else spoke English all the time.

So we couldn’t keep it going. We just didn’t have enough—we thought it was artificial for us to insist on speaking Portuguese when neither of us was a native speaker, since our Portuguese wasn’t perfect. Usually people who are teaching a bilingual family, usually one of them is a native speaker of that other language. So we didn’t. But the older one, when she was in college, she learned Portuguese and speaks it quite well now and goes back to the village and can speak with the Suyá, who all the younger generation speak quite well. They speak Portuguese quite well.

I see. Interesting.

So she can travel very easily there.

Wow.

The other one speaks Spanish and could make herself understood, but she hasn’t been back as much, and just for one reason or another, partly because she doesn’t speak Portuguese as the older one does.

Interesting. Lastly, while you were in Brazil and during these various return visits, how much, if any, experience and influence did Brazilian music have on you while you were there?

We listened. You know, Brazilian popular music, of course, was going through an amazing period with the Tropicalia movement in the sixties and then all kinds of interesting music happening. Of course, we would participate in one way or another in carnivals as they came around.

But I decided pretty early that if I was going to get any really serious writing done, I was going to have to focus, and I pretty much decided to focus on the Brazilian Indian material I was collecting and on other things I was doing. So I just paid very little attention to it, didn’t watch much television, didn’t go to many concerts. We did go to some very nice concerts, but I wasn’t writing about it. Got some nice recordings. But I think, always, as I said, to a certain extent, I always thought I was one of the unimaginative ones, and I just sort of plodded straight through, but also, I think, by focusing I also was able to get the writing done that I was able to get done and sort of keep focused on writing up the material that I spent so many months and years actually collecting over time.

Right. Okay. Well, I guess, next time Indiana and Washington, D.C., hopefully we can get to UCLA.

I think so.

Okay. Thank you very much. [End of March 6, 2012 session]

All right. Here we are again in what is soon to be not your office in a matter of probably hours, I guess, huh?

Matter of hours. I go from one place to another and leave behind a lot of friends and take with me all my books.

Wow. This is Alex Cline. I’m interviewing Professor Anthony Seeger. Today is March 21st, 2012, it’s the Persian New Year, and this is session number four. This could be our last session, but we won’t know till it’s near the end. Good morning.

Good morning.

You said that since we left off last time covering your time spent in Brazil, not just the jungles of the Amazon, but also in Rio de Janeiro and other places, and we talked about your daughters, your family returning to the Suyá and what that experience was like for them, including when they were teenagers, which I think is just an amazing thing to ponder, frankly, but you also said that there was something more about the Brazilian experience that you wanted to try to include while we’re in that part of your life. So what is that?

There is. In thinking on the Brazil experience, we talked mostly about my work with the Suyá Indians and experience with the family and things like that, and it seemed to me there was another really important part of the Brazilian experience that is important not simply to me as a person but also to the growth of anthropology in the country, and so I wanted to speak a little bit about the National Museum, where I was invited to work and worked for seven years as an associate professor.

To get an idea of what the National Museum was, you have to imagine an Imperial palace sitting on the top of a hill surrounded by a large park that includes a zoo and an observatory, and also it was sort of the center of the intellectual life of the empire of Brazil for quite a long time. Don Pedro II was the second emperor of Brazil, and he reigned for almost fifty-nine years

Wow.

And during that time he assembled 60,000 volumes of books there. He was interested in sciences, he was a multilingual writer and speaker, and he basically set up a kind of personal museum, which wasn’t uncommon for monarchs in those periods, but he did it sort of quite extensively with the help of relatives. He had a wonderful collection of Pompeian glass, glass from Pompeii that he got from a relative and took to Brazil. When a ship came through on its way to Argentina with a whole lot of Egyptian mummies, he actually commandeered the ship and took all the mummies and put them in his palace as well. He had an observatory built, and, of course, it was his private zoo that became the national zoo there. When he was deposed, I think it was 1889, though I could be wrong about the date, when he was deposed, the Brazilian government, the people who came in to rule, decided the best way to keep him sort of from coming back was take his palace. So they first took his palace and used it for a meeting for the Senate and things like that, but then they turned it fairly quickly into the National Museum Research Center and collections for the nation.

It was in that same place that I worked when I was working there in the 1970s, a huge edifice with interconnected rooms, had been pretty much modified from its original palatial structure, but when you walked up to very large rooms, some of those had clearly been reception rooms for the monarch and then that were turned into the place where the dinosaur bones sat. In the tall room, the dinosaur bones are sort of there, but in the usual dinosaur sort of way.

Right.

And then a lot of the other rooms which were interconnected into a series of long exhibits surrounding courtyards, two different courtyards. In the back of the museum, probably the old servants’ quarters, is where the scientists actually hung out, and I think my office must have been part of the imperial kitchens or stables or something like that, as I recall. But it was a very imposing building. It was also crumbling into pieces, and then it was very hard to have—as anybody knows who works in a museum, even the Smithsonian, the old buildings looked gorgeous, but they weren’t built to be museums, and so they aren’t terribly handy for museums, and they’re also really always falling apart.

Wow.

So the termites were eating it and the roof was leaking, and the power supply just wasn’t sufficient to really manage any air-conditioning. So it was at once a gorgeous place and a rather frustrating place to try to do our work, but it did remove us from the rest of the university and gave the anthropologists there a kind of pressure-cooker atmosphere with only other anthropologists and only graduate students that allowed us to really do a lot of work, a lot of thinking, a lot of creative activities.

I was brought there, I think I mentioned, by an anthropologist named Roberto Da Matta, who really was quite brilliant and sort of restarted that program there in the 1970s. One of my jobs was to sort of restart the study of indigenous peoples in Brazil, and I did that partly by recruiting students to go do research, and some of them I had to take by the hand to get to the field, including probably one of the most famous anthropologists, living anthropologists in Brazil, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who was a brilliant student, but he did have a problem in actually getting to the field. For one reason or another, he didn’t make it, and he was left on the airstrip by the Air Force at one point, and that seemed like a rather cruel thing to have happen. So I said, “We’ll go to the field. We’ll try it by land this time.” And so I got him, and I took advantage of the trip to also take an Italian linguist, Bruna Franchetto, and a Swiss linguistic student who was there and also a Brazilian Indian who was going to join the Suyá. So there were five of us or something like that on this expedition. We got on a bus and went overnight to São Paulo, got on another bus carrying, I don’t know, twenty or so boxes and then filled with stuff I mentioned we had to take to the field. Then we got to Goiânia, changed to another bus, and eventually got to San Felix de Araguaia, which is on one of the big rivers that goes up, but a river away from where we wanted to end up on the Xingu, and found that the bus leaving the San Felix de Araguaia for the Xingu had actually turned over and been destroyed the day before.

Wow.

So we had to wait around for a replacement bus, and the replacement bus finally showed up. It was a rattling old thing. It was so rusty you could see right through the sides of it, right through the siding. We finally got to the river. The Indians had left. So we finally got them there, and I felt very happy about that. I got my student into the field, got the other folks in the field, got the Brazilian Indian where was supposed to go, and I did a bit of research myself. But, again, that was sort of part of a series of students, including Elizabeth Travassos and Vanessa Lee and a number of others that I sort of helped get into the field and started. Some of them were working on music. Some of them were working on social organization. I did, in fact, feel that the museum was a great place for students, it was a great place for faculty, and I wanted to sort of bring it into the story, because it continues to be one of the great programs in anthropology in South America, probably in the Americas, with many of the same people in it that were students when I was there.

But Brazil was actually a dictatorship at that point.

Brazil in the early—from 1964, really, was a dictatorship until 1982 or something like that, or ’84.

Right. Well, what was it like working under those conditions?

The dictatorship started in ’64, but it really had a crackdown in 1968, and that’s when it really became dangerous for people to think differently, and it put a lot of people in jail. There was a lot of people were tortured. A lot of people and a lot of academics were tortured, but so were clerics and union organizers and all kinds of people. I got there in 1970.

Right.

Not having studied Latin American studies, I knew all about the South American Indians and their social organizations. I didn’t know a thing about Brazil, I’m afraid. So I was a little taken aback by what I found. What it meant for me was that there was a fair amount—the power of the military was fairly arbitrary, and they kept me out of the field for the first eight months until I found that connection that could get me in. It also made it very difficult the times when I was at the National Museum for us to do research, because if we, when we—and most of us were, in fact, protesting the attacks on the rights of Brazilian Indians, which are guaranteed in the constitution but not in practice, we were punished by not being allowed to do our research. So at one point there were twelve professors of anthropology at the National Museum prohibited from doing research, because a general was actually running the Brazilian agency and a colonel was running the research section of it, and he didn’t care anything about research particularly, and he was using this as a sort of a way to control thought and control publications. It didn’t work, ultimately, but it did slow things down, and that’s one of the reasons I found myself actually having to go myself to the field. After being president of the Brazilian Indian rights commission, I think I talked about last time, I was elected chairman of the Department of Anthropology, which was also a great honor, on the one hand, and I did wonder why my colleagues did it. They said it was to teach me about Brazil, which it did, but it also meant that they had someone who’d actually been fairly active in indigenous rights issues running and sort of in charge, the titular head of the department, which didn’t have a whole lot of power, but it did have a reasonable amount of visibility. So as chair, I could then argue and often get into the field myself, and I could free up a whole bunch of other researchers in the process. There were great linguists there. There were some very fine social anthropologists.

So Brazil was then really, in spite of the dictatorship, the graduate program was a vital place. A number of scholars had left the country, but they came back sort of later. When I went back to Brazil and started teaching in ’75, the harsh, harshest period of the dictatorship was over, and what followed was a slow period called, on the one hand, the opening by the dictatorship, where they were sort of relinquishing their power very slowly and opening up the people who were involved in the protest and contesting of the power of the military dictatorship. It was actually a forced opening. They were forcing it open. So the question was a P.R. difference as to what you thought was happening, whether it was actually people were relinquishing power or being forced to relinquish power. But it did mean that it wasn’t as dangerous a place as it had been. I did worry, I think I mentioned last time, about my concern about opening packages because of the letter bombs being sent to—

No.

No, I didn’t mention that? Well, after I had been elected president of the indigenous rights organization, the Comissâo Pro-Índio of Rio, and the right-wing sort of enthusiasm, I’m not sure, they may have been military, but they could also just been private citizens—we have them in our country—began to sort of retaliate against people who were running NGOs that were contesting the situation and arguing for the more democratic process over one that was more legal. They began sending letter bombs, so the head of the land-rights organization had a letter bomb sent to him and it blew up his hands, I think. And somebody else, the Brazilian order of lawyers had a bomb sent to them. It blew up the attendant, the person who opened the package. So I got pretty freaked out by that, actually, because I figured that I was certainly possible. We’d had one of our meetings cancelled because of a bomb threat, and so I thought it was possible I could have—so I never liked opening a package.

Wow.

And what it does is it sort of turns an everyday act into a silent moment of heroism, and I think that’s probably what happens in a country where there’s a lot of terrorism. Just opening a package, every time I open a package, I think, “This could be the last thing I ever do.”

Wow.

It may be the last thing I ever do, opening a package one day, but at least I’m aware of it.

Yes.

And yet it made me reasonably uncomfortable there, and at one point I wondered whether I should have a taxi running at the foot of the stairs all the time. I think one of the reason I was elected president was that I was a foreigner and I could get to the American Embassy and get out of the country and was most likely not going to get locked up and the key thrown away or tortured. Why would anybody elect a foreigner to be head of a pro-Indian rights commission of Rio?

That’s what I was wondering.

I went to a meeting, and they were going to elect a president, and they asked if I would consider it. I was on my way to the bus station, I had my banjo in my hand as I was going off to the bus station to see my wife doing her research in the fishing village. I said, “Look, I think it’s a really bad idea. I think you should elect a Brazilian, but I won’t refuse if you elect me. But I really think it’s a bad idea,” and then I left. They elected me, which just goes to show if you turn your back on somebody, they’ll—for whatever reason they had, they did it, and I think it was partly because of my visibility as a researcher, my credibility as an Indian rights advocate, and then possibly because they thought I was probably safer than any of them would be doing it.

But still, visibility is obviously vulnerability.

Visibility is vulnerability, and there were a bunch of people in the organization that were more interested in other aspects of the political moment. There were some people who really wanted to organize the working class in Rio, but then since they couldn’t do that, they sort of went into indigenous rights issues for a while. I was told that there was this uneasy power play happening between the Maoists and the sort of Stalinists, the different versions of the Communist Party of Brazil—in Brazil, not of Brazil. The Communist Party and the Community Party of Brazil are two parties.

So another reason I may have been elected is simply I wasn’t affiliated with anybody, and so by voting for me, they didn’t have to support either of the competing ideologies. But for whatever motive, I was reasonably active until Brazil passed a law saying foreigners couldn’t organize mass demonstrations, and that was really aimed, I think, at the church. It wasn’t aimed at me. I wasn’t organizing enough mass demonstrations to make any difference. But we did decide that I shouldn’t be president anymore. I sort of abdicated my presidency and became sort of an ambassador. But within a couple of months, I was elected chairman of the department, which sort of gave me the same sort of position. But that was legal [unclear]. The Brazilian government was—in other parts of Brazil, contested foreigners who had been elected to the chair, but I was the only foreigner in the National Museum, and my colleagues were absolutely determined that I was not going to be contested and I never was. So all kinds of things happened in the city of Rio that were all reasonably adventurous and really interesting, and I did learn a lot about the country. I learned a lot about friends and people, and as chair, I was traveling around all over the country and looking at graduate programs and meeting with other people running graduate programs. In the National Museum one of the towers—there were two large square towers going up, and the top of the left-hand one, as you’re facing the front of the museum, was the emperor’s bedroom. And the congregation, as it was called, the heads of the departments would meet with the director and vice director of the museum in the bedroom, the former bedroom of the former emperor. It was a very sort of impressive place to meet. I mean, here we were, some of the top scientists in the country, and meeting in a place where we could imagine the ghost of the emperor walking back and forth, worrying about the outcome of the Paraguayan War in the previous century, and also a place that was right above the room that displayed the mummies in the National Museum. The mummies were considered to be very powerful. People would go in there and have [unclear] trance. So the room with the mummies was a powerful place, and we were meeting above the powerful place.

The palace itself was considered a powerful place in the Afro-Brazilian sort of possession religions, because it was where the law abolishing slavery had been signed. So in addition to sort of being the emperor’s residence, it was also the place where a certain really sort of important moment in the history of people of African descent in Brazil, and also had the mummies in it. So I would walk to work, sort of stepping over the carcasses of dead chickens and stepping around large cigars and all those things and offerings of food, which are all part of things that had gone on at night the night before. So the National Museum was a powerful place in a number of different ways, sort of superimposed on one another.

[laughs] Wow.

So having the meetings up there were quite remarkable, and I have a memorable meeting in which we were being required by the Ministry of Culture to give salary cuts to 10 percent of our staff in order to give salary raises beyond the normal 10 percent.

Interesting.

The idea was they would, by giving salary raises, encourage people to do some more and also to discourage people who were just not doing very much at all. No one wanted to do it. I mean, there are obvious reasons for not doing it. When they went around the table sort of one by one, every chair said, “No, I have nobody I can recommend. I have nobody I can recommend.” They got to me, and I said, “Well, I actually have somebody I can recommend. He’s a drunkard, and I’m keeping him on the books because my colleagues said I should keep him on the books so that when he dies, his wife will have a pension, but he’s not going to live much longer. I don’t think he needs the 10 percent raise. I mean, I’m perfectly happy to put him down, because there are some people who are producing more than he is.” And the woman from biology next to me said, “Aren’t you afraid?” And I said, “Afraid of what?” “Aren’t you afraid of people actually attacking spiritually?” The umbanda, sort of the spiritual attacks. I said, “No, actually, I really wasn’t particularly afraid of the spiritual attacks,” but everybody else around the table was.

Wow.

Everybody else said, “This is serious stuff. We don’t want to provoke the poor people by taking any steps, sort of single them out in one way or another.”

So no one got a raise and a salary cut. The power of the museum and the power of the people surrounding the museum and the power of everybody’s belief in the efficacy of symbolic work of some of these religions was certainly quite powerful.

Wow.

So it was a very different kind of place. It did teach me about Brazil, as my colleague suggested it was going to, things that I never imagined. So when I came back to the United States, I really came with a very rich experience and also a tremendous amount of admiration for my colleagues and the feeling that I’d really been extremely lucky in having spent my seven years there. We could have stayed forever, but I think I went into that last time.

Right.

So we were in Indiana.

Yes, speaking of high contrast again. [Laughs]

High contrast. And did I talk about sort of taking over the directorship of the Archives of Traditional Music?

No, this is where I was going to start with today.

Okay.

I mean, you went there, you’re studying ethnomusicology, you wind up being an anthropology professor, and then you’re invited to take this other position. How did that happen?

Well, I applied to be an anthropologist working with music in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University, and Indiana had a pretty long history of that. One of great scholars of the field of ethnomusicology for a decade or two was a man named George Herzog, who was brought over by Franz Boas to study anthropology under him, but Herzog before that worked as an assistant at the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin. Boas wanted someone to come from the Phonogramm-Archiv who had expertise in archiving, to sort of bring that field and comparative musicology to the United States, but to then get a good dose of anthropology and make it into sort of an anthropological thing. He wrote over, and they sent Herzog, and Herzog came over as a young graduate student and did some spectacular work and really thoughtful work in American Indian music, doing a lot of recordings, as he was trained in recordings, and he knew all about wax cylinders. He sort of amassed a personal archive at Columbia. He sort of created a kind of archive of recorded sound, similar to the Phonogramm-Archiv, somewhat different from it in that he borrowed a lot of the things. He borrowed most of the wax cylinders from the American Museum of Natural History, and he borrowed them from people and was doing analysis and training students, not a lot of students. He was a little hard to work with, and eventually he had a severe personality trauma and spent the last twenty-five years of his life in an institution. I don’t know when that started, and I hope it wasn’t because of all the mold on the wax cylinders that he had, because I was breathing the same mold.

[laughs] But you’re okay so far.

So far. But Herzog, I think in 1949, was hired away from Columbia University by Indiana University, which was expanding, and he took his whole private collection with him, as I understand that’s a German philosophy, sort of a German thing. You take everything with you. And everything that he took with him wasn’t his. I mean, he took a whole lot of other people’s stuff with him, too, and set up what became the Archive of Folk and Primitive Music, later renamed the Archive of Traditional Music. He was director of that and also professor of anthropology for a number of years until he basically couldn’t function any longer and was found naked bathing with the sculptures of dolphins in one of the fountains at Indiana University. He had a famous moment which he spooked out his students by taking a mask and he would put the mask in front of his face and say, “Now you see me.” Then he would take the mask away, and they could see his face, and he would say, “Now you don’t. Now you see me. Now you don’t.” So he eventually was institutionalized. The archive was then turned over under the directorship of George List, and they hired a young ethnomusicologist named Alan Merriam, who wrote a famous book called The Anthropology of Music while he was at Indiana, and sort of created a vision of ethnomusicology as an anthropological approach to music, taking the methods and the ideas of anthropology and applying them to the study of musical performance. He was a very powerful and single-minded person and certainly one of the most interesting ethnomusicologists of his time, I thought. I went to study with him. When I was in Brazil, I took a postdoc at Indiana University for six months and was taking a course with him on American Indian music that I think he taught at eight o’clock in the mornings. He said if the people didn’t want to get up at eight and study with him, he didn’t care. He wasn’t going to teach any other time. So you had to get up early to study with Alan.

I was taking the course and I was finding the traditional American Indian music I didn’t know much about, actually, from North America and it was sort of interesting. He took a trip to Poland to attend a conference and died in a plane crash at the age of fifty-six or fifty-seven, something like that, maybe fifty-eight. And suddenly the course ended. It was right toward the end of the semester. It was in May, I think. So I left. I was taking some other courses, and I left his course, but I then took an intensive three-week course in audiovisual archiving from the associate director of the Indiana University Archives of Traditional Music, whose name was Louise Spear. Louise gave a really interesting course. It was a three-week-long intensive course that brought people from all over the country because there are practically no courses in archiving except for that one then, and then we have one here. The idea of teaching it as a very intense summer course meant that people could get leave from their institutions and actually come and take it. It was quite a nice course, and it sort of covered all the aspects of archiving in a pretty superficial way, and the final paper was to design an archive and then talk about how you would deal with all the issues of storage and dissemination, acquisitions, and all those things. So I wrote a paper. I had a good time. That was my last paper at Indiana. Then we went back to Brazil.

