Just in time for Hanukah Christmas Boxing Day Yuletide Jonkonnu New Years Eve ! Manny Festo and his Lonesome Silver Tea Drinkers present Hele Bleter / Bright Leaves.
What are Bright Leaves?
Emily Alice Katz: In 1881, a group of New York-based, Yiddish-speaking immigrants arrived in Durham, NC, at James Buchanan Duke's invitation. Their task: to roll cigarettes, train local workers—men, women, and children—in the skill, and help Duke corner the burgeoning market on this new tobacco fad. Under the banner of the Knights of Labor, these men sought better working conditions and the right to organize in alliance with their fellow white and Black tobacco workers. But Buck Duke sowed distrust among the locals for these Jewish outsiders and the movement failed; all but a handful of the 125 Jewish cigarette rollers had left town for good by 1886. This song dwells in the moment of possibility before this unhappy ending.
Chorus:
Bright leaves bring quick money
Poor souls, what an awful world
Verses:
Dear brothers, come here
Hear the news
Where and who
Workers all, come here
Black and white
It's terribly hard
Little children, come here
Raw backs
Never again
Strong brothers, come here
Malicious bosses
Not a tear
Bloody leaves, unclean money
Fight back, brothers
A new world
Ending chorus:
Bloody leaves bring unclean money
Fight, sisters and brothers
Make a new world
The Last Wave of Klezmer Organology
Phil: Serendipitously, “bright leaves,” have been on my mind a lot this year. As we’ve seen in the Age of Night series, you could do worse than to make sense of the post-1492 Jewish diaspora through the lens of tobacco and the new social spaces it and other modern stimulants found itself in.
The North Carolina Piedmont, where this album was recorded, happens to be one of the capitals of that international bright leaf empire and was also a global epicenter of stringed-instrument fingerpicking. One of those traditions was the open-tuned parlor guitar, which could be found amongst the rural and urban, black and white, male and female, rich and poor, and which pioneered a down-home and amateur, but also internationally-minded, approach.
Etta Baker, who worked tobacco fields in her youth, and who I was lucky enough to meet briefly before she died, played in this style, amongst others.1 She was a major influence on my much more inferior offerings, and I first heard her on the record pictured above (and below, redesigned cover).
Summary: The klezmer guitar presents an alternate way of looking at our current notions of authenticity, whose returns are diminishing rapidly. The beauty of klezmer guitar is that it is not really a tradition at all. It was deliberately not adopted for this music. Therefore to play it is to conjure the complicated and conflicted historical ghosts of Klezmer Past and to choose a different path, one that looks beyond musical nationalism and towards creating modern situations for conviviality. This path is one that was blazed by transnational weirdos but subsequently adopted by everyday folks, like Etta Baker, Joel Rubin’s grandfather or Raisa Koppelberg (pictured below).
If we’re honest, this is the path many of us who play klezmer are already on, we just don’t claim it. But we should. Our motives are worthy and there is no need to be imposters. You don’t need to play the guitar to do this- you just have to see the history of klezmer from the point of view of the guitar, the parlor (or salon or boardwalk or front porch), the democratic and the everyday.
The classical guitar-based method that one finds taught overwhelmingly at current klezmer workshops is no more historically accurate than this down-home parlor tradition, which has centuries-long roots in the Americas as well as Eastern Europe. The classical guitar method simply has one thing the other tradition doesn’t- respectability- a respectability that, I argue, is based on assumptions about class and gender that are obsolete. More importantly, contra Segovia, neither does it present more creative or social possibilities. I may not be the best player of it, and certainly am not the first, but it deserves more love.
Also, old time klezmer harmonica.
What About The Freaky Track?
Emily: [I] arranged fragments of text from Ashkenazi Herbalism. That is: I used the methods of erasure poetry to scrape away most of the text in a particular chapter to reveal bones and fragments left behind.
Phil: Avant-gardening!
Anything Else?
I’m putting this out there so folks can give it a listen if they wanna- no need to buy it really! Buying bandcamp albums is a little silly I guess,- you can always just listen to it.
Thanks to Dan Partridge for dragging the saw out of the shed. He’s always super fun to play with. Check out his other music. And