Then they did a search for a replacement for Alan Merriam, and they were looking for someone in African music who as Alan had been, and after a year’s search, closed it without find anybody, so they opened it again, independent of geographic area. And so I applied and I was offered the job. I went and interviewed, and people liked what I’d done, and so they offered me the job to be an associate professor of anthropology at Indiana. As I was sort of finishing up the negotiations and planning to come, I got a call from the dean that I’d met, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, saying, “Well, look. The head of the Archives of Traditional Music is resigning. We’d like you to take that as well. I’m sure you could do both. You could be both the professor of anthropology and also the director of the archives.” I’d taken, what, a three-week course in archiving, and I was going to be the director. I was going to be the boss of the person who taught the course. So I called my colleagues at Indiana, I called Ruth Stone and Ron Smith, who was acting head, and I said, “Well, look. Is this really a good idea? It’s true, I’m coming with tenure, so I can throw my weight around, but it means I’ll be doing two jobs. Shouldn’t there be a full-time director for the archive?” Then they said, “Well, it looks to us as though we’re never going to get a full-time director for the archives. If you don’t take it, we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Wow.

So I said, “All right.” So I took basically two people’s jobs. It was originally a quarter-time position, but it couldn’t be done in quarter time, and within a year it was half-time, and so I was half-time in the department, half-time running the archive.

I knew a little about the archive because I put my own recordings in it, and I’d visited it as a graduate student, and I’d taken the course in archiving, and I’d put my recordings there because I thought it was better to have them there than on my own shelf. It was much safer. I’d been on the Exhibits Committee of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, which, since it had no funding, met once a year to say, “Sorry, too bad we don’t have any money to do anything about these exhibits. They’re getting old.” Then we’d all go back and drink coffee. So I had sort of a titular responsibility for exhibits and dissemination for the department and then the museum. So I accepted it and I went there, and it was clear that it had become decadent in the sense that it had a very ancient air-conditioner that wasn’t working that well. It was in the basement of a building that was damp. It had some nice space in it and had lots of storage, but it just wasn’t very secure storage and it wasn’t a great place. It had some very nice listening rooms three flights up. So I put my office up three flights up, because it was nice and bright instead of being basement-like and damp. Then I began to figure out, well, what needs to be done to improve an archive? What’s the role of archives?

What were the actual contents of the archive? What form were they in?

The archive, it’s one of the largest university-based archives in the world, and it’s really large. It was based on the idea of the Phonogramm-Archiv in Berlin, which was to acquire the collections of researchers. When researchers go to the field or went to the field and made recordings, they usually made one copy. They would make it on various kinds of media. They would make it first on wax cylinders and then there were discs that you could record directly onto, and then later wire, and then later reel-to-reel tape, and then eventually cassette tape, and then we’re sort of into digital recorders like you’ve got there, the Marantz.

But Indiana, because Herzog had acquired all the wax cylinders from the American Museum of Natural History, which had a huge project of recording, had five or six thousand wax cylinders in it, unique wax cylinders—I’m not talking about Caruso, who sold hundreds of thousands, or brass band music or something like that that was commercially sold. These were unique recordings and therefore extremely valuable, extremely fragile. Equally fragile were a lot of the discs because every time you get material that has several layers, there’s a process by which the layers separate, a chemical process going on all the time, and they’re almost always disintegrating at that point. So you have the backing falling off, you have the acetate or sort of the covering peeling off of the metal discs, and then you’ve got endless problems. The wax cylinders didn’t have layers but they did, actually, since they were made out of a biodegradable material, they actually got moldy, and so mold would eat them up or things would get in and chew them up. So all of those were obviously problems. And it seemed to me that I was told by my chair that I was being—I must have told this last time. Didn’t I tell you that I was told by my chair that I was actually probably being hired to close down the archive?

No, you didn’t mention that. [Laughs]

My chair, who was a good friend, Emilio Moran, he said, “Look, your being hired to be the director as well as a tenured professor indicates that the dean is going to close the archive. You have tenure. It’s not going to affect you at all because you’re going to be in our department. So I wouldn’t get too attached to being in the archives.” I thought, well, that’s a really interesting perspective on it. I’d never thought of it. So I thought, well, if I’m going to fight for the archive, I’d better find out if it’s really worth having an archive. It seemed to me that one should start with the need to be convinced. Just because we needed archives in the past didn’t mean that they were necessarily useful today, and just because it existed didn’t mean that it had to exist. It was costing money, and it had staff and it took up a lot of space. We could use the space for dancehalls or to create music or for something for anthropology. So I thought I really needed to spend some time looking around and seeing what the archives did. Had a very small staff. It did have, I think, three permanent staff members. So I spent six months, basically. I gave it six months, and I didn’t tell the staff because it would have freaked them out, but I gave it six months. I said, “What will people do with this place?” A lot of things were clear. First of all, students didn’t use it very much. Faculty didn’t use it very much. Students only came when they had an assignment there. But other people did. People from the community came. People from small towns all around Indiana came to hear their grandparents singing. Musicians came to get inspired by music they might use as the basis for some project of their own. We got a letter from the Fox Indians saying that they had forgotten some of the pieces to one of their ceremonies, and they wanted to continue performing it, but no one knew the songs anymore, but they did know that somebody had recorded them in the 1930s. They didn’t know who, they didn’t know where it was, but might we have it. As it turned out, we did have it. They had no way of knowing because the catalog wasn’t out and there was no online at the time really. But the answer was yes, and we made copies for them and sent them to them, and they were extremely happy with it and began to do the ceremony again.

That pretty much convinced me that archives really had a role to play, and they have a role to play not necessarily only for research, which is how they were originally set up, but they have a role to play in the communities of the peoples who were recorded where they—

Collective memory of sorts.

A sort of kind of collective memory of the people and it’s of themselves. A lot of the history is written about people by the victors.

[laughs] Right.

And yet these are their own words and their own songs and the things that they thought were important enough to record at the time. So archives have a different kind of information in them, and they have a real potential, it seemed to me, to have sort of in them the weapons for self-determination of groups. People could create a future based on their own past instead of on the basis of somebody else’s history of them. So I thought that archives, far from being quiet places, were actually very important and sometimes critical places for communities outside of the university. So on that basis I became a total advocate for archives, and I became an advocate for archives not because I thought that research was the most important thing about them, but because I thought that actually their role in the modern world was important.

I began to write about that, and because I wrote about it, it got noticed. There are a lot of archivists around. Not a lot of them write. Not a lot of audiovisual archivists write, and if you don’t write, you can inspire lots of local people, but you don’t really—it doesn’t get out there and get discussed in the same way. So I was writing and I was putting it in journals.

Shall we pause?

We’d better pause. [Interruption]

Are you ready?

I’m ready.

All right. We’re back.

So there I was, totally convinced that archives were important. I’m writing about it and that sort of gave me instant visibility in the archiving community. I went around and learned a lot about archives. I traveled, and one of the first things I did was I went and visited the Library of Congress, the British Library, and the Berlin and the Vienna Phonogramm-Archiv to sort of see how other people did it, and made a lot of friends and went to conferences and things like that. I asked for some special money from Indiana just because it seemed to me if you’re going to start something new, you’ve got to figure out how it works. And since anthropologists are specialists in asking questions and sort of analyzing results, it seemed to me that I had to use my anthropology ideas, sort of be an anthropologist about this. There is something out there. It’s called archiving. It has its own customs. They do their own things. Why they do them that way, and does it have to be done that way was sort of the questions I went around and asked, and then I came back and applied them.

I applied for a series of fairly large grants to work with the wax cylinders. It seemed to me that there were a number of problems with the archives. One was the materials disintegrating. Another was that the permissions that we had for them weren’t very adequate, as you know now from your own work.

Yes.

And you’d really need the permission of the people that you’re recording if you’re going to use it later, and since we couldn’t get the permission from them necessarily, we certainly needed the permission of the institutions that had recorded the cylinders and sort of had responsibility for them, or the collectors. We had a lot of collections that were highly restricted because one piece of them was very sensitive. I mean, you would have a whole collection restricted because there was one tape of a ceremony that was a secret ceremony. They were allowed to record it, but they were told never to let anybody listen to it, and that would affect the entire collection. So we had a problem with disintegration, a problem with permissions, and we also had a problem with dissemination. People had to come to Indiana to listen to it, and that seemed like a real problem.

So I set about sort of with a grant to address those three issues at the same time, sort of renegotiate all of the contracts, every contract, all eleven hundred. There are eleven hundred contracts, eleven hundred collections. So try to find the collectors or the person or the institution responsible, renegotiate the contract so that they would restrict only the parts of the collection that had to be restricted on an item basis rather than on a collection basis and then let us disseminate parts of every collection if possible. And if not, I didn’t mind restricting it. But I also required that the new contract, insist that they had to renew their—if it was a total restriction, they had to renew it every ten years. So they had to rethink it every ten years, because it didn’t seem to me it was a good idea for archives to be spending a whole lot of money to preserve things that could never be listened to by anybody. Then I went about copying from the wax cylinders to what was then magnetic tape, which was the best preservation medium at the time. We spent a lot of time talking about what speeds and how it should be done, and we got a whole group of graduate students to clean them and copy them and put them into new boxes, where they would presumably not be so susceptible to mold because they didn’t actually touch the edge of the box so there was no contact with anything that might could make them damp.

Interesting.

We were following the Library of Congress procedure at the time. Then the third part of it was to start cataloging the collections online. In looking around for online systems versus in-house systems, everything was pretty much up in the air at that point for archives, but I decided I wanted to have it so that if you looked up Franz Boas, you would find his books on the Kwakiutl. You’d also find his collections of recordings on the Kwakiutl. So it was in there, sort of in the domain of the same universe as the research writing, because it seemed to me essential that these were seen as part of research and the production of research and therefore should be available in the same databases.

So I went with what is now OCLC cataloging at the collection level and got the grant to do the cataloging and then began to make listening copies available on cassette, which was the latest instant—it was so much easier to use than a reel. It was a lot lighter to ship. We could ship them out for people to borrow and things like that. So I sort of did an integrated project that sort of looked at archiving as a whole and sort of took steps to fix what I saw as the problems in each of those areas.

This also, then, included all this material that had been brought over by Professor Herzog that wasn’t, as you put it, “his,” unquote.

Wasn’t his. One of the things I did was I actually straightened that out.

Okay. I was going to say, how did you track all that down?

Well, I knew that a whole lot of collections of American Indian things, the early ones, had come actually from that museum, and so I worked on it. We signed an agreement so that Indiana actually had the legal right to continue to hold them for the museum and to copy them and to consult them if certain things needed to be done. So, yes, that was another reason.

George Herzog died in my first year at Indiana, and so all of the things that he’d sealed up were unsealed, and I was able to start moving on a whole bunch of things, sort of straightening out that particular sort of mess that had sort of emerged as we were unsealing boxes and I was becoming better aware of what the issues really were and who controlled what. I got enough money from those grants to give a fair amount of overhead to the university, and there’s nothing like overhead coming in to make the university think that they’re suddenly worth something.

[laughs] For sure.

And like anything else, universities have their soft points. They have their places where you could actually make changes in normal procedures. One of those suddenly emerged when I was one out of about twenty people who got a copy of a memo from the former chancellor of the university, Herman Wells, saying that the Hoagie Carmichael family wanted to donate its memorabilia to Indiana University, and he was trying to figure out does anybody want it, should it come here. Hoagie Carmichael was a famous composer, actor, arranger, and band leader. He was raised in Bloomington, Indiana, and he had gone to Indiana University. He was a native son of the state. He was an alumnus of the university. He was a name to conjure with at Indiana University, especially among the people of a certain generation who remembered “Georgia on My Mind” and many of his great songs. So I wrote back immediately saying, yes, I thought the ideal place would be the Archives of Traditional Music because we knew all about recorded sound, and Hoagie Carmichael was known for his music and not for his shirts, though he had shirts, and that I proposed that we should not only house the things, but there should be a room with Hoagie Carmichael’s memorabilia that could be used for meetings and conferences and small concerts and things like that as part of it. And I said, “We can’t do that here. We need new space.”

Wow.

We’d been asking new space, I gather, for a long time, but we were always down way below the biology labs and everybody else’s requests for new space and would continually get bumped back as time went on. That happens to us here right in this building at UCLA. But the sudden availability of that material sort of basically catapulted us up to number one, and we got new space really quickly after that proposal in order to be able to acquire the collection from the Carmichael family. We moved the archive out of the basement to the first floor of another building, a very nice place with amazing storage, specially-built storage with specially-reinforced floors and a separate room to house the wax cylinders in with the best climate control the university could manage to arrange. It didn’t work quite on spec, but it did after we complained a lot. Anyway, it took a couple years to move, I mean to get the whole thing done, but I sort of put on a hard hat every week and went into the new building, and we moved the archive, and it really did move it to where I thought it should be with state-of-the-art materials, state-of-the-art labs, video labs as well as audio labs. So by starting with raising grants and then taking a symbolically important collection on, then the archive was able to continue its long history of serving a lot of the public.

My anthropology teaching was going fine. I was enjoying the teaching. I was spending a lot more time probably on archiving than on anthropology. They were very patient. But I did teach two courses, and one of them every year was “Ethnomusicology: the Anthropology of Music,” and the other one was usually “Kinship and Social Organization” or “Anthropological Theory.” I was considered by my colleagues to be far more a hardcore anthropologist than Alan Merriam had been, because I could teach the central theory of anthropology coming out of University of Chicago and then coming out of six years, seven years in Brazil teaching that stuff. So I was having a good time.

What was life like for your family in Indiana at that time?

We were living in a cute little house about four blocks from campus that I was renting first from my colleague who was on leave, and then he decided not to come back, so we bought it, on Wiley Street, a nice little shady street. The kids, it took them a little while to get used to it, but they really liked Indiana because they could step outside. Rio is cars all over, it’s a big city, and so they couldn’t just sort of walk out whenever they wanted to, and suddenly they got to Rio (sic) and our older daughter just began to realize she could open the door and walk out, and we wouldn’t say anything. She’d walk out or go around the block on her bicycle or tricycle. It’s a really terrific, wonderful place to raise children, I thought. We both did. They made friends. There were lots of kids next door. It was one of those classic—it wasn’t a suburb, because we were right next to the university, but it was suburb in the sense that there were lots of young families around, and then they made friends back and spent all day playing, which was great. The school was okay for the younger age, and so they went to school.

After six years, I was up for a sabbatical and I thought it was probably time to take a break. I’d gotten the archives where I’d wanted it to be when I first saw it, and it seemed to me, well, maybe it was time to take a break and let somebody else be director of the archives, let them take it to some other level of development. That’s sort of a position I’ve taken several times over in my career, and that is that I think it’s actually good for institutions to change, though I’ve noticed that it’s not always good. It depends on who the next director is. Sometimes it doesn’t work out. But I had a question that was coming up in my own research. I finished the book Why Suyá Sing while I was there at Indiana.

That’s what I was going to ask.

Well, the reason I’d gone to Indiana was because I wanted to be with other people working with music, and there were very few in Brazil, and there were as many in Indiana as there were in the whole country of Brazil in terms of ethnomusicologists. So I went there and was taking courses and listening and writing, and I got the book manuscript done and associated with a CD that goes in the cover. So I was working on the CD in the archive, I mean that’s where my stuff was, and put the whole thing together. It’s an analysis that proposes that there’s a relationship between the cosmology, the ideas of time and space and vision of the world of the Suyá Kisêdjê and their social organization, which is the way they organize themselves into groups, and their musical sound. The argument is there’s a fairly tight connection.

Now, the question comes up is did I make it all up? I mean, did I make it up? Did I not? Did I make it up by myself? The Suyá Kisêdjê Indians themselves love symmetry. They’re fascinated by dualisms, and so I may have. They may have created with me. Of course, did this make any sense? It made sense analytically. It made sense in terms of all the data I had. It made sense in terms of all the literature I’d read. But it seemed to me the best thing I could do was to sort of check to see whether it made sense, would be to look at the music of the neighboring indigenous groups that spoke the same language family, and that would be the Apinage and the eastern Timbira groups, Kraho, Canela, and a whole bunch of others. These had been studied by the students of David Maybury-Lewis, who I’d referred to in an earlier--

Right. Yes.

So we had a lot of ethnographies of social organizations which showed that there was similarities in social organizations. There were similarities in language. There were some similarities in ritual names and groups. So the question was really, well, what’s the music like? Was the music also the dual? Is that the same similar structures? So I proposed that instead of learning the language of every other indigenous group, which I’d already decided I could never do, I decided I’d go around and go to the houses of the people who’d worked there and collect their recordings, make copies of the recordings for deposit in the archive, and then analyze the recordings and see if they made sense and if they were related to the Suyá structures of sound. Since they were all alive, I could ask them about things that they knew that they’d never written.

It was a very popular project. I got a Guggenheim grant for it and I got an NEH grant, and because of Indiana’s particular way of encouraging you to take Guggenheims, they would give me more time, and so I could actually take two years off to go back to Brazil and the United States, just devote myself to that comparative study.

Oh, wow.

So I thought, well, one of the problems with Indiana was my wife couldn’t get a job there. It’s sort of a one-university town, and if you aren’t employed by the university, it’s very hard to go somewhere else. You have to drive a long way to get somewhere else. At the time, it tended to take advantage of the brilliance of the spouses of the people who were there to employ them as very cheap instructors. So it wasn’t working terribly well for her, so she thought, sure, let’s go back to Brazil. And the kids thought it would be fine, so we were all set to go back to Brazil for two years, it was going to be. I thought, well, we could go back to Brazil for two years, and I could possibly never come back. We could stay down there if we wanted to. The kids had learned English, they’d made friends with their grandparents, maybe we could sort of—life was [unclear]. Anything could happen. Anything could happen, but what actually happened was I was recruited to come to the Smithsonian instead, and I was recruited by a man named Ralph Rinzler, who was at the time, I think, a deputy secretary of the Smithsonian. He was one of the four sort of undersecretaries of the Smithsonian, or the people under the secretary level. The secretary is the head of the Smithsonian, like the secretary of the Navy or something. It’s that kind of secretary.

Right.

Not the one who takes notes. Ralph was a former bluegrass mandolin player and folk organizer, and he’d been the manager of Bill Monroe for a while in later years, and he’d been research director of the Newport Folk Festival, working for, among other things, my Uncle Pete. He’d worked on the Newport Folk Festival, and he’d been hired by the Smithsonian to come and start a festival at the Smithsonian, a kind of an outdoor exhibit, based on what he knew about how to find people and how to organize things for the Newport Folk Festival. What most people don’t know about the Newport Folk Festival is that it wasn’t just people coming to play. There was a real attempt to bring star performers who would draw the audience, and then have them really showcase the traditional performers that were coming out of the mountains, people who had been recording in the 1930s but then suddenly couldn’t get a job as a musician and went into the mines for thirty years and were now coming back and playing, and showcasing the Cajuns, showcasing the great diversity of music that was to be found in the United States. It was Ralph’s job to find them, and the Newport position was that everybody should get paid the same amount of money. So if you were Joan Baez, or if you were some coal miner, you got the same amount of money. At least that was the position, and it was sort of an ideological festival. The idea was that you would come for the names, you would suddenly become awed, super awed by the musicianship of the kinds of musicians you’d never met, never heard from. It had a lot of workshops, a lot of teaching, a lot of discussion.

Well, Ralph was hired to basically start that sort of thing at the Smithsonian, and did, and he started the American Folklife Festival in, like, I think, 1974. 1976 was a huge one. It went on for ten weeks, because it was a celebration of the Bicentennial of the United States. Ralph was a huge organizer. He would get these ideas and then he would try to get other people to do them for him. One of his ideas about 1986, 1985, he was negotiating with the founder of Folkway Records, whose name was Moses Ash, who’d started an independent record label that was probably the largest independent record label of its kind in the United States, a label that had specialized in alternative musics, a lot in sort of the unpopular music. It had specialized in world music, a lot of music from different parts of the world. Ash had sort of a vision of recording sound of every place in the world. He had a numbering system that was sort of working. He was trying to fill in empty places on a large map. But that wasn’t all he was doing, by any means. He was also producing lots of children’s music and producing a lot of other kinds of spoken-word albums, hundreds of spoken-word albums, and things like that. But, anyway, he was getting to be old. He was getting ill. He was in his eighties. He was trying to find out—he was trying to think of how he could unload his company in such a way that everything continued to be available. His position was if it’s good enough to put into print, it should be kept in print forever. So you don’t take the letter Q out of the alphabet just because there are only a few words that use Q. You still keep it in the dictionary. It’s not very often used, but it’s there when people want it, and that’s the way the record label should be.

Well, the problem was that no commercial company really was very interested in it on those terms. Columbia and Warner would have loved to have had them, if they could have just picked the cream off the top and sort of dumped the rest, and he refused. Ralph came in with an offer saying the Smithsonian would take it, because it was a great collection, like the great collection of other things that the Smithsonian has, and that the Smithsonian would keep it all in print or keep it all available. They ran up into problems. The lawyers got involved. The Smithsonian refused to give any money for it. They would buy other collections, but they refused to buy a company. So Ralph was trying to figure out how to get money for that, and he was trying to get a lot of scholars to write in and say how important the collection was, and that I was one of the scholars that was asked on the basis of my works not only as an ethnomusicologist but also on the base of my work as an archivist. Ralph invited me to Washington, D.C. a couple of times to meet and talk and meet with other specialists and sort of come up with what to do about Folkways. Then he got the idea of doing a benefit album. He was walking through the festival with Bob Dylan, and he was telling Bob Dylan about he really would like to get Folkways there, to honor Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, because they were on the label, and he wanted to keep all that available, the wonderful stuff. And Dylan apparently said, “Well, why don’t you do a benefit album. I could get some of my friends together like Bruce and others that we could do an album, a benefit album, that would raise enough money so that you could actually have some money for the Smithsonian and get it in.” And that’s what happened. So he got started on a benefit album. He found really good people at Columbia Records who were interested in following up on it. Don DeVito, who is sort of Dylan’s—not his manager, but Dylan’s sort of record company sort of contact at Columbia, and that and a number of other people became involved. It became an album called Folkways: A Vision Shared, which won two Grammies in 1988, I think it was. But with the idea of getting some money, then you could move ahead to sort of figure out, well, it looks like we’re going to get some money, the Smithsonian would agree to front it as long as they got some guarantee it was going to get repaid. Ralph sort of worked on some other company buying all the stock and giving some money for that. So, anyway, he was working on the money. Then he wanted to find a curator, and he decided I should be the next curator. So he was asking me, “Well, wouldn’t you like to be curator?” And I said, “No, I’m going to Brazil for two years. I’ve been director of the archives. I’m tired. I’ve got this project I want to do.” At one of the meetings we were having in his house, my Uncle Mike came up to me, and Mike said, “Tony, you know the family would really appreciate it if you took this job. We really think you’d do a good job at this.”

Wow. This was the label you listened to when you were young.

This was the label I listened to. There were reasons that I was interested in it. One was that it was the label that turned me on to the music of the world. It was the label that dared to put out my Uncle Pete’s recordings when he was blacklisted. It was the label that had Woody Guthrie on it that I was listening to as a little kid.

Anyway, there were reasons to take it over and reasons to take it on. Mike, that was sort of the crowning blow, in the sense that it felt a bit like the mafia. I said, well, it felt a bit like the mafia. The family thing, this is a family thing here. But it’s true. The Seeger family had about 170 albums on it all just by themselves, so it was a substantial part of the two thousand albums, and in terms of sales probably a very substantial part of it. So I thought, well, I knew that recorded music could change people’s lives and really start them off to do explorations, and it seemed to me if it was going to come to the Smithsonian, it really ought to go there and change people’s lives. It shouldn’t go there and be put in a box. It shouldn’t go there and be put on a shelf and displayed. It really should be out there somehow. It seemed to me that this was a job, actually, that I was born for. You can’t look at very many jobs and say, well, you know, I was born for this one. But I was, in a sense, born for Folkways, I thought, because I was born in Greenwich Village, and I was raised in a family filled with musicians, and I went to concerts in Carnegie Hall. I knew a whole bunch of the artists on Folkways just because I ran into them when I was four feet tall, and not just family, but others as well. The other thing, and the reason I think that Ralph wanted me, was that I had experience in audiovisual archiving and therefore I knew about old tapes and contracts and rights and all those things which are central for record companies. I had a curriculum vitae with three books published and a whole bunch of articles that allowed me to sort of be respected and stand up to the curators at the Smithsonian, who were very powerful folks, and actually be a curator. I had the kind of experience that gave me a curatorship. I had experience working with politics in Brazil, and some administrative experience working with budgets, though I’d never been very good with budgets.

So Ralph convinced me to apply. Now, then he wrote a job description, because it has to be announced, of course. I don’t think there’s anybody else in the world that could possibly have had all those particular criteria, the desired criteria. The general criteria, maybe a half dozen people could have it. By the time you got living in another country for an extended period of time, speaking another language fluently, and also performing, and also archival experience, suddenly there was nobody left. So I think I was the only person who actually fit that description, and I was given very strict instructions on how to fill out the application form. And lo and behold, it took months and months and months, and he was introducing me as the new curator of Folkways long before the paperwork had been finished, and I said, “Ralph, you can’t do this. No. I haven’t been approved. You’re embarrassing me because I’m not.” He said, “Well, you’re going to be, so you might as well get used to it.” On those terms, I went to the Grammy Awards and watched Folkways win its two Grammies for that album.

That’s interesting. Wow.

Yes. It was a great party. Rented a limo and went around to all these big parties afterwards. It was quite an album. It was quite a lot of fun, and it was my introduction sort of to the music industry at its more glitzy levels, at the same time as I was figuring out about how the music industry worked at its really the lowest, most under-the-radar level, which is Folkways.

So I did take it. I gave the money back to both. I declined the NEH, and I gave the money back to the Guggenheim and said, “I changed my mind. But if it’s all right with you, I’ll reapply sometime, and you can decide if you’re going to give it to me.” So I left Indiana. That was one of the reasons. There were many reasons to go. One was my wife living in Washington, where she had a much better chance of finding a job that she did in Bloomington. I thought it was good for the kids to get out of—by that time, they were, what, in sixth grade and fourth grade, and we thought it was good for them to get out of small town in rural Indiana and get into a more diverse urban environment. But we did the best we could on schools for them by going to Montgomery County in Maryland, which had at the time the best of the public school systems. We couldn’t possibly afford, on the salary of the Smithsonian, a private school. So we put them in public school. We found a house, which we eventually bought, and so we had a house by the time we were moving. It was fairly complicated, as all these moves are, and got everything out of Indiana and sold that house to a colleague and moved. And I began to learn about the record industry.

Right. Well, this is interesting thing. This is where my questioning will go.

Okay.

Because now you’re really in a crossroads of some really diverse worlds, the archiving world, which you have experience with now, and certainly the music world, as well as now you’re in a big institution where you have a lot of essentially academic sorts of interests, but the music business, on the other hand, is not any one of these things. Even though Folkways was not designed to sell records and to be in that sense commercial, it’s a business. It’s not something happening, say, in some sort of institution or on a campus somewhere for academic reasons. And here you are already in at the beginning of this at the Grammies and going to the parties and experiencing, I’m sure meeting some illustrious music figures who were involved in this benefit concert, for example. It’s hard for me to imagine the intersection of these influences and how one would begin to broach that, so what was your thinking and what were specifically the expectations of having Folkways now be associated with the Smithsonian since—I mean, how much was it still a working, functioning record label and how much of it was in a sense a purely archival sort of an entity?

Figuring out how to run a record label and figuring out what Folkways should do as it moved into a national institution, that was the biggest challenge of the first few years, and I had a couple of advantages at the Smithsonian. One was that Ralph decided he would get an appointment for me that had two parts, one as director of Folkways, and one as curator of the Folkways collection. Curators are scholars, but they aren’t allowed to handle money. Directors are typically not scholars, but they are money handlers and organizers. So I had both titles superimposed, and that gave me a very interesting—in the Smithsonian there were very, very few other people who had that sort of two-sided appointment and—

Well, it’s a pretty unique thing to have.

It was pretty unique, and it was especially then when the Smithsonian was not at all entrepreneurial. It was really unique. So I got that, and then I was told by Ralph and my immediate supervisor, who was Richard Kurin, who had been a graduate student at UCLA (sic) with me way back, so I knew my boss pretty well, and we were both anthropologists, Richard said, “You can do anything you want with Folkways, just don’t lose money.” Oh, I figured, “Wow. Don’t lose money.” So I thought that’s a really interesting—I mean, that did mean no one was going to get in my way editorially, and they never did. No one at the Smithsonian ever did, and Ralph was running interference until he died on that sort of thing. I felt sort of—if you’re sort of a football fan—everybody cleared the field, all I had to do was toss the ball. It was really very simple, because everybody was fighting all the battles that I didn’t have to fight. But then, of course, how do you run a record company? The Smithsonian had another record recording organization as part of the Smithsonian Press. It was called the Smithsonian Collection of Recordings, and it licensed out recordings from large companies and put out boxed sets, gorgeous boxed sets.

Right. That’s right.

I went and had lunch with them sort of immediately, as soon as I got there, and they said, “Well, basically you can only afford to put out boxes. You can’t do individual recordings,” and they looked at the whole Folkways collection and said, “Well, maybe there were three boxed sets in it, but otherwise there’s nothing commercially viable there.”

So I thought, well, this is not going to work. Actually, before, even when I was still at Indiana, I’d also gotten a contract from the Smithsonian to have the records evaluated, and so I sent batches out to scholars and paid them $5 each to listen to a recording and fill out a form and send it back to me. So the questions were about is the music any good, are the notes any good, you know, is the music good, are the notes good, is the selection good, is the package good, what are the strengths and weaknesses of it. We had like hundreds of those, so I actually had better control over how it was perceived in 1988 as any—much better control than anybody else had.

Interesting.

So I had an idea of where the strengths and weaknesses of the collection were, and then I went out on the road. I said, I’m an anthropologist. I ask questions, and I figure out what the systems are, so that’s what I did. I visited Rounder Records. I visited Flying Fish Records. I visited Alkazar Records in Vermont. Each one gave me a whole different set of perspectives on the business. Ralph had convinced a print publisher to take over the distribution of Folkways, and they really didn’t know anything about recordings. I think they were trying to get into the recording business. It looked to Ralph as though they were hoping one of the children would take over the recording part, but that particular child went off and decided to run airports instead. So that didn’t work, and so they were stuck distributing Folkways and not knowing much about it. But it did have a distributor, it was selling records, it was repressing as things ran out, and it was only on LP but it was at least a children’s distributor, so it did have some idea of how to distribute. So it was a going company. It wasn’t a very happy going company, and they raised the price of records of LPs of $9 and $12, and basically the children’s artists were furious, because they were getting dropped by their catalogs.

I spent the first two years basically ruing the day I ever went to the Smithsonian to run a record company. It was really hard. There were a lot of different things in play, but I did figure out what I wanted to do, and I basically had three objectives. I even jotted them down. Let’s see. I had three objectives. One was I thought that Folkways at the Smithsonian had to be run differently than it had been as a private company. I mean, Moses Ash as a private individual was running a company, and he had a level of—he could do things that the Smithsonian could never do. I’m convinced that unless you run Folkways, you have no idea of what the label is. To folk music enthusiasts, it’s a great folk music label. To electronic music enthusiasts, it has John Cage on it and a whole bunch of electronic music. To people who are interested in poetry, it has amazing collection of spoken work, hundreds and hundreds of spoken-word albums. To ethnomusicologists, it’s a world music label. And to teachers, it’s a children’s music label. And to preschool teachers, it’s a preschool children. No one sees all the other parts, because each one is so huge and in a sense so independent. Ash basically supported his whole label on children’s music. Six of the top ten albums, I think, were children’s music albums. Very often a small independent label will have one artist that basically supports it for a long time, and Rounder had had George Thorogood or something like that. For Folkways it was Ella Jenkins and Pete. Well, first it was Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly and Pete Seeger. Then Ella Jenkins came along as a children’s artist, and she just has sold for decades and decades, and she’s celebrating her seventieth birthday now. So it was supported by children’s music, but it was famous for its other things, and that was a really odd situation. It seemed to me that Folkways was fairly famous within the family and also elsewhere for not paying royalties.

Like so many other record companies. [laughs]

Like so many other record companies. Moses Ash had contracts. I mean, unlike a lot of other record companies, he was extremely systematic with contracts. Then they were draconian. You gave all your rights to the Smithsonian (sic). It was this one-page contract in which you basically gave away all rights in return for a royalty which he often didn’t pay. It seemed to me that we really needed to—if the Smithsonian was going to have it at the (sic) place that respects artists, we should actually be paying the artist. So I said one of the things we had to do was we had to change the way artists were being treated. Another thing I wanted to do is it had to be moved from one format to another. It was an LP label when I took over, and LPs were being rapidly replaced in popularity by cassettes, which didn’t sound as good necessarily, but they were much easier to play and could play in cars and things like that. Just about 1988 when I took over, the CD was coming along, and the CD was becoming more popular. And it seemed to me that we needed to be moving those formats. Ash had been really lucky in his whole career, in that he started Folkways in ’48, ’47 when the LP record was invented, and he dropped it just about the time the LP record was in decadence. So once he pressed something, he never had to change the format. He just kept making more, or never making more. He’d sell the same record he made in 1950 if it hadn’t sold out.

I was faced with not being able to sell the same record anymore. People didn’t want LPs anymore. That’s why I had to invest as much money as I could in changing formats, and the trouble with changing formats is the change to a cassette meant that you had very little space for all those wonderful liner notes that Folkways had. And change to a CD you had a bit more space, but still you could only fit twenty-four pages, sometimes thirty-two into one of those CD boxes, and they were pretty unforgiving.

Right.

You had to reformat everything in order to sell. So it was a huge project, and I eventually dropped the first distributor we had and moved to work with Rounder Records, because I thought they had a whole lot more experience with it. They had their own in-house design. In return for a percentage of the sales, and I had someone working up there, paid by us but working up there, to push the projects along. We basically started with a series of releases that we thought would bring enough money to not just pay for themselves, but actually pay for doing more. So we made our first CDs, and first we sold off the LPs, 40,000 LPs, great sales. People kept on telling me, “Oh, there’s great sales on Folkways Records at my local stores.” I said, “That’s right. Buy all you want, because we’re not making more.” The final consignment of 25,000 of everything else that was left, all the language tapes and things on how to speak Chinese and things like that went to Tower Records for the price of shipment, and they were selling them for 25 cents each or something like that. From the money we got from that, then I was able to start making more LPs (sic).

Now that left the question, how are we keeping it all available to the world, because the promise was that we would not just take the label and put out a few CDs from it, we would actually keep it all available. So I decided the only way we could do that was to make very small batches, because I had the sales figures for four years before I took over, and probably a third of the titles had not sold a single copy in four years.

Wow.

So there’s no point in spending all the money to make five hundred CDs on something that wasn’t going to sell, hadn’t sold any copies in four years, and probably wouldn’t necessarily sell any the next four. So I decided to start an in-house mail order operation for the things that were not yet released on commercial distribution, so they would be available, but we wouldn’t necessarily be trying to get them into stores. We’d be selling them directly, and we’d be basically making them on demand. So if somebody wanted a copy of the Grand Prix race at Watkins Glen in 1956, which is an amazing set of sounds if you like old cars, if you like sort of speed cars and the sound of amazing mufflers and things, tailpipes, if you wanted it, we would make four copies. We’d transfer the original master into cassettes, make four copies, send you one, and keep the other three in the box for the next three people who might never come. The advantage of that was we also didn’t pay any money out to anybody else. We got the full price. When we used to sell recordings, we would sell to a distributor for about $6, and the distributor would sell to the record store for about 9.25, and the record store would sell it to you for anywhere between 15 and 20, whatever the market would bear. And since they weren’t selling too many of ours, they’d put the price pretty high. So we would only get $6 on a recording, and that meant it made much more sense to sell it straight out of the mail order for 12 or 10 or whatever it was, because we could then keep it all.

So I finally got the Smithsonian to do that, and I finally got permission to use credit cards for it. And that sort of started up a fairly large mail order business that is still going strong. The mail order business has not failed. The mail order business continues to grow, and as the number of stores that sell recordings declines, it sells a lot of CDs now as well as these specially made ones. I started with cassettes, and then they since moved to CDRs, and you could print them on CDRs just as nicely. Now they have a very nice package for it, but it’s basically the same system where if somebody orders it, they make ten or they make one or however many they want and send them off. That’s the way the entire collection is kept available as a physical product. Also in the first year I was there, I started a cataloging plan for cataloging the Folkways collection that actually had a number for every track instead of a number for every album, because it seemed to me eventually we were going to be able to want to identify and sell individual tracks as it’s now been consecrated by iTunes and every other place now. Albums are now gone. They weren’t gone when I was there, but it seemed to me we had to come up with a system that would allow us to move from albums to tracks, and so you start with cataloging, basically. And that was the archivist part of me. If you have no way of identifying it, then you have no way of actually doing it. So we started the cataloging system with one that I thought would eventually lead to our being able to move and sell them another way.

I was really interested in different ways to sell the project and different ways to publicize it. The biggest problem at that time that anybody faces in the music business is distribution. How do you get the material out to where people can find it?

Right.

And if you’re a large label working in the old days, and one of the major labels, they basically determined if you would get it there, and they would decide to promote your certain album, and they would make the stores take it. They would have to take a certain number.

Or not. [laughs]

And they could sell or send them back later, but they didn’t take that one, they wouldn’t get the other ones that were selling. So they had a lot of power. The independent labels, the small labels really didn’t have much power in the game, and it was hard to get stores to take it. If they took it, they could send it back, and they certainly didn’t want to take a lot of product they couldn’t sell. They had to be able to sell a certain amount per square foot to pay off their rent, the monthly rent. So they were only interested in the top-selling ones, and that’s sort of hard for a record label, and a small label that doesn’t have top—it’s top-selling list selling ten thousand and not a million. It’s a big difference.

So I worked hard trying to think of ways to market things, and I did an exhibit at the Children’s Museum in Boston, which every bathroom was wired for sound, and each one was playing a different Folkways record in it for children, and with a sign saying one was playing Swedish fiddle music, had a picture of an old man teaching his grandson how to play the violin, play the fiddle, and it said, “In Finland (sic), all young children know how to play the fiddle and play dance music with their grandparents.” Then it would say, “If you want to hear another kind of music, play in another bathroom.” So the idea was the kids would run from bathroom to bathroom, and each one, of course, was promoting an album in the shop. I did a lot of sort of schemes like that. “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?” came out about that time. It was a game in which a player would chase a spy around the world. On the first CD-ROM version, you’re chasing a spy. As it’s loading, you’re leaving and chasing the spy around the world and having to go to different countries and you’ve made a decision, the computer has to reload sort of how that decision fits in what you’re going to go to, played the Folkways track while you’re doing that of the music of the country you’re going to. That was also a nice way of sort getting the music into places that people wouldn’t normally encounter it. It seemed to me if you were going to hook people on sound, you’ve got to hook them on sound not in a record store, but you’ve got to hook them on sound somewhere else, radio shows or games or museums or any kinds of places. And that’s what I spent a lot of my time doing on Folkways was sort of being a salesperson, sort of a market—

Yes, trying to reach your market.

Trying to reach the marketing, trying to get directly to the market. And it seemed to me that technology could help. So I was working with Panasonic Records. I was working with Panasonic, large digital jukeboxes of video discs. They were going [unclear]. I was working on a system with them that would be a 900-number system. I don’t know, you’re probably too young to remember 900 numbers, but they were the pornographic numbers. Before we had the Internet, you could get your pornography by dialing 900-something-something, and pay $1.45 or $1.50 a minute and have a conversation with whatever [unclear].

Right, I do remember that. [laughs]

So it seemed to me that you could use the same number to actually record on your answering machine a Folkways Record. So I had this idea that for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you could dial in, dial our unique identifier for each one of the tracks, this recorded onto your answering machine, and then be able to learn it and play it and sing it that night. If you’d forgotten the words to a song, dial Folkways. And we could get $1.45 a minute. I was just having these visions of an album with forty minutes of music is $60 or something like that. It seemed like a great idea to me, and so I was very busily pursuing it. When the Internet moved from being sort of a DOS system to actual being able to transmit media on it, I gave up. I said, “This is where the future is.” And we started to move cataloging to the Internet, and then eventually the whole collection is available on the Internet. That’s good. I embraced it immediately, as I think a number of independent labels did, because major music industry owned pressing plants that were threatened. It owned distribution systems. The major labels were deeply involved in parts of the music industry that the independents weren’t. Independent labels only had master tapes basically and the rights to use them. We pressed our CDs in somebody else’s plants. We pressed our printed places and printed parts on somebody else’s printing presses. So the idea of actually being able to find an audience directly, without having to manufacture and ship a physical product that almost always broke in the process because those boxes for CDs—I don’t know why they couldn’t develop a plastic that didn’t break, but they didn’t want to, obviously.

Money, I’m sure.

So it was massive amount of money were just going in the shipping process of sending things out and having them come back and then repackaging them and sending them back out again. It was obvious. So no one is happier with the Internet as independent labels. What we were not so happy with was the discovery that people wanted to have things for free on it all the time. That wasn’t really anticipated, I didn’t anticipate it, just because we hadn’t been getting music for free before that, except on radio. So it’s taken a while, and I think iTunes really was a marker in making people willing to pay for convenient music. But still, there’s sort of ups and downs with how it’s going to be delivered. But it seems to me that for independent labels like Folkways, it has been tremendous, and Folkways, a good part of its income is now coming from digital media, and another good part of its income is coming from its own mail order for people who still want hard copies, and there just aren’t very many record stores left.

That’s for sure.

So even if you wanted to buy one in a record store, you’d be hard-pressed to find one, and then you’d be hard-pressed to find a Folkways record in it. They’re just not there. They have very small stock. They can’t afford the danger of creating a large inventory.

I was going to ask you what your own feelings were about the decline of the artifact, of the recording.

I’m a great fan of LP records. They are a superb multimedia format. You don’t need any special software to play it. It’s not proprietary software. All you need is a record player, and you can read the text and you can look at the photos, and you’ve got the sound all there in one place. The size of a 12-by-12 gave you a fairly large amount of space for interesting artwork, and Folkways had really interesting artwork. Moses Ash contracted with really interesting artists who did original work for him, and as did others. Artwork on LPs was definitely an art, and there are a number of books now of cover art of different albums of different labels. The other thing was the liner notes. You could put a fair amount of liner notes in there, and you could fit a lot in, photographs and bibliographies and maps and descriptions of every track. Try to move that to a cassette, and it just didn’t work. We had terrible times in transitioning to other formats. So I’m a great fan of the LP. I never had an LP that actually went obsolete on me.

They do take up a lot of space.

They take up a lot of space. I’ve got a whole shelf I’m leaving here. I’ve already given the archives everything I think that’s sort of worth archiving. But I made quite a few different CD-ROM projects that actually are no longer playable on anything at all. They’re totally obsolete, and so you spend immense amounts of time on these projects that then don’t play a year later on anything, or CM or something like that, a very old operation system. And even Microsoft projects that I’ve made don’t play on the current Microsoft. It’s not all compatible and especially if the programmers were feeling a bit adventurous and stepped a little teeny bit out beyond the sort of so-called bluebook. They got a lovely CD until they changed the format and you could move from Windows 98 to whatever the next Windows was.

Right.

So I really miss the LP for that. We were getting better and better sound. We were moving from pressing plant to pressing plant, and we found better and better plants, and they were doing better and better jobs. The sound was getting better, and we were spending a lot of time mastering it. As we remastered, we were trying to get the best possible sound off those old tapes. Mo was also, as an independent businessman, trying to cut his costs as much as possible. He said that he could produce an album for about $400. If he sold four hundred copies of an album, he could break even on it. I was never anywhere near that. I was more like five, eight thousand, somewhere in there. I tried for three.

But in compensation, his pressings weren’t very good necessarily, because dirty equipment and they didn’t clean it often enough or the vinyl wasn’t very good or whatever. So the sound was not what you brought a Folkways record—the quality of sound was not what you bought a Folkways record for. It was really for what was on the record. The quality of the printing on the booklet was not something you bought it for. It often had typos, and it was actually a typewriter and a lithograph or something. But it was what it said. So as we moved into the late twentieth century, we tried to make things look better as well, but we were having to make them look better—I don’t know where I packed. Make them look better on an increasing small scale. Even for the fiftieth anniversary, I made a little magnifying glass that you could use to read the liner notes on Folkways, because you had to.

Wow.

So Folkways sort of grew, and I was pleased. I don’t think we lost money, but we didn’t lose money. The short answer is we didn’t lose money. Not everything worked the way I wanted it to. I was trying to run it outside the Smithsonian, because I thought the Smithsonian’s accounting system was so archaic and so built around federal budgets that it was used to getting allocations and then distributing it, but it wasn’t used to getting money in at all. It was very complicated, and handling money is—you got money, well, you have to account for it in fifteen different ways. If you want to do something quick like make a poster to sell an album, the album’s been out six months by the time you actually get the poster made because of all the processes of doing it.

Interesting.

So I had Rounder manage most of the money for me, and then we would take the percentage back at the end. That worked fairly well until it began to actually be fairly successful, and then it was making so much money out there that the accounting system at the Smithsonian began to look at it and said, “Well, wait. You’re basically running a whole Smithsonian operation outside the Smithsonian. You can’t do that.”

Right.

So we brought it in, but it cost a lot more. We had to hire more accountants and spending—

Interesting.

Everything about money at the Smithsonian has been very tedious and very complicated and very slow, and still is. I mean, anybody who’s involved in trying to do something that’s not standard federal-type things at a federal institution is just always coming up against systems that were put in place for a different kind of operation. So we didn’t lose money. We didn’t make a lot of money. I wasn’t trying to make money. At the end of the year, if there was money, officially one-third of it would go to pay the remaining debt, any remaining debt for the purchase of the label. A third of it would go to the archives to buy tape and supplies for preserving the type of collection, and a third of it would go to the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage for miscellaneous expenses. Some years there was a lot, and some years it was more and some years it was less, but I basically toward the end of the year when you’re seeing how you are, there are always ways where you can spend down your surplus, and I could always print up a whole bunch more CDs that were about to go out of stock or something like that.

Wow. Now, during this period, what was selling? What was making the profit?

Well, Ella Jenkins was outraged by the rise in price, and she thought the Smithsonian really didn’t understand children’s music, so she came to Washington absolutely livid, and she had some reason to be, because Ralph Rinzler, who was the figure behind getting it, he didn’t have children, and he didn’t think much of children’s music particularly, and he left Ella Jenkins off a poster of sort of representative Folkways covers that he’d made. So she came, and she and I got along pretty well, because I’ve worked at summer camps. I’ve sung for kids my whole life, so, you know, there I was. I was a lot younger then, but I’d still spent a lot of my life singing for children. I knew exactly how good she was, and I believed in that part of the collection very strongly. I’d heard it myself. I was moved pretty deeply by Woody Guthrie and Pete when I was five. So I sort of pacified her a little and worked very hard to get her to continue to produce new recordings, and she’s one of the artists that actually stayed with Folkways and that I’ve actually recruited to stay with Folkways, because she was so successful. So I tried to continue the success of the children’s label while that continued to sell. Then we began to reissue on CD some of the great classics of Folkways, Woody Guthrie Sings Folk Songs and Lead Belly’s Last Sessions and Pete Seeger’s Goofing-Off Suite and a whole bunch of other things. I would basically sit down with Rounder or by myself and the other people on the label and make out a plan for the next year that would include some that we thought were certain sellers, would sell a lot, and some that we thought were really good, but wouldn’t necessarily sell a lot but they were really important parts of the collection. We would sort of try to represent the breadth of the collection in a given year. Then there would be a couple slots for festival-related recordings, related to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival that we would then sort of—they were one of the ways the festival would live beyond its own term on the Mall.

Then I usually kept a couple just for my whimsical things, I mean things I really wanted to do regardless, that I just thought might come along. I was trying to do about twenty-five, twenty-four a year, two a month, which was pretty hard, as it turned out. Mo had done an average of fifty a month (sic), or four or five a month, his entire—I mean, if you averaged out his entire year, that was how much he was doing. I mean, forty or fifty a year, just massive production. No, how many? Yes, fifty a year. I was doing half that and really stretching the staff. They were dying at the overwork, they thought. Some of the world music sold reasonably well. I think our biggest seller in the first years was a recording of Tuvan throat singing, which is a remarkable sort of biophonal song that sort of became popular with New Age, and suddenly it was our biggest seller. It was the biggest selling world music record for a really long time. I came along at the right time. I was really fortunate that I was there on the cusp of—at that time the CDs were replacing the LP, because I could get a whole bunch of people who already bought Folkways Records to buy them again. They would buy them again on the CD, and we would try to improve the sound. But that meant that the Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, Seeger things were selling really quite well.

Ella Jenkins was not selling on CD at first. She was really selling on vinyl, and so she could continue to sell. I think we’re still making vinyl of some of her albums because they’re in the catalog. If you’re a schoolteacher and you have a record player, it’s a great deal better than a cassette player, because you can drop the needle exactly on the track you want. Now most schools will have a CD player, and so they’ll be pretty much moved to CDs, but a bunch of people were for a long time buying the LPs in the children’s market and not in the adult market. So we would put out, again, a number of different types of music in a year, and some we thought would sell and didn’t, and some we thought wouldn’t sell and did. You couldn’t really tell, but what I tried to do with each album was highlight the rest of the collection that you could get through mail order. So I was trying to have that. We started the label with the name Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which hadn’t existed before. That was a new label that we established at the Smithsonian when we started to reissue things on CD, because I thought it should be a different name from Folkways, because Folkways had 2,160 titles, 2,159 of which were not yet available on CD, because we only had one. So I thought we should have the Smithsonian Folkways as the front-end commercial label that was out there in the stores and out there being circulated that would then pull along the others by virtue of references to them and use of the full collection. And that’s pretty much what happened.

Okay.

And it didn’t happen perfectly. But we were trying to do our best to sort of do really good late twentieth century really high-quality liner notes, high-quality art, and good documentation, much better than—documentation standards have really changed in the last forty years in ethnomusicology. We expect a lot more, and we get a lot more.

So as we brought out the new label, it was pretty carefully sort of at a fairly high standard, and then we could keep all the other things just with the original notes and then a little disclaimer saying these were what was written at the time.

So other than Ella Jenkins, were you releasing any new editions to the catalog?

Yes, because one of the things I discovered when I took over Folkways that had never entered—I’m an archivist, so as an archivist you don’t necessarily look for artists.

Right, right. Sign people.

When I got to the Smithsonian, there was a letter waiting for me, sent to Ralph Rinzler by the head of Rounder Records, who said that he and his friends in the independent record business were deeply disturbed by the fact the Smithsonian was going to be competing with private industry by releasing albums of music that would take away from their sales, and that if the Smithsonian continued to do that and was going to sort of compete with them, they would start a campaign in Congress against it. That’s a pretty big threat, right?

Yes. [laughs]

So I got there, and I thought, well, this is an interesting problem. I never imagined this particular one. It seemed so the question in Indiana, well, was what’s a relevant archive. The question there was what’s the relevant record label in a national museum. It seemed to me that that was the key question, and maybe that question could be answered in such a way that we actually weren’t considered a threat by Rounder and presumably by the other labels that they were talking to.

It seemed to me the purpose of a record label at the Smithsonian shouldn’t be to find hit artists and sell a lot of copies. I mean, that’s not what the national museum is about. It’s about the Smithsonian was founded by Mr. Smithson who gave a lot of money to the United States to found an institution for the increase and diffusion of knowledge. That was literally a phrase in his letter or his will, I guess. It seemed to me that music also increases and diffuses knowledge, but if you take that as your criterion, it should be something that improves, increases knowledge, then your criterion is not necessarily to find touring artists. So I basically decided at the start I was just going to stop touring artists. I wasn’t going to recruit new ones. If we had them on the books already, I wasn’t going to take them off. I wasn’t going to take them off the label, but I wasn’t going to add new artists. Instead, we were looking to do either anthologies that increase knowledge or new projects in international music that did it. We did a twenty-CD series of music of Indonesia that was a spectacular series of music, and we certainly weren’t competing with anyone for that one. In fact, they weren’t even selling, but they were a spectacular project, great music, and great notes. So I decided that we should be doing something different, and that pretty much once I was hired, I think as soon as they saw the Smithsonian was hiring an ethnomusicologist and not hiring a record industry maven, everybody backed off. I mean, they couldn’t care less.

Interesting.

I later went and had Rounder be my distributor. But I think they saw it as competition, and later I think just going around and being an anthropologist, asking questions, getting them all sort of engaged in the project, engaged in sort of the possibility of the Smithsonian actually doing anything different, and then they all came around pretty nicely. But it did mean I had to think pretty hard at the start about what the role of a label at the Smithsonian should be, and it seemed to me that it should be to increase knowledge, and I thought we should also be relating and collaborating with international partners in a very different way than Folkways had in the past and that ethnomusicology had in the past. In the old days, ethnomusicologists used to go to other places, make recordings, bring them back, produce them, and forget about the people they’d ever worked with, who often never saw a copy of the recording, so they couldn’t play them or they never got them. It seemed to me we should be doing something different, and so I wanted to collaborate directly with institutions in other countries that were producing albums that included their own scholarship, that it wasn’t an American scholarship always about the music. It could be a scholarship of a Peruvian scholarship about Peruvian music, a Brazilian scholarship about Brazilian music, and have the artists themselves be able to write liner notes. So I really wanted to change the voice and the perspective on things. I was able to do that to a degree, though quite not the way I imagined. The first big international partner turned out to be the JVC software division in Japan that came to us with a proposal to put out an English-language edition of a—how many? Sixty disks, sixty-CD set, sixty-VHS set, I believe it was. Let’s see. Thirty or sixty. Let’s say thirty just to be safe. I usually have it on the shelf and I can tell. It’s endless numbers of VHS tapes of music from all around the world except for Japan. And a set of booklets, which were basically with the liner notes, but they were separate.

I thought that was a really neat idea, because one of the challenges for ethnomusicology teaching is that actually you can teach it better with video, and you can actually listen to it better. You can actually understand what the music is like if you actually see people playing it. You see the instruments. You see how they move their bodies to make it. You see the dance that it’s associated with. I was always a great believer in video. So I agreed. I agreed to do that. That was one of the earlier partnerships. I flew to Japan a few times, set up an advisory board. The Smithsonian would never start something without an advisory board. If it’s this big, you probably want to set up an advisory board. That way it doesn’t come back to bite you later. So you get good people on it, and being—I think I was by then president of the Society for Ethnomusicology. I knew a lot of people in the field, and it was pretty easy to get people to join a board associated with the Smithsonian and doing something interesting like a video anthology. So we all met in Hawaii and had a nice board meeting, went and divided up the work and produced an English-language version. Now, I knew that there were problems with the videos and I knew there were problems with the notes, but I figured that it was better to put it out and let people criticize it and do better than not to do it at all. And, yes, I mean, it sold a number of copies. It was not a great commercial success, because, actually, you probably listen to a whole lot more music than you watch, right?

Yes.

In Japan, interestingly enough, at the time, the figures were going that people were actually watching more music than they were listening to. I don’t know what they were doing. I mean, sitting at home and watching, or able to watch [unclear]. Whatever it was, there was a clear movement toward watching more and more music, and it didn’t seem to me that was going to work in the United States. I like to listen to music when I’m doing the dishes and cleaning the house and moving around, and watching is not in it. But for teaching, ethnomusicology, it is. It really is, and for teaching about music of the world and then a whole bunch of other things, video is better. So we worked with the JVC corporation on a number of large projects that they paid for. OPM is sort of the Smithsonian’s watchword. It means other people’s money. Since the Smithsonian doesn’t have a lot of money, and Folkways didn’t, all the money I got was by making new CDs, and that wasn’t going to be enough to do major projects, was to partner with other people that had money, and then we would put it out together jointly or with our name on it. So the JVC one was one. We also collaborated with the Berlin Ethnomusicological Center (sic) [IITM-Berlin] to produce its series of recordings and with a Peruvian Center for the Study of Ethnomusicology Archive and produced something, some eight volumes of their recordings. And we collaborated with the Indonesian Performing Arts Society to produce a twenty-CD set of Indonesian recordings, funded largely by the Ford Foundation as a large project that involved not just making recordings, not just making CDs, but making a large collection of recordings that would then be deposited in Indonesia as an archival collection and also training Indonesians in method of field collection. So that was sort of a professionalization for the people doing it.

Right.

That’s a very nice large project. The only problem was it never sold any copies, I mean, after the first ones. Volume 17 was a really hard sell. I mean, by the time you got sixteen volumes, what do you say about the new volume? The marketing people were going crazy, “What am I supposed to do with this?”

Interesting.

I said, “Well, you can’t do a whole lot.” But even the worst-selling album, I always consoled myself with, sold more copies than all of my books together.

Wow. [laughs]

So that the number of people that I was reaching as a scholar through the recordings was vastly larger than the number of people that my words ever reached and my actions ever reached as an author of books. And I don’t think that many people read the articles either. So one of the great satisfactions for a scholar of running something like a record label is I was deeply implicated in a whole lot of the projects. I was rewriting the notes, I was editing, I was arguing about sequencing, I was in there doing a whole lot of production work. And it was being heard and read and debated by a whole lot of people. One of the great satisfactions of Folkways was actually to see the projects come out and then have them sort of get out there and have people react to them.

We have books and books—I’m sure we do—a book of clippings. We got a clipping service, did a book of clippings, because it seemed to me that if Congress was ever going to investigate Folkways for anything, our best response had to be that it wasn’t us that thought it was a great label; it was actually a whole bunch of places, including people in their own districts, that thought it was a great label. So we just clipped from everybody, every small-town paper, any interview, and accumulated massive. It would be nine hundred pages one year and four hundred pages the next, sort of depending on what we were releasing. It was really fun and very rewarding as a scholar to actually see that many people engaged with what we were trying to do and engaged with our writing. We had a lot of fan mail too. I mean, the other nice thing is I get fan mail here at UCLA once in a while, but the fan mail for Folkways was different. You get a fan mail from a woman who bought an album of Jamaican Maroon music, who wrote and said, “You know, I bought this album because I’m from the Maroons in Jamaica. You know, I never knew I had culture.”

Wow.

“I never knew I had a tradition. It’s so exciting. Thank you so much for putting out the album.” I got another one from a pastor in a church in—I think it was Sweden, saying, “I was really depressed, and I’d lost my faith. I didn’t know what to do, and I was thinking of killing myself. I bought this album, Wade in the Water, and it’s the most amazing music, and I’m just totally rejuvenated, and I found my life again. I found my faith.” It was a great album of gospel music.

So I sent that particular one around to the staff saying, “Well, look, we save lives in our business. But before you feel too good about it, just remember the people who kill themselves after hearing one of our CDs don’t write.” So you never know how many people killed themselves because they’re so depressed by the music or hated it so much or couldn’t think of anything they could do better or whatever it might be.

Wow.

But the fun thing about Folkways and the fun thing about the Smithsonian is you’re right out there in the public line, and you’re getting nice feedback from the public. You’re getting criticism from the public, you’re getting attacked from various sides. It was going so well, I decided I would start acquiring other record labels. We figured out a system for keeping things available through mail order and then putting some things out on CD. But I thought we could probably take and apply to other independent record labels, and I began to look around for other independent record labels. One came actually sort of over with a colleague in ethnomusicology, a record label named Cook Records, which was a high-end audio [unclear] label in the 1950s by an inventor of audio equipment. He invented actually—what do you call it? They call it binaural recordings—

Oh, yes, binaural, yes.

—which had a forked pickup with two different needles, and it would play two tracks. One track would be the left ear and the right ear. But, anyway, it didn’t quite have the winning system. But it was an early attempt to do stereo.

He put out every album—a lot of his albums had pieces of plastic in them, in the hole, so that it would break the plastic to play it for the first time, so you knew if you had a virgin record, in a sense. You knew if you were playing the record for the first time before any groove had been dug more deeply than it should by the heavy needle or something like that. So it was really high-end audiophile. He pressed his records at his own plant, so he actually had his own plant. His money, I think, was making pressings for other people, but his hobby was his own label. He based his plant in Trinidad for quite a long time and so he had a lot of Calypso recordings released in Trinidad and also on his own label. So I took over his label and discovered that he wasn’t quite as good with contracts as Mo had been. I said, “Where are the contracts?” He said, “Oh, in the bottom filing cabinet over there,” and I never thought to open the filing cabinet before I acquired the collection.

Oh, golly.

I opened the filing cabinet. There was practically nothing there. But it was a great collection, and then we acquired a number of others, Monitor Records. Paradon Records was a famous West Coast label of basically music of struggle and protest and had speeches by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro on it and songs and nueva cancion and songs by rebellious Irish and rebellious Mozambicans and rebellious Vietnamese. Whatever, wherever there was a war and a fight, they had an album for it.

I thought, well, it’s important this be part of the national collection, too, and so I tried to get a really interesting experimental rock label, and for lack of $50,000 I didn’t get it. That’s what happens when you’re so poor, you sort of have to get other people’s money all the time, and I couldn’t get everything I wanted.

Do you remember what that label was?

It was called ESP.

Out of New York.

Out of New York.

Sure. Did a lot of free jazz stuff.

Woodstock was where the guy was living at the time, a lot of free jazz, a lot of really neat free jazz, neat rock, great, great folk. They had the Village Fugs and a whole bunch.

Right.

Folkways had the first Village Fugs album, but actually Mo was so offended by it, he actually gave it back and let ESP have it.

Yes.

But, so, yes, it was a really interesting label. I really wanted it, and they needed money to pay off debts, and so it went for [unclear] generally have lost out in the bidding to somebody else. I could get labels from people who had a sort of a political, ethical vision and also really wanted to keep things available. So as long as people were interested in the label because it was sort of their contribution to the world, then I could convince them to not take money.

But I couldn’t quite convince the head of ESP to do that. He kept on saying, “Well, it’s still coming, and it’s still coming, but maybe it will.” In the end Sony Music is going to be here too. I didn’t realize it was going to be quite so soon, I mean. One label, at least, has given all of its master tapes to the Library of Congress to take care of, and as the business changes, we may be getting major labels at the Smithsonian one of these days, but we don’t have a whole lot of space for that. But I was collecting—it seemed to me that the really interesting thing about American commercial music was that the independent labels have consistently done the most experimental things, and they’ve often broken the ground for music that then becomes popular later. That would be as true of rap music as it is of a whole bunch of others, free jazz.

Right. Punk rock.

They were right there in the forefront, and they’re usually run by idiosyncratic people who really love the music that they’re doing, and they really love the sound, and they really love it. They spend a lot of time working on it, and then when they get older and the thing isn’t popular anymore and they want to unload it, they really want it to be available. So those were the people that I was going after, and I’m happy to say that Folkways continues to acquire new labels long after I’ve left it.

Yes. That’s how punk rock got going.

So punk rock, I mean, almost everything got started in independent labels, and then the major labels said, “Hey, we can make some money here and we can give you more money. Why don’t you come to us?”

Right. It’s hard to know what to do when you’re rebelling and then you become successful. [laughs]

Sell out. Sell out.

Exactly.

The accusation of being a sellout has sort of followed almost every kind of music over the years.

Yes, it’s a dilemma.

It’s true of folk music, and it’s true of others. I was reading something about why Pete Seeger formed The Weavers, which was he formed The Weavers on purpose to be a popular group. And according to something I was reading, I think it was in his own memoirs, but I hadn’t seen it before, he said that he was trying to get the people’s songs that he was playing with earlier to be used by a union organization for its big meeting, for its big convention, and he overheard one of the people, one of the union organizers talking to others saying, “Now, I really have to have a group that’s popular with the rank and file. I can’t bring these guys in. Only a few people like them. They’ve never heard of them before. They’re not going to care anything about this group. I want somebody that everybody recognizes.” So Pete says, “Aha. We need to be famous. There’s a reason to sort of be a sellout. In a sense, you sell out in order to get into houses.

To have the door open.

Get the door open. So that’s why he went into The Weavers, which he then left in an argument, apparently in part over their doing an advertisement for smoking. He just didn’t believe in smoking and didn’t think The Weavers should be part of it, and but also his own private career was taking off as the black list loosened a bit. But, anyway, selling out is a real problem. Moving from small labels to big labels happens a lot. Folkways was interesting in it has Lucinda Williams first two albums. Lucinda Williams then became very popular and went to major labels and then dropped off the major labels and went to other independent labels. It has the last albums of Big Bill Broonzy, who had been extremely popular as sort of a rhythm and blues musician and then later became popular as a folk artist. But that was towards the end of his career, and that end is on Folkways. So Folkways, interestingly, has either artists on their way up and then they move out, or as they’ve lost their audiences and are finding a new audience with folk or somebody who’s willing to put out their album for really little and pay them very little if anything, it will get out there.

So how are we doing here?

Well, it’s about time to stop, probably.

Yes. So we didn’t finish, but we’ll—

We didn’t finish. I’ll have to see you in May.

In May. Okay.

But I think we can finish. I assume we can finish in May.

Okay.

But I hope you don’t mind. I think the Folkways part can’t be told by anybody else, and so I should probably tell it.

No, I don’t want it—

And you’re right there with me on that, and how do you do it. The challenge of running a record label at a national institution was exhilarating on the one hand, and also it did have its moments. After we acquired Paradon, the Foreign Relations Committee suddenly called the Smithsonian.

Oh, okay.

I was at a conference.

I wondered about that. [laughs]

Jesse Helms was chairing it at the time.

Oh, lovely.

And Jesse Helms’ assistant called over and said, “What is the Smithsonian doing selling the speeches of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro and selling it to the enemy and sending royalties to support the revolution in Cuba? Don’t you know that’s against the law?” Well, the Smithsonian, of course, didn’t know anything about any of that, and so they called me, found me, and pulled me out of a conference paper in Bloomington, Indiana, and said, “Got to have an answer. I need an answer now. What are we going to say?” I said, “Well, give me a couple of hours, and I’ll tell you what you can say.”

Wow.

I called our mail order business, and we hadn’t sold a single copy yet. I think the whole story was sort of it came out of a story in the Miami Herald, which then sent a whole bunch of angry Cubans up from writing it to the Foreign Relations Committee about this. I’d already set up a whole royalty system that was actually not paying any royalties to Cuba. It was paying it to a bank account that we would then use if Cuban scholars came to the United States, we could help them with some their expenses in the country. So I already knew more than to send any money directly to Cuba at that point. But then not having sold any records was the crowning thing, so when the Miami Herald finally called and was interviewing me on this thing, I said, “Buy all you want. We’ll make more. The Smithsonian has the artifacts from the North and the Civil War. We have the artifacts from the South and the Civil War. We don’t throw them out just because one side lost or another side won, and the same thing goes for music. We have those people who sang for losing causes and people who sing for winning causes, and that’s our job. So buy all you want. We’ll make more.” And I didn’t lose my job, surprisingly.

Wow. Excellent.

And there occasionally times when it was exhilarating, and I figured I’d just act the way I thought was right, and I could probably find another job later if it didn’t work out.

Yes.

I gave up tenure to go to the Smithsonian. There’s no tenure at the Smithsonian, especially when you’re running a record label.

Right.

So it was a very different kind of position. On the other hand, I had a lot of help. I had tremendous support from Ralph Rinzler. I had tremendous support from my former colleague in graduate school, Richard Kurin. I had some great students. As Folkways developed, and we had to move it in-house instead of running it all out through the other companies, out through Rounder and things, I would keep on getting interns and giving them jobs. Then they would have an assistant who was an intern, and then suddenly their job would divide. So I was constantly getting really good young people who were just tremendously enthusiastic coming straight out of college never having worked in the music industry before. It meant that we made some mistakes. On the other hand, it also meant that I could afford to hire them and we could keep on growing. So I grew from having one assistant to having seven or eight and plus the mail order operation of five or six just as we had to take on more and more responsibilities. It was fun. I had a really good time doing that. It got a little frustrating after it was all set up. After the system was set up and we were just running it, then it became more like work because then I was sort of doing the same thing over and over again. I was finding that people still can’t write liner notes. Good scholars still can’t write short liner notes. Or I’d find out that, no, we missed a deadline again because somebody didn’t do something, so there was just—

Yes, all those things you can’t control.

Things you can’t control, and when you can’t control them year after year—when you can’t control them once, then you figure out how to solve it. But if you tried to solve it and you still can’t control it, then you think, well, maybe I should be doing something else, and that was how I ended up out here actually.

I see.

Basically, I thought I’d probably done what I thought needed to be done with Folkways, as I had at Indiana. I’d moved it to a new place, got it sort of to a new total level of operations. About Folkways, I’ve done everything I wanted to do. It’s ready. So I went there, said when I can go back to Rio de Janeiro and listen to music on the beach for Folkways, I’m done. Pretty much that was true by the time I left. You could listen to anything you want on Folkways. Now, it wasn’t quite up and running yet, but it was planned and on its way. And I was having frustrating times with the bureaucracy and things like that, so I thought, I mean, maybe it’s time to move on and let somebody else take it over. They could bring a new vision to it, see it as it was then, and sort of move it from there to some other direction. And that’s what I did.

Okay.

And that comes next time.

We’ll talk about your coming here to UCLA, which you’re now leaving. [laughs]

That’s right. Yes. I was at the Smithsonian twelve years, and I’ve been at UCLA 11.6 years, so about the same amount of time—

Oh, interesting.

—and done very different things here. But the Folkways years certainly taught me a lot, and I certainly had a blast doing it.

Yes. And you keep following in the footsteps of your grandfather.

That one, yes. There I was in Washington working for in the government, just the way Grandfather Charles had, and I was in Washington and moved out to UCLA, pretty much following in his footsteps too.

Wow. Amazing.

But doing, again, something a bit different.

Yes, and we’ll talk about it in May.

See you in May.

Thank you for this. [End of March 21, 2012 interview]

Today is May 18, 2012. This Alex Cline interviewing Professor Anthony Seeger in a makeshift office here at the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA from where he, as we heard in the last session, not long ago officially retired. But that doesn’t mean, as we just determined before we began this session, that he’s just sitting around watching TV now. He’s still very busy. And we’re going to hear about today in particular his time spent here at the Department of Ethnomusicology at UCLA, how he got here. Consequently, my first question for you this morning is you talked a little bit last time about the frustration that was starting to set in at Folkways and at the Smithsonian, and maybe you can, if you would, elucidate a little bit about what was motivating you to feel that it was time for you to move on from that job, turn it over to someone else, who that person was, and how you got wind of the offer here at UCLA.

How do you know when you’ve been at a place long enough? I’ve moved from job to job during my career, as opposed to some people who go to a place—especially professors tend to often go to a university and stay there for their whole career. When I went to the Smithsonian, I went because of my loyalty to Folkways and also certain family pressure and other people’s pressures, but also because I really liked what the label was all about and thought that I had a particular biographical and also academic training that would be very useful and probably make me better able to do that job than a whole lot of other people. When I got there, there were some obvious things that needed to be done, and it needed to be brought into the Smithsonian; it needed to be distributed in a new way; it needed to pay royalties to the artists. There are a whole bunch of things that as it moved from one kind of sort of institutional setting to another really had to change.

It seemed to me that I thought I could do it in six years, because I’d changed the Archives for Traditional Music pretty rapidly in six years, and I’d spent seven years in Brazil, and so I thought, well, I seem to be on a six-year cycle. It took me almost twelve to do it at Folkways. It just took longer to get Folkways up and running again and to sort of do the things I thought were obviously needed to be done in order to make it work at the Smithsonian. In the process, I learned a lot about the record industry. It was really fascinating. At the beginning, it’s always interesting because you’re learning everything for the first time. After a few years, then they begin to have to do some things over and over again that you already learned how to do, and they’re just boring, and you hope you can either hire people to do that or get around the whole way of doing it altogether. At the Smithsonian that wasn’t possible, and so there was a slow accretion of paperwork as we began to sell more and, in a sense, make more. The tracking of money and the spending of money through the Smithsonian, which even though it’s an independent trust-fund organization runs on a federal system, even for the nonfederal money it meant that it was extraordinarily hard to get money moving and to hire people quickly and to get rid of them at all, and it was a very hard place to run a record company. I first tried to run it outside the Smithsonian and managed for about five or six years, and then it had to come in because it was getting too big. Then it got more boring, I thought, and there were a lot of things that were more boring. Some of my esteemed colleagues can’t seem to write short liner notes.

Oh, yes.

And I got tired of the same problems with editing all the time. And I thought after about ten years that I had pretty much accomplished what I knew had to be done when I got there. A whole bunch of changes had been made. The thing was up and running. It was making money in the sense that it was making all of the expenses and giving a little at the end of the year to be divided between the archive, future plans for the label, and also the Center for Folk Life and Cultural Heritage. That was the arrangement. At that point, I thought it was probably a good time to leave. I was also becoming, it seemed to me, overly identified with the label by a whole lot of people, partly because when you’re the director, you’re always the person on call. Partly because I’m a bit of a showman anyway, so I was always on call and on the radio and in people’s minds. So it seemed to me that was precisely the danger that any organization runs, which is sometimes called the founders syndrome, which is if someone who establishes something stays too long, they become identified with the institution or the organization they’ve been working in, and they also identify themselves with it, and it’s bad for both parties. It can lead to people not leaving in the right time. It can lead to people taking criticism personally instead of institutionally.

Right, right.

So having been warned about that by my Uncle Pete, who is always very concerned about institutional processes and development and trying to find younger generations to take over his various projects, I thought, “Well, yes, it’s probably time, and it’s probably good to pass it on.”

Over the years I’d been offered several endowed chairs, sort of by colleagues who had openings for new chairs. Probably the most surprising was one from Illinois, which the university had created a system to attract new talent by which they asked departments to nominate people, but they couldn’t tell the people they were nominating that they were nominating them to be invited as a distinguished professor, therefore they couldn’t find out if they wanted to be a distinguished professor. Then if the person didn’t want to come, they lost that option completely.

Wow.

So it was strange. And I did get the invitation. It was somewhat garbled in its delivery, but it came at the wrong time. I really hadn’t come to the point where I thought I had finished with Folkways. An offer from Texas and a possibility from the University of Maryland also were very flattering but at the wrong time. So in 1999 I was invited to a conference out here at UCLA organized by Professor Steven Loza, who is a professor here, and he’s a specialist in the Chicano music, but he’s a specialist really that has drawn here students and postdocs and others interested in the music of the Americas, especially the Latin America and Spanish-speaking America, and he organized one on globalization and music in Latin America. He invited me out for it. I thought about it, and I wrote a paper that I sort of liked and came out here. He’d brought together a whole bunch of old friends of mine that were coming up from Latin America, and some people I’d never met before, but I knew most of the people here, and it was a wonderful conference. There was music and there was lots of talk, and there was food and there were lots of enthusiastic students. I met a whole bunch of younger new graduate students who were very excited about what they were doing. And I had a really good time, and I thought, well, gee, that wouldn’t be so bad. UCLA’s really hopping these days.

On the day after the conference, the two old friends who were Dan Neuman and Tim Rice, who I’d known in the Society of Ethnomusicology for many years, Dan was then dean of the College of Arts and Architecture, and Tim Rice was the chair of the department. They said, “Why don’t we go have brunch together after the conference is over.” So after the conference is over, we went, we’re having a nice brunch over there on the beach in Santa Monica, on a gorgeous day. The beach was beautiful. They said, “Well, if you allow us to try to recruit you, you won’t have to pay for breakfast. We’ll call it a recruitment.” I said, “Oh, well, sure. Why not? You can try, and then I’ll get a free breakfast anyway.” So they told me that there actually was a search in progress, that I was sort of aware of, for a senior faculty member. And they also told me that the person that the faculty had agreed to make the offer to had decided to pull out and decided not to come after talking about it for a while, after negotiating with them for a while. So what they had was an open search for a senior professor that had failed but was still open, and they wondered if I would be interested in applying for it. So I did. I applied within a week, because it was open.

Wow.

I mean, it was open. I simply hadn’t turned in my papers before, and it was open. So the department had already evaluated its short list, and I think then they just sort of added my name to the pool. They didn’t put it on the short list. And an offer came through from the department fairly quickly after that, because the whole process was under way. So that was in, I think, 1999, and I asked for time to come here because I said, “I can’t just drop Folkways. You can’t drop a business in the middle of it when you have no plan for a successor or nobody—and it takes a long time before anybody at the Smithsonian was going to come. I need a year.” And they gave it to me. That wasn’t the problem. I told the Smithsonian immediately. I said this wasn’t a question of negotiating a better salary. I was going to leave. I’d had a wonderful time and I’d had a great time and put in a lot of work, and I thought it was time to move on to get back to teaching since I had been a full professor before I went there and after I came back. I wanted to go back to it. The particular plan I had for teaching out here was since I was going to be commuting from the East Coast to come out here—basically my wife had told me early on that she didn’t want to leave. Her family had just entered a retirement home nearby, and so she didn’t want to take go; they needed her. And she had a job at a college that was a great books curriculum with five hundred students maximum and everything in seminars, and there’s nothing out here going to be like it. Even if a job were made available to her in some form or another at UCLA, it wasn’t the kind of place she wanted to teach.

So we talked it over, and I said, “Well, if it’s all right with you, we’ll try it, and if it doesn’t work for either of us, I’ll quit and find another job.” So we agreed, and I took the job, but I took it with the condition that I do all of my teaching in winter and spring quarter and keep the fall quarter for travel, going to conferences. I’d be here for [unclear] quarters made sense. I always came at the beginning and at the end to start my students off and to finish them up, sometimes came out in the middle as well. The rest of the time I was on the road going to conferences and sometimes at home but not very often. That turned out to work out fine, so UCLA not only made me an offer, but they accepted negotiations very well, since I had such a nice full-time job already, I didn’t really have to come. That’s a nice position to be negotiating from. When I’m telling my students about professional development, that’s one of the points I make. I say, “Don’t quit your job before you’ve got the next one, and make them know you don’t have to quit.”

[laughs] Right.

There were a number of reasons to want to come here, in addition to, of course, the weather and the good time I had at the conference. One is that this is the only Department of Ethnomusicology that’s really a standalone department.

Yes, right.

You know, you’re going to say, “Well, what does that mean?” 00:12:36 Well, that means in a university structure that it has its own budget and it has the autonomy to decide what faculty it wants and how to promote them and what graduate students it wishes to invite to be part of the department and how to allocate the money that is available for graduate students, what the curriculum for the programs should be like. Also it has, in this case and in any case where you have a whole department, it has enough people in it to actually have a group of substantial colleagues to talk to in the field. Most ethnomusicology programs that are part of larger departments of music or schools of music had reported to me for many years, bitterly in many cases, that because there weren’t very many of them they were always being outvoted by the larger number of often performing musicians or the music department, the performers part of it, the performance or composition or theory part of it and sometimes by the musicologists. They felt that they weren’t able to attract the students they wanted because they couldn’t get the funding for it, or they weren’t on the list made of the top students. If theirs was third, they wouldn’t get any money, even though it was their first choice. And, similarly, they couldn’t hire the people they wanted. I didn’t think I’d ever be hired by a music department anyway. My degree is in anthropology, and my writing is very anthropological.

Right.

So I’m not surprised, but I had been made offers by a couple of departments, so I knew I might be.

But this one, the advantage of a standalone department was clear in the possibilities that it offered for really creating a kind of ethnomusicology and a kind of approach to the study of music that was quite distinct and wasn’t dependent on winning the agreement of colleagues who weren’t trained in the discipline. So that was the real attraction for coming here. There’s a famous statement. In many places if you’re invited to give a piano recital, you have to go and build the piano before you can play it. In the case of UCLA, invited to teach ethnomusicology at UCLA, I could just come here and start teaching. I didn’t have to explain to anybody what ethnomusicology was, why it was valuable, find funding for it, target a library collection for it, and all those things you would have to do in most places didn’t have a strong program.

Right.

The other reason to come was when you’re senior and people want to invite you somewhere and offer you a decent salary, enough to get you away from wherever you are, the offer also comes with a requirement that you be chair, that you be an administrator.

Right.

And I was really not keen on being chair of any place, didn’t matter where, because I was coming out of twelve years of heavy administrative work, and I figured if I’d wanted to stay in administrative work, I could stay at the Smithsonian and I’d just do fine. So I was really interested in an offer that came without a simultaneous offer of administration. I don’t mind administration, but I’ve done my fair share in my career and I’ve been chair of a department.

It didn’t involve that here because Tim Rice was chair, and he was very happy being chair, and there was no talk about my needing to be chair or ever being chair or being dean or anything else. So I said, “Well, that sounds really nice.” Those are really the reasons I came, was because of the size and pre-establishment of the department and the type of offer that was made that didn’t involve what I need in terms of teaching and time for research and lecturing and traveling to conferences and also gave me a good structure to work in. There were a couple of other reasons that this place was attractive, but one of the reasons one of the things I was concerned about was, of course, that my Grandfather Charles had been here in the 1960s, and I wasn’t sure they knew that which Seeger they were hiring. So one of my questions in a letter to Tim was, “Are you sure the department knows which Seeger they’re hiring? Because Charles is one person. He’s very famous. He’s done all these things. I’m another, and my background is different. My training is different. I’ll be doing something else.” Because in terms of following in one’s footsteps, after I got back from my first job, I went to Washington, D.C., which is where my grandfather had gone to work in the Roosevelt administration, and I worked in public sector of ethnomusicology and folklore, which is what Charles had done in the 1930s. So then to follow him out to UCLA, where he’d been such a strong part of the founding of this program, was something that was a little daunting, on the one hand. Charles is still a legend here, and you can see his photograph in the cases outside and things like that.

Yes, that’s right. [laughs]

Then I wanted to be sure in my own mind that I wasn’t just coming here because Charles had done it. I wanted to be sure that the destiny is not manifest but actually something you want.

Right.

So I thought about that. And the last thing was that our daughters were both in college. It was the first time I really could easily move. They’d gotten out of high school by then.

Yes. I was wondering about that.

So I think one of the reasons we probably took twelve years to do Folkways, one of the reasons it was convenient to take twelve years is the kids were in elementary and then high school for that whole period.

Right.

But it was really time to leave, and at the Smithsonian they were generally sorry to hear I was leaving, I think, because of the status I brought to the program and the department because of all the work I’d done in it. So they put me in charge of the search committee to find a replacement, and I started to go around and strong-arm people and tell them about what a great job it was. I didn’t say much about the bureaucracy. I tried to get some people to apply and invited everybody to apply. It was widely announced. We had lots of time to advertise it. One of the people that I thought would be very good at the job because he was familiar with Washington, familiar with a lot of the musical traditions in the United States, had a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology, sort of, and was a very genial person who could get along with other people in the department at the Smithsonian was a man named Daniel Sheehy.

Yes.

Now, Dan Sheehy was a student here, and when he was a student here, he studied mariachi music, and he actually took a mariachi program and put it on at Folklife Festival, I think, in 1976, at the first sort of at-large Folklife Festival there, invited by—I believe it was Bess Lomax Hawes, who was in charge of some of the music programming. So he had gone from that to working in the National Endowment for the Arts for many years under Bess Lomax Hawes and later sort of running the section, and he’d been active in the Society for Ethnomusicology and given papers on applied ethnomusicology. He’d produced, I think, a couple of recordings. But he was also extremely well known and recognized in the profession as a whole, and not only in the profession, but by traditional artists all over the country knew him because he’d given grants to support their activities through the NEA. So he was just really widely known through folklore and ethnomusicology. So he seemed like an ideal candidate, and he turned out to be an ideal candidate when he applied. He was the top candidate ultimately for the job. So I convinced him to come, and that reassured me. When I left, a number of my staff decided they would leave at the same time just because they were tired, too, and he came on and did a spectacular job. He was able to confront lots of problems in the changing eras of the Smithsonian, the changing climate of the record industry.

As I was leaving and looking at what was happening with CD sales and the Internet, I thought it’s a good thing I’m going now because whoever’s coming along is going to have to deal with something else, but Folkways at least is strong now and the position is strong, and it seemed to be. And Dan has done a great job in the last—it’s been almost twelve years for him now, too, however, running Folkways, hiring terrific staff and expanding it, building it, and especially building its contributions to publications in music of Latin America and Spanish-speaking peoples of the Americas in general, both in the United States and out. So I was pleased with that transition. I thought Folkways deserved a really strong, imaginative, congenial leader who could get things done within a federal system, which he knew very well. And then I came here.

Now, when you’re coming here, this is the first time you’re really teaching ethnomusicology, is that right, as opposed to anthropology?

Yes. There were a number of big shocks coming here. I mean, big, big changes. I hadn’t taught for twelve years. The students who were coming into my classes as freshmen were in first grade when I last taught a class, and so people were different. And I was also teaching a field I’d never taught full-time before. I’d given courses in ethnomusicology when I was at Indiana and also in Brazil, but it was generally one course a year and never four or five courses a year. So I had to prepare a whole entirely new list of courses, and I also had to think about how you would teach ethnomusicology in the twenty-first century. I also had to figure out what to do in a quarter system. A quarter system is not the semester system. Even courses that I had given once in a fifteen-week semester could never be given in a ten-week quarter. It was a very different kind of approach.

Furthermore, I was coming into a department that had a very definite approach to ethnomusicology, which tended to be, still is, very geographic-based, area-studies-based. People, to a certain extent, are considered specialists in a certain region of the world, and we teach courses related to that region of the world where we do research. Because it’s a large department, we actually had the luxury of having people who teach only ethnographic courses on Latin America and others who do it on Europe and others on Asia and Africa. Most places don’t have the luxury of even trying for that, because they don’t have enough professors. But that has its advantages and its disadvantages. It tends to mean you aren’t looking at music around the world at the same time with the same theoretical framework. You tend to focus on history. But for all that, I thought I wasn’t coming to change it. I decided I wasn’t coming to change UCLA. I was coming to figure out how it worked and to enjoy being here and to help do my part to contribute to something. So I learned a lot more about the music of Latin America than I ever knew before, because I really had only done research in the Amazon and didn’t know much about Brazilian music, but I learned similarly about the music of Colombia and other places. So my job here, I thought, as I was sort of given to believe by Tim Rice, was to sort of introduce and give a course called “The Anthropology of Music,” which hadn’t been given in a long time, since my training was in anthropology. And I was an admirer and had studied a bit with Alan Merriam, who wrote the book on the subject. And then also to teach about Latin America, which was no problem at all.

They asked me in—I think it was a faculty meeting. “What would you like to teach?” they said. I said, “Well, actually, I think teaching is something that has to depend on the department. What does the department need taught? Because there’s a curriculum here.” I think most people were pretty surprised at that. I basically believe that the teaching, in terms of teaching, it’s not my right to say what I want to teach, as long as I’m competent to teach it. It’s really our decision as a group to decide who’s going to teach what so that everybody can feel good about what they teach and we actually meet our requirements to teach students, I mean to give students the training they need and supply all the courses that are required that they need to graduate. So I taught a whole bunch of stuff over the years, as a result, and I didn’t require that I only teach graduate students. That’s what many senior professors do when they come to a place. They say, “I’ll come but I’ll only teach graduate students.” I happen to like undergraduates. There’s a kind of freshness to their approach to things, and you can see when you’re exciting them, because their eyes sort of get really excited by things, and they ask questions at a level of basicness that is very refreshing. They tended to ask things like why do you do that, why is that important, and those are really important questions. And they’re really important questions if you’re teaching, to keep rethinking those, and if you’re writing, to keep rethinking those.

Graduate students, much as I enjoy working with them, have already made the commitment to a field, and so they’ve self-selected people who think, well, this is significant. So they don’t ask the same kinds of questions. They’ll ask other kinds of questions and even more and even better, they’ll bring you things to read you never thought of reading and ask and make you think of questions you never thought of asking yourself. But it’s a different kind of thing. So I really like the mixture of teaching undergraduates and graduates, and over the years I’ve taught some courses over and over again to serve the department and taught some of the courses to serve my own interests and others to create new sort of branches of activity here in the program.

What specifically did you do to really get to know where the department was at when you came here? What were you even able to do since you weren’t here in the beginning?

Well, I did come out and talk to people, and I met them at conferences, and I talked to graduate students. One of the best ways to find out what people are doing and what’s going on is to get syllabi for courses, because it gives you and sort of lays out what people are reading and what they’re thinking and how they’re approaching it. So I got a bunch of syllabi from people. If I’d been a little bit less busy at Folkways, I might have done it more systematically, but that was more or less the way I did it. And the other thing that UCLA’s famous for and that no place previously in which I’d worked was at all interested in doing was in performance.

Right. Well, that’s where I was headed. [laughs]

Mantle Hood had this vision that in order to study music you really also had to be able to play it and it was very important not just to play your own musical tradition, but to learn to play other people’s musical traditions, just the way it was important to learn other people’s languages, and that a method and an approach to the studying of music of other places was to learn the language of music and learn to become a performer. And I’d never been at a place that that happened. At Indiana, we weren’t allowed to because when we tried, when we asked about giving credit for musical ensembles, they said, “Well, the music school can do that because it has that kind of course, but we don’t allow that here in the College of Arts and Sciences.” I was given to believe that it was a structural issue. We simply couldn’t do it. And I wasn’t sure it was even worthwhile at the time. It seemed to me everybody who wants to study music is probably already playing it, and I wasn’t sure they needed to play gamelan. I wasn’t sure they needed to play a particular kind of music. I thought being good at some kind of music and knowing what a performance was and knowing what practice was and knowing how it felt when you and the instrument and the audience were all sort of working together well is pretty important if you’re going to study any kind of performing arts. But I wasn’t sure that you necessarily had to study a particular type of music that you weren’t actually going to study eventually. So why play gamelan if you’re going to go to India or to Pakistan or to the Eskimo or something like that? What’s the point? So I came out here sort of curious about that, and never having run an ensemble and actually didn’t run an ensemble for the first six years, and I didn’t have much to do with them except for to encourage, except for to go to concerts and enjoy them, things like that. I think it’s an impressive part of this program is not just the numbers of students in the program who take ensembles and play music in a number of various configurations and bands outside the university and all kinds of things, but it was the number of people in the university who are not in ethnomusicology who came to play in them and came to the concerts, and those were really very exciting, and I think it’s very good for everybody. A little bit of ethnomusicology is good for everybody. I think a little bit of performing music is good for everybody. And given the lack of the performing arts in most of our high schools and not everybody lives in a community where you can easily do it or has parents who will encourage them and drive them to do it, I think being able to do it in college as an option while you’re also studying engineering or biology or something like that, it’s a really important contribution of this department to the life on the campus.

Right. And you also came here shortly after, a few years after the jazz studies area became part of ethnomusicology, and how did you view that particular aspect of how things sort of had progressed here in this department? Because that’s a somewhat different position for that.

Yes. Jazz studies, I don’t know exactly when it began on campuses. I know that Indiana had David Baker and a pretty nice, strong program in the School of Music, and it was a performance-based one, as the one here is. I always thought it was interesting. I thought it was interesting that the School of Music would embrace jazz and not embrace ethnomusicology or gamelan or anything else. I mean, so I thought it was an interesting choice. I thought it was an interesting indication of sort of political power in the United States, the importance of jazz in the country to a whole lot of people. The idea that jazz is the United States classical music is certainly widespread. I’m not sure that it’s true. I mean, it’s hard. It’s a music. In the United States, I’m sure it’s classical, certainly, and you have to be a very good performer to do it well, but that’s true of a lot of kinds of music in the United States.

So I wasn’t all surprised to find it here. I’d heard when I came that it had moved from place to place in its configuration within the departments, and I was delighted it was in ethnomusicology. It didn’t seem like it was a problem at all. The other thing I did know about UCLA, which I suppose is worth noting since I think it’s true of every department in the world, is it was famous for being a very factional place. It was famous for people disagreeing with each other, not only violently but fairly unpleasantly. One of the reasons that it’s the only university in the country that has a standalone ethnomusicology department is because the music department that preceded the ethnomusicology department included musicology, composition, performance and music theory and ethnomusicology all in one department. And the ethnomusicologists felt very bitter about precisely the things that I’d mentioned as being the problem.

Yes, right. [laughs]

The musicologists weren’t very happy either, and so all of a sudden—I never bothered to really learn a whole lot about why, but all of a sudden that big department split into three places, and the musicologists withdrew not only from the department but from the school and moved over to the College of Letters and Sciences, and ethnomusicology became separate. Then music became separate.

Then ethnomusicology was famous for reproducing within itself the same sort of bitter divisions within itself. And I wasn’t surprised. I think university departments, it’s like paradise. University departments are paradise. They’re paradise. I mean, here we are in a place that pays us to do things we love, research and teaching, and we have spaces to do it. We have a library to do it. Not everything is perfect, but it’s pretty good, especially if you’re in a place like UCLA or Indiana or the Museu Nacional in Rio, where I was. Yet in every case, the departments create hell for themselves, or somebody creates hell for it, and says Satan is in every department in the works, or it’s in the air, or it’s in the walls or whatever. But this department was famous for it, and I thought that, well, I thought I could handle it because I’ve worked in lots of places where there are lots of factions, and I think people who haven’t worked in other places always think their place is the worst and always think that they’re the only—they don’t realize that it’s actually a structural statement, it’s a structural nature of groups of people working together, it appears. Where there are as few controls over things as there are in a group of highly tenured, very intelligent people, it can get quite unpleasant. So I also knew that that was a possibility out here as I left the Smithsonian to come here.

Wow. [laughs]

And it is. And it wasn’t a surprise.

So once you started teaching here, how much interaction or collaboration opportunity was there for you with some of these different factions or some of these, as you’ve defined it, geographic sort of delineations within the department here? I mean, it’s a very, I think, broad and deep department, and you’re not specializing in a particular geographical area or style of music. How did that work for you?

Well, actually, I found it worked better to read their books. I mean, for one thing, the structure of teaching at this university, at every university I’ve ever been to, is that one professor teaches one class, because if you put two professors on it, you’re paying a whole lot of money. The university is paying a lot of money for that. So I only taught one joint course with two other professors at Indiana, and I did it. I think we were all were doing this in overload for fun. It was on a topic we all thought we’d really like to give together. We never did that here. We have a course like that now, but it’s specifically for undergraduates and specifically certain kind of training and part of the School of Music. But we didn’t have that, so basically what it was like, took people to lunch and talked to them about what they did.

Right. But I mean sort of unofficial, even, collaboration. Were you able to kind of experience what some of the other sorts of teaching was like here? Did you take any—

Did I take any classes?

You mentioned gamelan. Did you decide to see what it’s like to play in the gamelan?

No.

No? [laughs] Okay.

Partly because I was never here for a full year. I would be traveling so much in the fall. There’s one conference after another in the fall, and there were board meetings of various organizations, so I just was always on the road in the fall. I can’t believe how much I traveled. I mean, I can, because I always traveled all my life that way. But it was intense because I had no reason to say no as long as someone else paid. Well, I thought it was important, so I did a lot. So I was never really here for the full year. So I never was at the start, and I also was super busy. Part of the problem with travel is that when you come back, you’re always behind.

Yes.

If you’re active, and I was very active in professional organizations of all kinds, and so I was just always behind. That’s it. I was always catching up or getting ahead so I could travel. I was working really hard. I’ve always worked six full days a week, but when you’re traveling, that gets pretty heavy.

Right.

So I didn’t try gamelan. I did sit in on some courses and some seminars in anthropology and occasionally from time to time I went to as many lectures as I could because I find lectures are nice and contained and you can actually get an idea of what someone is thinking in one and a half hours or something like that.

Then you mentioned that you were interested in or able to teach in the Latin American area, but how were you able to specifically plug yourself into the curriculum here, and what were you specifically able to offer? You mentioned the anthropology side of it. I guess part of what I’m still wondering about is how much real interaction you had with all these different people in this department and what your personal relationships were like as colleagues.

Well, one of the reasons I came, and one of the things I found frustrating at the Smithsonian, was the Smithsonian was very hierarchical. You were either someone’s supervisor or you’re supervised by someone, especially if you’re running a large organization. And that’s not the case here. Most of us are just colleagues, especially if you’re not a chair, you’re a colleague of everybody, and that’s a really different arrangement. So I’ve worked over the years with lots of people, and I’ve learned a lot from their thinking and their ideas and discussions with them. Professor Loza is certainly the person I’ve learned the most from, probably, about Latin American music, because I didn’t know that much about it, and he has spent his lifetime thinking about it and teaching it. Even though he doesn’t know as much about Brazilian music, he certainly taught me about a lot of other things, and also he teaches a lot of large undergraduate classes, and I thought the way he does it is interesting and encouraging. So I went to a couple of his lectures and listened to him very carefully when he talked, and we’ve sort of been buddies for the whole time I was here. Let’s see. Tim Rice and I have been good friends ever since I came. He was very helpful and solicitous as chair, but he’s also been a good friend. He is particularly interested in getting feedback on his papers before he publishes them, so I often was invited to read his things and comment on them for him. Sometimes we went the other way. But I often would talk to him about my ideas, rather than send the paper. I’m not nearly as organized as he is in that sense. And really enjoyed working with him.

I’ve enjoyed working with Chris Waterman, who, although in another department, is a very fine ethnomusicologist. Some of other people around the place in WAC have been very interesting to work with. I’ve learned a great deal from Helen Rees on music of Asia and how to think about the music of Asia. That was an era I really didn’t know much about, even though my first interest in ethnomusicology came through listening to the music of India. When I bought records and listened to the music of other parts of Asia, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t understand them for whatever reason, and I think I probably could now. I mean, I do now, and that’s thanks in part to Helen Rees. I never really thought about hip-hop until I’d read Cheryl’s book, and Cheryl and I knew each other back when we were both at Indiana University. I knew everybody here pretty much before I came.

Sure.

So Cheryl and I go way back, and it’s been interesting. We’ve worked together on a number of projects through students and things like that. I think another way that faculty work together is, of course, through their students, because we share students and therefore share ideas. It’s not a joint publication, but it’s joint production, in a sense, to have a student graduate that’s been working with several faculty members.

Let’s see. It’s a big department, but I’ve worked with everybody over time in some form or another. Probably less with Jackie DjeDje, although she was a chair, and we worked together when we were working on things. But I know very little about—I’m not a specialist in African music, and there are specialists. So when people ask me about Africa, I just say, “Go see somebody else.” I really have read less on that than I have even on Europe. There are some areas of the world that I’m better on than others. So, sure, I worked with people here. I like getting out of the department and going to other departments around. There are some really interesting people on campus, Andrew Apter in history and a number of people in anthropology and linguistics. I think one of the first things I tell my students when they come here is to forget the department boundaries. They’re important for administration and they’re important for funding and they’re important for their being here, but once they’re here, they should be going after everything they possibly can. I completely forgot to mention the musicology department, where I have a number of friends. Tamara Levitz and I have had some great conversations, and Robert Fink and I have had good conversations. A whole bunch of people over there who’ve been interesting. Talked with Susan McClary while she was here. She’s leaving about the same time I am. She’s really interesting to talk to and had interesting ideas. So just around the place there are a lot of interesting people. What kept me, I think, from doing more of that was constant travel and also having a wife on the East Coast. Not living here but being here, having a pied-a-terre here instead meant that during the vacation periods when you can relax and have a social life, I was never here. So we never could invite people over for dinner very easily because it was always just me, and my apartment was really too small for it. So I always felt sort of hindered socially because of this particular fact of living on two coasts at the same time. So I was actually living on neither coast, in a sense, because I was here for work and I was there for social life, and that sort of interfered with some things here. Life would have been different if that hadn’t happened and if I hadn’t been quite so busy with other things.

Right. What was your sense of what some of the faculty here’s expectations were when you were hired? And I’m kind of tapping into the Seeger legacy again here a little bit.

That’s a good question. When I left, I think one of the things I said was I hoped that I sort of lived up to their anticipations, even though I didn’t do what they necessarily thought I was going to do. I don’t know. I was quite well known in ethnomusicology. I had been president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and things like that. So what they were getting was someone whose name was fairly well known. [interruption]

So I don’t know, but I think I came with a reputation for doing interesting things, for good publications. They liked the book Why Suyá Sing. They liked my other publications. So I came with, they thought—what do you hope for when you get a new professor? You hope that they will help train your students in interesting ways to become active professionals. You hope that they will attract new students, attract good students, because every department is competing with every other department to get the best students they can possibly get. And some of that you get through the quality of your faculty and the renown of your faculty, whether or not it’s good or not, but the renown of your faculty. Some of it you get by the money you can offer them because even if you have high renown and can’t offer them good fellowships, you can’t match the offers from other places, the chances of their coming aren’t so good.

So I think those were certainly in the works, and also you want someone who gets along with people fairly well, and I don’t think anybody purposefully hires somebody known to be totally objectionable. I mean, people become totally objectionable, but I don’t think they’re hired. I think you’re not allowed to say that you’re looking for that, because you’re really only allowed to look at quality of work and teaching and service. On the other hand, I think I was known to be a fairly genial person. I’ve worked in a lot of places.

You also have a background in archives, and there’s been quite a large ethnomusicology archive here. What was your involvement and relationship and feelings about the archive here when you came here and during the years that you worked?

Well, I knew the archive pretty well because I’d visited here a number of times. I didn’t come out here for the first time when I came out for the conference. My associate director of the Indiana University Archive of Traditional Music left when I was at Indiana and came out here to become the director of this archive, Louise Spear, and she was here for many years. She was here when I arrived.

So I was quite aware of the archive, and I knew that it was very much similar to the Indiana archive, and I knew, therefore, it was facing similar problems. I wasn’t asked to be director of it at the time. Professor DjeDje was being appointed director just about the time I was getting here. So I knew the archive, and one of the things I wanted to do, as I think I mentioned, my entire training in archiving came from a course that I’d taken at Indiana University for three weeks with Louise Spear giving it, and then I was hired back as her boss two years later. Well, Louise was here, so we decided to give the course here, and so we gave the course in ten weeks as a seminar, and I’ve been giving it every other year since then. Louise left, but every year somebody else has been there in her position. So I’ve been teaching archiving here, which is probably one of the very few courses in audiovisual archiving that’s been regularly taught in the country. Then about six years ago when Professor DjeDje was chair of the department, after a while she offered me the job of being chair, sort of faculty director of the archive. Now, here the faculty director can do a lot, but really the staff is very competent, so it’s more like being an advisor and a spokesperson for it, though I did continue teaching and worked with them on some fundraising and things like that. I didn’t do as much as I probably would have liked to, but that’s probably because they were so good.

[laughs] But this is during a time, though, when the format for archiving for recordings for preservation purposes is still very much in transition. To exactly where still seems somewhat uncertain. How were you able to address sort of the nebulous quality of the impact technology has had on archiving and also the issue that this raises regarding something I know you have thought a lot about, which is copyright?

Well, one of the interesting things about living a longer time is that you actually get various of those kinds of experiences. At Indiana I was director of an archive at a time when reel-to-reel tape was the preservation medium, and so we were transferring things to reel-to-reel tape. Only after about 1995, I think, it was obviously digital. I mean, you could record digitally, but whether it was worth storing it, whether you could store it because the files were so big and the storage was so small, it really only because possible to think about seriously storing video later on, and so I came here and we were in a digital storage age. It’s probably going to be impossible to preserve and transfer into digital format and preserve every single tape that’s ever been recorded, because there simply aren’t enough tape recorders to do it, and there are very few manufacturers, if any. There aren’t enough [tape] heads. The equipment is obsolete. So a big danger for audiovisual archiving is not only that things have to be migrated to a digital format, but also that so much equipment is obsolete and that simply it’s going to be impossible to play everything back. So it’s really a question of trying to ensure that the best recordings are actually in an institution where they will be curated and taken care of. The other thing about digital sound, which is different from other sound, is that sound files get separated from their descriptive matter very easily. We can make sound files really easily and shoot them all over the place, but it’s really hard to make a sound file that actually tells you anything about what’s in it besides that very short descriptor. It doesn’t carry the so-called metadata with it. Whereas on a wax cylinder box, people wrote all kinds of things and stuck pieces of paper inside, and so it’s associated with the sound with something else. And the same thing with discs. They wouldn’t write when the disc was inside it, but they would take the envelope of the disc and write the contents of the disc and stick it back in, so you could actually track things.

Once we have things in sound files, a lot of effort has to be made to make sure that in the various movements of them from format to format and shifting them around, that we don’t lose the information about them. Information about them for librarians is fairly straightforward. It’s fairly small. Information about them for ethnomusicologists is much bigger. It’s huge. It might be hundreds of pages of material about the same sound recording that all you really need is about five lines of data. So it seemed to me here this is a moment that we need to be thinking as ethnomusicologists about archiving, because our requirements are different from librarians who are trying to recall data. We want data and information about that data that’s not just related to that data. I mean, it’s not related to finding; it’s related to content of it in very profound ways and linking it with photographs and instruments and things like that. So that, to me, is, I think, one of the challenges. I think we’re very fortunate here at UCLA because at the same time as we’ve been trying to deal with digital transformation, digital transfers of older recordings on reel-to-reel tape and cassettes and less on discs, we’re not worried about the LPs and 78s, they last quite well, and therefore they aren’t urgent. As we’re trying to transfer them, the university’s been setting up a very robust digital archive system for long-term preservation and migration of the data, because there’s no point in digitizing things and just putting them on a DVD and leaving them on your shelf there. They’re not going to last, and they’re not going to be playable, and the machine, the whole system, will probably be obsolete in fifteen or thirty years.

The digital audio tape, the DAT tape, which is the first digital medium that really came along that was convenient for recording on and storing, we discovered it wasn’t robust at all, that could go and stop playing in as little as five years if you didn’t have the same piece of equipment around to play it back on. And it certainly couldn’t be trusted more than fifteen or twenty, which was much less time than the material it was replacing. So the combination of transferring them to digital formats in our archive and then being able to put them in line to be inserted in the UCLA digital archive is, I think, the only way that we’re going to be able to preserve audio and video. We have an audio format that almost all audiovisual archives think is pretty good. It’s—what is it—96 and 24. Everybody’s agreed pretty much that that’s a good standard. The oral historians aren’t so sure, because it takes up a lot of space. But for music, we think it’s good enough. It’s good. You could do more sampling, a higher rate of sampling, but we’re not sure that that’s audibly different, but we are pretty sure it’s audibly different if you step back from 96 kilohertz. So for audio we’re fine. Video is still not settled down. We still don’t know. The video takes up much more floor space and much more visual space.

[laughs] Yes. Absolutely.

So every archive I know of is kind of waiting on digital while people work out the standards that will produce a lossless video the way we have sort of—that we can all agree on, because a number of us have rushed in, and when you’re on the bleeding end of technology, sometimes you’re amputated. You’ve spent a whole lot of money and effort, and it doesn’t work at all. That’s not a position an archive should be in. It’s fine for individuals, and somebody with a lot of money can be in it, but not a place that after you’ve spent all that money to transfer it, you’ve really put something into a dead end because you then have to go start all over again or get a whole bunch of equipment all over again. So we’re waiting pretty much. We’re doing our best. Sometimes we’re transferring to a DVD, but knowing that’s just because we might lose everything otherwise, not because we like it.

Right. A stopgap sort of [unclear].

So these are challenging times for archives. At the very time in which we have the technology that’s allowing us to do this and when the obsolescence of all those old tapes and recordings is becoming extremely obvious and when UNESCO and international organizations are stressing the importance of intangible cultural heritage in the human race, at the same time, almost every institution is cutting back on archive funding.

Right. That’s just what I was going to ask, funding. [laughs]

So, alas, instead of putting all of the people who have been thrown out of work to work as archivists, transferring things digitally and documenting them and things like that, which just think of all the people who could be doing that that don’t have a job in this country and other countries around the world. We are paying them something, unemployment insurance, and the stuff is going and the archives are disappearing. And in attempt to balance budgets, the archives are constantly facing cutbacks.

So it’s been really a challenge. It’s a challenge I think whose shortsightedness will become evident in a while. The small movements of things like the Library of Congress select list of recordings that it’s trying to do to call attention to the problem calls attention to the problem to a few people but doesn’t really even begin to address the problem, because the problem isn’t about twenty-five pieces of great music, it’s about millions and millions of pieces of music.

Right. Wow. Yes.

So being an archivist is challenging. It’s very easy to be a very passionate archivist. I’m a very passionate archivist. I think it’s something if you think that art is important to people, then you need to think seriously, and that if art from the past is important to people and we all know it has been important to people, including ourselves, including nineteenth-century society, twentieth-century society, probably twenty-first-century society, then you need to worry about its disappearance.

Yes.

Or relegating all of the responsibility over what is saved to for-profit companies, because they won’t save the things that aren’t immediately profitable, and we have no idea what’s going to be insightful in the future.

Wow. And not only that, but most for-profit companies allegedly are not making much in the way of profit anymore, so just the intangibility of the form that a music, in this case, file takes is highly a cause for concern.

Well, you know, a company like Google is collecting immense amounts of information. It’s conceivable a for-profit company to say, “Well, we’ll just archive the Internet.” And that’s fine when they’re making money, but when they’re not making money, it’s quite possible that they would dismantle it, and the record companies in the United States, long before the crisis, back in the 1940s, were melting down their masters to help the war effort, but also freeing up a whole bunch of storage space. There are famous stories of finding master tapes in dumpsters as companies were moving, and if it weren’t for collectors, passionate people who collect 78s, we probably wouldn’t have a lot of the old music we have now because the masters are long gone in many cases. They were thrown out or destroyed. So that’s why I say you can’t really trust for-profit companies. While there’s profit in it, they might save it, but if they go out of business or they don’t see a profit in it and they need the resource for something else, then they have no reason to keep it around.

And what about the issue of copyright, then, as the format becomes more and more ephemeral and the ability to share almost indiscriminately gets greater and greater?

One of the things I’ve written a lot about over the years has been copyright, and I think my first article is 1986 on it. It’s partly because I was working with an indigenous group that was concerned about the misuse of its knowledge, but it was also partly because I was running an audiovisual archive. When you’re running an archive, you’re dealing with issues of rights all the time.

Right.

It seemed to me that archives have levels of issues of rights. It’s the rights of the person who deposits things in an archive, and it’s the rights of the people who are recorded by that person who are in the archive, and it’s the rights of the archive. So it immediately gets really complicated, and it can impede an archive from doing even such obvious things as preserving recordings under some copyright laws, and especially in Europe. It can impede them from letting people listen to them or use them or making copies so that people can study them offsite or something like that. So the copyright law is something that I started to write about because of research reasons and also because of archiving reasons. As I looked into it further, it seemed to me that especially for indigenous peoples, as the issues of land rights that were getting resolved, the next big fight of indigenous rights was going to be over intellectual property, be over knowledge, who has the right to knowledge and to their knowledge, and especially in certain moments to their knowledge of pharmaceuticals, for example. If a shaman teaches somebody that a certain plant is good for headaches or fever or something like that, and that’s sold to a multinational that then makes billions of dollars on that, what does the shaman get? Are there any rights there? Well, it’s public knowledge. It’s traditional knowledge. If it’s not copyright, there’s no patent. But equally with music and dance and other kinds of appropriation of other people’s music, the copyright as it evolved in England and the United States is very much oriented towards individual creativity by literate people who are making things for profit, and that’s not true of a whole lot of the knowledge in the world. It’s not made by literate people and it’s not made for profit. It may be made for beauty or it may be there’s—so the whole problem with copyright is that started with a set of premises that don’t apply to a lot of knowledge. It applies to certain types of knowledge.

Right.

Then the power of rights holders to influence lawmakers has been very powerful, and so especially the publishing companies have had tremendous power in the United States since the founding, actually. The number of founders who were authors and journalists, it’s not surprising. There was a lot of debate over the copyright phrase and clause in the Constitution, but once it got there, then the limits of fourteen years plus another fourteen is the limit that you could copyright something, expanding to the lifetime of the person plus seventy years, and that changes the nature of copyright, changes the nature of getting access to people’s ideas. As you could put more and more information on smaller and smaller media, and as we could move information around so more quickly, the limitation of copyright, its restrictions became more and more obvious to people and more and more galling to people. We’ve been lucky in the United States in having a fairly robust fair-use clause so that our educational institutions aren’t as affected, but if you’re ever publishing a book on popular music, you can’t afford to do it because you can’t put any text in there. You can’t put any transcriptions in there or any song texts. So there have been problems with teaching. Copyright affects all level of people’s lives, what they hear, what they don’t hear, what you can teach and what you can’t, what you can write about, what you can’t write about, and how you present it. It shapes a whole lot of things. So one of my points has been we have to look not only at the rights of the artist, but you have to look at what it’s doing to society and to knowledge.

There are a lot of people working on it. There are some really interesting supplements to copyrights such as Creative Commons, where copyright law does not have be revised. You just simply create a different set of licensing arrangements on top of it. There are people who argue copyright can’t survive the Internet. But it’s a philosophical issue, too, because if you look back to 1813, I think, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “When you light your candle from my candle, we both gain because I still have my light and you have a light.” And he said, “Knowledge should be like the air in which we live; spread.” And it was totally different—it was an idea that knowledge wasn’t something that you owned and gave and sold, but knowledge should be like lighting a candle from another. It should be free and available, a very different vision of knowledge and sharing of knowledge and the importance of sharing than we have today if you ask somebody what is knowledge. The idea of intellectual property in that sense doesn’t exist in Jefferson’s formulation, and that’s the same thing that people are saying now. They’re saying it’s because of the Internet, but actually it’s not the Internet. It’s about ideas. It’s about knowledge. So it’s a really interesting and lively debate and one in which immense economic interests are at stake. So it’s very divisive and complicated, and I think it’s going to be solved. It could be solved by changes in the law. It could be solved by so many people becoming lawbreakers that it’s not worth following them anymore, or it could be changed by a set of new arrangements coming up that actually allow sharing so that people who want to share things should share them.

I think one of the great unfortunate things that happened with copyright law was that the idea that things would become automatically copyrighted as soon as you make them. If things weren’t copyrighted, people didn’t have to go to a whole lot of work not to copyright something, I think most of the ideas that we have would just be floating around because people don’t care.

Right, right.

Then you could copyright the things you cared about. But that went out in the 1970s, I think, you didn’t have to put a copyright notice on anymore. Therefore, you couldn’t look at something and say, “Well, I might just not copyright it.”

Right, right. Entrepreneurial idea—

Somehow it just sort of became the default. Instead of the default being it’s not copyrighted unless you copyright it, the default is it’s copyrighted for your whole lifetime and for seventy years, people are going to need to get your permission to get it, even if you don’t care.

[laughs] Yes. Wow. So obviously this has a real impact on, for example, the study of ethnomusicology. What do you see right now as the impact on just the simple fact of through digital media, the Internet, etc., the world becoming smaller and smaller, access to information in terms of, in this case, for example, maybe music of a particular people or culture or time, easier to have than at any other time by far, awareness of a lot of information about the music of different peoples, different parts of the world, different time periods available and perhaps therefore known more than it was, say, even thirty years or so? What kind of impact has this had on the discipline of ethnomusicology and on today’s students coming into that study?

Well, let me step back and just go over three different things.

Okay.

One is as the rest of the world sort of gets brought into the copyright system, which it has been by the GATT group, by the trade agreements, which will put copyright as part of trade, has required countries all over the world to create their own copyright legislation that looks like European and the United States’ legislation, that has forced a whole lot of people who never encountered the idea of copyright to discover that other people are using their stuff, and they’re discovering that they’re being ripped off in some form or another. So one of the things that ethnomusicologists, one of the roles, it seemed to me that if you have to pay The Beatles to use their songs, then you should have to pay the Suyá Indians of Brazil also to use their songs, because it’s only fair. Doesn’t matter whether they learn those because a jaguar teaches it to them or because George Harrison claims to have written the song.

Right.

So one role for ethnomusicologists has been, it seems to me, to help communities defend their own rights to their heritage, or whatever it is, however you want to call it, property, or at least claim the rights they want to claim, and help them figure out how to do that.

The other thing that ethnomusicologists have to do is be much more aware of rights when they’re making recordings. They don’t just have to say, “Is it okay if I record you?” They have to say, “Is it okay if I record you and use it in my dissertation, and can I also put it into an archive so that your progeny can someday, your descendants can someday use it, and other people can use it? Can we put it into the Internet? What can we do with it?” All those rights have to be transferred individually on every single piece by every single performer on that, or we get caught in the web of copyright restrictions that have hampered a whole lot of things. The great misfortune of all this is that most archives are filled with things that they don’t have the rights to distribute because no one was getting them. It’s not as though they were gotten illegally or without people’s knowledge. It’s simply no one ever thought to ask, “Is it all right to use this on the Internet?” about which no one ever thought, because it didn’t exist.

Right. [laughs]

Or even that people would want it on recordings or anything like that. People were really making them and still think they’re making them for research purposes. So we spend a fair amount of our time pounding into our students the fact that, well, it’s for your research now, but you’re going to want to use it in your classroom, you’re going to want to get all those rights at the start, and so it requires a different kind of field research, different kind of clearances.

Then I think we’re going to have come up with a way in the world of restricting knowledge, because not all music is made to be commercial. Some music is made for sacred purpose and people don’t want it commercial at all. Some music is made for secret events, and those events are supposed to be secret. They aren’t supposed to be available for everybody. It’s the rights of indigenous people that have probably brought this up most clearly, because groups especially in Asia, Asian Pacific region, in indigenous groups there, I think, control transmission, encourage transmission by controlling access. Only certain people can know certain things, and they may be a member of a certain clan or a certain family. And by saying that only they can know it, you’re also saying that those people have to know it. So you have groups in Australia where a lot of the knowledge is clan-based and also gender-based and also age-based, so that you have a system where young children know very little. As they’re initiated and grow older, young women sort of are initiated into and learn the knowledge of older women of their clan, and young men learn and eventually acquire the knowledge of the older men of their clan. And when the clans get together, then all the knowledge is there, and when the genders are together, they have the knowledge of men and women. But the idea is that not everybody has access to everything. You have access only to really what you’re supposed to have. The position of the Internet so far as been, well, everything should be free knowledge, wants to be free. Knowledge doesn’t want to be free if the people want something. I think Facebook, I think the lesson of Facebook, where people are discovering that if everybody knows everything about you, it’s really not a good thing, there are some things you really don’t want people to know about you, that discovery by large numbers of people is probably going to be very good for future discussions of knowledge sharing. It’s going to encourage people to think that maybe not all knowledge is meant to be shared by everybody. You have your friends and your non-friends. And if you take that into music, you can say, well, some music is meant to be disseminated because it’s public music for whatever reason, and some music is just going to have to be secret forever. And we have to respect that and we have to come up with systems that do that.

At the moment, one of the most interesting ones is being done among the Pinjatjatjara, where they’re putting all of their knowledge onto a computer database. Wow. That’s precisely violating every single thing. You’ve got one clan right next to another and things like that. Well, they’ve created a system of access by user name and PIN, so that when you’re a young man, and all that knowledge is on the computer, you can only access the knowledge that’s appropriate for someone of your clan and your age, and similarly with women and things like that. So they’ve created a system of access to knowledge using modern technology that actually replicates the access to knowledge that they think is appropriate for their traditional knowledge anyway, and we may find that they actually have an interesting idea and follow it someday. I don’t know where it’s going to end, because nothing will end, but the arguments will go on, but the way knowledge is shared and the amount we can put into very small amounts of data and of materials has certainly changed. Maybe there will be a tax on having babies in the future, and that will pay for the rights of all the stuff put on a chip that gets implanted in their brains and their heads somewhere so they can access all the known knowledge of humanity. It just seems to me that if that’s going to be the case, there better be more than just the for-profit stuff that’s there, and what shouldn’t be there shouldn’t be there. So I think the debate’s going to go on, and I think it’s going to get more sophisticated as the implications for ourselves of knowledge being free become clearer.

Ethnomusicology was a discipline where at one time someone could go and use it to learn about the music and culture of some people in the world that they would not have had access to, probably, in any other way, and that has certainly changed, thanks to the Internet and digital technology. You’re one of the few people probably in the world who has had the experience of going and living with people who were essentially untouched by what we would call the effects of civilization. Given the age that we’re living in and given your experience living in that age and also having the experience you did with the Suyá in the Amazon jungle—I guess it’s a two-part question—where do you see ethnomusicology at this point in terms of study, what’s available, what the opportunities are in this rapidly changing world? And how has your experience living with these people at a time when so little was really available in terms of knowledge affected your view of the world and of the discipline that you’re involved in? [interruption]

Sorry for that interruption. That “duck” was my daughter’s ring.

We stop for ducks. We brake for ducks.

We brake for ducks. Where was I? I was saying something about—

This was the opportunities today in ethnomusicology and your experience with the Suyá and how it’s affected your view of your discipline and of your life, basically.

One of the things that working with the Suyá did was show me how a community that doesn’t have technology may work with it when they get it. When I first went there, I was the only person with a tape recorder. There wasn’t a single working playback machine of any kind, LP or anything else, in the village. There were two shortwave radios that all they could do was listen to when they had batteries, which wasn’t very often. And I watched them sort of deal with the arrival of cassette tape recorders, which transformed things completely, because instead of listening to what somebody in some distant city wanted them to listen to on radio, they could make their own recordings and play them back for themselves if they had batteries, which they often didn’t, and as long as the tape recorder worked, which wasn’t very long in the jungle. But it really changed things. Then the arrival of video, which actually I brought to them because I wanted them to learn to make video before they started to consume it, so they had a video production training and possibility before the first parabolic antenna entered the region. The Suyá work with video, they have adapted each of those with great enthusiasm for their own purposes, and not to watch commercial things except for soccer games, of which they are great fans, and the news sometimes, but actually to make their own recordings and make their own videos. So it’s been really interesting to see how people use and actively make their own, the new technologies that come along. They’re much better video makers than I am, and they have their own—they have a couple of them posted on YouTube, and they have their own sort of small video production company when there’s electricity and everything works.

Right.

Now, ethnomusicology, while it was based on originally trying to acquire, like museums acquired artifacts, acquire sounds that could be compared in research centers of comparative musicology, sort of has moved from collecting recordings, which we still do but in a different way, to asking questions about why music is significant and what it does, why are people enjoying this music and not other music, and why are people talking about it that way. The music is easily available now. You can hear music from all over the world. You can’t necessarily hear music that’s a long-form music. You won’t necessarily find a whole lot of music that goes on for twenty-four hours, even though people do listen to it, I mean make it for twenty-four hours. As with commercial recordings which always were reducing things to short bits, the Internet’s not really full of twenty-four or thirty-six five-day ceremonies sort of without stop, and they’re always recorded from a particular place. So where you put your microphone, where you stand, where you make your recording is tremendously different, depending on the question you’re asking and what you’re interested in. So just because there is recording doesn’t necessarily mean that the instruments that you might want to actually hear are in it.

Right, right.

I mean, the quality of YouTube recordings is atrocious, I mean except for where you have a studio recording put up because the artist actually made it first. So just because the sound is there doesn’t mean, first of all, that it’s got the sonic information you would want to have. Secondly, it doesn’t mean that it’s accompanied by the answers to the questions that you would want to ask about it before you could say anything about it or write anything about it and talk about it in relationship to human use of music and understanding of music. So there’s still a lot of space for actually going and talking to people about music. What I found at the Smithsonian when I was there, we had a lot of very famous artists coming to the Smithsonian Folklife Festival and recording there, but they were also being interviewed and they talked to each other, and there were lots of sort of narrative interview stages. And because they were so famous and so well recorded, people didn’t come to listen to the recordings of them very often, their music, but they wanted to hear them, their ideas, because no one ever asked them their ideas about things. So what seems to be probably the bigger contribution of a lot of our recordings is not going to be the performances that we record, but the discussions of people among themselves or with us about what that’s all about. Those, I think, are not being done by anybody else in the same way that ethnomusicologists would do them. So I encourage my students to make sure if they make a recording, and if they are recordings their interviews like this one’s being recorded, then they should get the rights for those, too, because those may be even more important than the sounds that they’re recording in the future, when everybody’s distributing their own sounds, because no one is distributing the discussion of those meetings.

So I think there’s a role for ethnomusicology, and there’s a role for crowd-sourced ethnomusicology where people are encouraged not just to put up their music, but to put up their ideas about it and discuss it among themselves and have that become part of the way that we document. But I think archives will move toward a system of documenting and getting metadata for their collections through making them available and using crowd sourcing or sort of intelligent crowd sourcing to find out who actually is on the recording, what the music really is, and get various opinions about what it means, and archive all of that together in a way that will deeply enrich the archival contents since most of our recordings made by ethnomusicologists don’t come with the richness of documentation that we would like. Even though we teach people how to do it, it doesn’t necessarily mean they do it.

Interesting.

So I think the future of mass communication for archiving and for ethnomusicology is really quite good. We have to figure out—we have to again make sure that things that people don’t want to have spread around aren’t spread around, and we also have to figure out how we’re going to come up with indexing systems so that when I’m trying to find something out about somebody’s interviews with, say, fifteen members of the mineworkers union about their lives and how music was important in it, so I can find what I’m looking for in that without having to listen to five hundred hours of recordings.

Right, right.

And I hope that the oral history program at UCLA is actually working on coming up with indexing systems that will help that, because I think one of the great changes in audio recordings since I started, and certainly video recording, which didn’t exist in terms of videotape when I started, is that we couldn’t record for a very long time. Tapes were five inches, and even with thin tape that meant you couldn’t record for more than forty-five minutes without turning it over, and you didn’t have that much tape. I had a silent camera for cinema, for 16-millimeter, but the film was so expensive I could only afford about fifty minutes of it for the entire fifteen months I was there. So that was all I had, so I was pretty careful about using it. So we were all pretty parsimonious, and we were trying to get the best recording we could, and we were trying to do the best we could, and I couldn’t even record interviews. There wasn’t enough tape and there weren’t enough batteries.

Now it’s so easy to get a tape recorder or a video camera and set it on and just have it run for hour after hour after hour after hour after hour, that we aren’t very careful with it, and often the quality of the recordings is worse because we’re not really concerned. It’s not our only time we’re ever going to be able to do that, and also because it’s easy and it’s cheap, and then it’s so long that even the people who made it don’t listen back to it. So unless there’s a lot of pressure to listen back or index it in a certain way that will then be accessible to audiovisual archives, we’re going to have a problem, I think, in the future with too much information, so much information that we’ll never be able to use it in ways that make sense. So those are several ways I think this changing technology is having an impact on ethnomusicology and how ethnomusicologists will learn how to deal with it. As we teach, there’s a tremendous new resource for teaching. It’s called YouTube.

Right. [laughs]

I think most of my colleagues have moved from making their own example tapes to using YouTube clips plus a few examples of types of things that simply aren’t available on YouTube.

Yes, right.

When I taught the South American Indian Music course, there really wasn’t much on YouTube. If you’re teaching about any popular genre, there’s more on YouTube than anybody could ever listen to and watch. If I want to learn a song and teach it in the bluegrass group, we often go to YouTube for it and get great performances that we can listen to, learn from, and then alter and take from there, get ideas from, and take from there. So I think YouTube has transformed our teaching. It’s transformed local people’s ability to post things. It hasn’t necessarily replaced ethnomusicology. It hasn’t replaced ethnomusicology.

Right. Certainly not. I did use it to get ready for this interview, however. [laughs]

I’m not surprised. Even I’m on YouTube in a few places.

Yes, that’s right. Then again, this experience that you had, and here you are again many years later, after spending a couple of years in the Amazon jungle, how has this had especially a lasting impact on your view of the world?

Let’s see. I think my training as an anthropologist and my experience in living with the Suyá Indians in Mato Grosso had a tremendous impact on the way I view the world. I tend to see things as systems of relationships and that have repeating patterns. That partly comes from an idea called structuralism, which was very popular when I was training, but it also, I think, works very well when you’re thinking about almost anything. So when I’m thinking about departments, I see a replication of structures of conflict. When I’m thinking about kinship systems, I see replicating systems of conflict. When I look at record companies, I see systems of rights of obligations. That’s the way I think. I think like an anthropologist and I think like someone who’s done extended field research in a different system of thinking. I think it’s been very beneficial for me and it may have blinded me in some respects, but it does give me a perspective on a lot of things that have happened.

Another thing that that experience gave me, especially, I think, working with the Suyá and before then, was a commitment to using knowledge to the benefit of the people that are studied, I think that you’re studying, that you’re working with, that you’re learning with, that you’re coproducing with, or whatever it is, because I think that’s an essential part of our moral jobs as scholars is actually not to be destructive of the very things that we are studying and admire, but to try to help people do whatever it is they want to do to preserve or protect them or abolish them thmselves, whatever it might be. So I think I’ve always been a believer in using knowledge not as something that you go to university and simply repeat and publish, but as something that you use for practical purpose for benefitting people, ideally benefitting them. You can use knowledge to harm them as well, but I’ve tried to avoid that. Other people specialize in it, but I long ago decided that, well, it’s probably better to have both than to only have people specialize in music to hurt people.

You’ve been somebody who’s been not only personally interested in ideas like fairness, justice, nondiscrimination, but you’ve come from a family that’s known for those kinds of concerns.

Well, it’s probably my family upbringing, but in addition to being an anthropologist, I am a Seeger, and I was brought up in a period of considerable tension due to the McCarthy sort of repression of members of the Communist Party and anybody else that might ever have seemed to look like one or act like one. So I was very aware of these implications of acting and also the importance of acting and the importance of standing up and saying what you believe, and then not just saying it, but then going and actually doing what you said you were going to do, what you said is the right thing to do. I don’t think anybody who thinks they’d like to do that succeeds at it all. None of us think that we succeed. But I think we all think that’s part of what people should do, and certainly my Uncle Pete has been a model of that, I think, in terms of living what he preached, but he doesn’t think so. And my father was also extremely principled and lived what he believed, and he didn’t think he always was either. And yet I think the family certainly has acted that way and has sort of held those ideas as something you aspire to, and I’ve tried to instill it in my students as well. I’m not the only one. Many of them come trying to figure out “How do I do it?”, and the complexity of student life and academic life and trying to find a job and all those things, and by model and also sort of exhortation, hope that they’ll figure it out.

Okay. How did you come to the conclusion that your time here at UCLA had run its course?

I’ve had a great time at UCLA. I didn’t leave because I was tired or angry or thought that my mind was going. I decided—my wife and I decided it was time to stop commuting, basically.

Oh, okay.

I told her that when we thought that it wasn’t the right thing to do anymore that I would quit, and we decided that about two years ago. We decided that we were getting old enough so it was probably safer if we lived together, and, besides, we wanted some time together before we got too ill to enjoy it. So we thought we’d probably better start, and so basically I decided to quit.

I see.

Again, I gave plenty of notice, and for similar reasons. I wanted to announce my retirement early enough so that people who were applying to study with me would be told that I wasn’t going to be here when they came. So it was not for this year’s class, I guess it was. It was for the class that came this year, so it had to be well into the year before, because there’s nothing quite as disturbing as wanting to study with someone, then finding they’re not there. Graduate schools are a lot more like a kind of apprenticeship, and I told everybody who said they want to study with me that I wasn’t going to be here, but I said it’s a big department, so it’s not nearly as serious as most places where if one-third of the ethnomusicologists retire, you’re really in trouble. This is one-tenth or one-eleventh or thirteenth of them.

So I started early letting people know, and I’ve always thought that I didn’t want to retire from the field of ethnomusicology or doing what I’ve been doing in my life; we thought we wanted to stop the commute. So I thought I could probably find something interesting to do within a half-hour, forty-five-minute drive of the house in Annapolis, Maryland, because I have Washington, D.C. right there and Baltimore right there. Figured there’d be lots of things to do. Seegers don’t usually stop working. I don’t have any relatives who’ve ever retired, partly because they, like Uncle Pete, if you’re a performer, you never retire necessarily. There aren’t too many performers anywhere who say, “Well, I’m just going to go retire and go play golf.” Most of them keep playing in some form or another or new collaborations or whatever. My father retired from being a schoolteacher and principal quite early, in his late fifties, but he and my mother were running a summer camp, and they kept that going. He was still working at it, working on aspects of it when he died at the age of ninety-four. So he never retired in that sense. He just shifted his job. My mother did the same thing. Since most of us Seegers are driven people, are driven, we’re not just doing something because we’re going to retire from it, we’re doing it because we believe in it, we just keep doing it. So I’m looking forward to continuing to do it. I just haven’t decided exactly how. Every time I’ve changed jobs in my career, I’ve learned a great deal from the next job. At the moment, I’ve been offered two things I already sort of know something about. One is working at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which needs a lot of help. You’re always shorthanded when you’re running a nonprofit label, and I have a fair amount of expertise in it. The other one is I could teach at a local university, like the University of Maryland. Both of them have made offers, and I probably will do that. But something totally different may come along or something that I’ve never done before may come along that might be really fun to try, to try out the same sort of set of skills that I’ve carried from childhood growing up, through young anthropologist going to the Suyá Indians, through the various types of audiovisual projects and enterprises that I’ve been associated with and all the teaching I’ve done. There may be something else coming along that I’ve never done that might be fun to try, and we’ll see.

Wow. Your answer actually led me into—well, it pointed at the question I was going to ask afterward, I didn’t know it was actually going to be connected, which is regarding your relationship with your wife. I mean, this is someone you met when you were extremely young, as it turns out, somebody you’ve been married to a long time, and you’ve lived a lot of different places, and you appear to have supported one another’s interests and activities quite strongly and actively. You weathered this whole commuting period while you were working here at UCLA. How would you not only characterize your relationship as it’s developed over the years, but what do you think has made it last so long and be so successful?

Well, I think we really like and respect each other. I mean, that’s got to be the basis of a relationship that’s going to last, and we’ve trusted each other to the extent that we can really be apart for long periods of time, because that’s always been the case ever since we got married. I would go to Brazil, she came with me to Brazil, but not always, and there would be six months where I’d be somewhere else. Then she also has done that as well. I asked her come and give a talk when I was giving my series of talks here, the Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy lectures, and the last talk was sort of on life in the Seeger family. I asked her to come in, and I left the room. But I did happen to overhear that she said she was lucky in getting one of the good Seegers. I guess she said because I had helped her with her ambitions as well, and I think that’s part of it.

We still play music together. We enjoy coming up with new songs to try out together and singing them for audiences. We still enjoy taking walks together and things like that. So I think partly, of course, after you’ve been apart for twelve years, that much as we have, we were still married and we were together a fair amount of time, but still apart a fair amount of time. We thought, could we manage this together? Is this going to work? But we took a sabbatical to try it out, and so we said if we can manage sabbatical, if we can live together all the time for that amount of time, it’s fine. But we’ve been so close in the field that we practically never left each other’s side for more than an hour or something like that, or we could be stuck together in a canoe for weeks or for day after day after day. So sometimes we’re stuck at the hip and sometimes we’re far apart. I think—I hope she thinks—I’m sure she thinks that it works. She probably has a different perspective on it that I do, but we’ve enjoyed it, and we still enjoy being together, and we’re looking forward to this next phase of our relationship, doing some things that we haven’t had the time or possibility of doing. She’s still teaching also, so it’s not as though we’re actually going back to spend all our time together, but we’re certainly going back to spend more of our time together.

It’s been a wonderful spring. I’ve been in Maryland now since, oh, about mid-March, and it’s the first spring I’ve seen in twelve years that has gone from just sort of practically nothing, so the leaves not only being green but they’ve grown in size and changed in colors and there’s a subtlety to the shifting colors of spring that you don’t really get here. There is a spring here, but it’s nothing like going from all bare to all green in a fairly short amount of time. So the weather’s been gorgeous, and I’m going on Tuesday up to the cabin in Vermont that my father built for me when I was seventeen or something like that.

Oh, wow.

I’ll get us started moving in, and Judy will come up when she’s done with her work down there in Maryland, and we’ll spend another summer there, which will be my—started in 1949 to now, what, sixty-third summer or something like that in Vermont.

Wow. Amazing.

When I’m in the country anyway. Some years I’ve not been in the country at all, but every summer I’ve been in the States I’ve been in Vermont for part of it. So we’re looking back to sort of continuing the things we really like to do.

You’ve lived in a lot of very different places, very, very diverse array of places. What’s been your feeling about Los Angeles?

I’d say one of the challenges, one of the problems with the last twelve years is that I haven’t really lived anywhere. I’ve been here when I’m working, and I work and I live right next to campus in a faculty apartment, so I was really in Westwood, and it’s been a great place to live for lots of music. The university is great, and I know very little about the city. I mean, I’ve explored the city a little. I’ve been to a few clubs and music performances and a little bit of touring, but I haven’t really explored the city. I’ve gone on hikes around the mountains and things like that. But probably I could have all done that in one year if I’d been living here, and it’s been twelve.

So all I can say is I think it’s an amazing city, a very vibrant place with lots of small communities in it. I don’t know. It’s a lot of different cities. I mean, it’s so spread out and it’s so big and there are lots of different communities all over. It’s an interesting place to live. It’s very interesting to be in a place where you have to decide what the traffic’s like before you decide when you’re going to schedule something. So your decision to see somebody in the middle of the day or late at night is determined because of the traffic, not because of the convenience of anybody’s thing. So there are some very interesting infrastructural things about this that you can sort of look at and say, well, the reason life is like this is because, and the reason I can give a class at these times is because those people can get to it, that are different from teaching in a small town somewhere or teaching in Bloomington, Indiana, where everybody could bicycle to the place in ten minutes, practically, from where anybody would be living. So it’s an interesting place. My students have done some great research in it, and I’ve learned a lot about some wonderful people in it. But otherwise, that’s one of the things I can’t say. I can’t say I know much about the city, except for what I read in the daily paper. Of course I read the L.A. Times every day. Annapolis I know about from reading the daily paper in Annapolis when I’m there. There’s an Annapolis daily paper as well as The Washington Post. But I haven’t really explored either, and so maybe one of the benefits of actually living in one place again will be that I’ll be able to explore more about the place where I actually am, and not just the ethnomusicology of the place where I am.

And you have a daughter who lives out here.

We have two daughters, and one lives out here.

Where are they now?

The older one lives in Washington, D.C. She works for a large investment bank called KKR and is in charge of sustainable initiatives. She was in environmental studies at the University of Chicago, and then after working for NGOs for a few years decided that decisions in this country about the environment and things that impact that the environment are not being made by lawyers, they’re not being made by scientists, they’re really being made by business, who then tell the lawyers what to do and then they suppress the findings of the scientists. So really businesses, at least when she was looking at it, people were advising her not to become a lawyer. They were advising her—no one was telling her not to become a scientist, but she didn’t think that was very interesting either. So she decided to go put herself through business school to learn the language of business with respect to environmental issues, and so she went to Wharton, and they did a nice job, and she did a nice job. So she’s got a very interesting position now. Who knows where it’s going to take her, but she’s enjoying it very much and flying all over the world talking about it and looking at places that are doing things and setting up policies. So she’s been very successful.

How much do you think her experience being part of your fieldwork entered into her decision about that?

Quite a lot. For one thing, she was born in Brazil, and so she has dual citizenship. Secondly, the experience with the Suyá tremendously had a huge impact on her. It had some impact as a kid, but when she went back as a teenager and since then. She came back with me last in 2010 and went back with me. It’s had a large impact on the way she thinks about the world and things, and she has seen such amazing huge transformations there, too, with the arrival of ranches and soybean cultivation and literacy and all kinds of things. So this certainly has been profoundly important for her. Our other daughter is Hileia. She’s two years younger than Elisa, and she is a geriatric social worker here in Los Angeles. She decided, after taking a year off after college, that she didn’t want to go to graduate school to get an advanced degree in something and become a professor. Neither of them had any intention of becoming professors. When you’re a child of two professors, you either love it or you think it really is something you probably don’t want to do. But she did this, and she wanted to do something that would actually help people directly, and so she looked at social work, and she looked specifically at geriatric social work, because clearly if you’re looking at a place where there might be a job, there’s an amazingly large number of older people who are going to be needing more help. So if you’re looking at a growing field, there’s a growing field. The other areas of social work, which include helping the drug addicts—and I mean, there are lots of people who need help—some of those are much harder on you than others, and she thought she could manage the kinds of stress that come up with dealing with people that you only get referred to when they’re going to die pretty soon, no matter how nice they are. That means so that it is hard. It’s not easy to be a geriatric social worker.

Right.

But she thought she could manage that, and she has been extremely successful at it. She’s just gone from one promotion to another and is now supervising. She made a choice very much living in Los Angeles and especially likes the Westside and especially Santa Monica. She finds Santa Monica to be a very agreeable place where even though she’s a fairly well-paid social worker, she totally qualified for public housing, because you don’t get paid much.

That’s for sure, yes.

So the two of them, we’re really proud of them. We’re proud of their commitment to doing things that make a difference to people in different ways, but they both are in jobs where they’re in the front line of making a difference. They’re both very smart. They’re both Phi Beta Kappa. Neither of us were, so they’re ahead of us on that score. They’re just wonderful people, so it’s one of the great pleasures of growing older is seeing your children grow up. And another great pleasure is seeing your students blossom and become full professors of their own, with generations of students of their own. I feel sort of at this part of my life that it’s a wonderful moment in some respects just to see that happen for such a long period of time. I have many students and two wonderful children. But I’ve also reached the stage where a lot of us are beginning to die, and that’s a different moment. I mean, here I am retiring, but not all of my colleagues who are my age are retiring. I’ve lost some very dear friends in Brazil and the United States, who simply have died of various diseases, and I’m losing students who are dying, which is also very sad and just as sad, in a sense, as losing a child who dies is losing a student who you cared deeply about and thought were making wonderful contributions die before their time, if there is ever a time. Certainly before they’ve retired is before their time. And that’s happening with a number of students in Brazil. So it’s bittersweet, and I remember my Grandfather Charles saying that at some point you get admired simply because you survived. So I’m not a great scholar, I’m just the last one standing. That was a little false. But he certainly was the last one standing, and he lost a great deal of his friends, and I think you get lonesome in your older age, though he had a prolific correspondence and was giving lectures and died with an article in the typewriter. So he was active intellectually until the day he died. My father said the same thing. He said, “You know, all of your friends die or move away into retirement homes, and here we are living in the country, and all of a sudden we don’t have any friends anymore. How do we keep getting new friends?” He asked me once, “Could you tell me how to tell jokes? I’m not a very funny person.” I said, “I can buy you books, but I’m not a great joke teller either.” I don’t think our family tells jokes very well. So he said, “What am I going to do? How am I going to replace these dying friends?” It was a challenge for him, but he found ways to keep some friends, and I imagine that that’s a phase of life that will happen for me too.

I think those of us who are in a profession have the advantage of a whole lot of colleagues that aren’t necessarily living near us but who we’ve met many times over the years and whose ideas we admire and who can get together with as we get older and enjoy each other’s company, even though we weren’t roommates in college or something, even though they can move away and we’re still close. And you know, who knows, maybe the Internet’s going to help us old folks, too, as time goes on, where we can actually keep in touch with people without actually having to move to see where they are. But I think aging provides new challenges and perhaps it will provide new perspectives on my own field research and new perspectives on the field itself of ethnomusicology. And if so, I hope I’m alive to be able to write about them or talk about them.

[laughs] Right. Is there anything we haven’t talked about that you’d really like to cover and get in the record right now while you have the chance?

Let me just think for—why don’t you give it a pause. [interruption]

I think not only have I said it all, but I’ve ended it in such a sort of grandiose sort of concluding set of phrases that I hate to break the pattern by saying anything else except for thank you very much for your patience.

Oh, it was my pleasure.

My question to you, is there any question you wished you’d asked that you haven’t, that I haven’t given you time to ask because I’ve talked nonstop?

[laughs] Every one of these sessions could have been hours long, as far as I’m concerned, and we would not have run out of things to discuss, and it would have been just completely important and interesting throughout. Ending these sessions is always very difficult for me because it always feels incomplete, but I think you did put a nice piece of frosting on the process with that last observation.

Well, I do feel badly that I didn’t mention all of my colleagues in the department. Tara Browner has been very important. We’ve collaborated on a number of things. I just got a flute lesson from her yesterday, actually, on the flute that she—

Oh, wow. Is this the cedar flute that she made?

—on the cedar flute she made for me.

Oh, wow.

I have worked with everybody, and I enjoy people, I enjoy departments, and I try not to get thrown by individual animosities, and just sort of take what’s best from everybody in every moment. I think I was criticized for always seeing the glass as half full by some people, but if you’re going to see it one way or another, I’ll take the half-full vision of the world—

[laughs] For sure.

—and work with it the way it is. I don’t think you can change people and structures completely, but you can help people work with them in such a way that a lot of really good things get done.

Wow. Good advice and a good way to live.

And a good time to turn off the tape recorder—

Good. Thank you.

—and celebrate the end of this series. Also I guess I’m about to return to Maryland, and I won’t come back until commencement, when I do plan to come back.

Well, it’s not long from now.

Not long from now. I really enjoy seeing the parents of students, and I worked a lot with the graduating undergraduate class, and quite a few of the graduate students are getting their degrees as well.

Well, cool. Well, on behalf of the Center for Oral History Research and personally speaking, myself, thank you very much for the time you devoted to this process and really appreciate everything that you offer. Thank you very much.

Thank you. [End of interview]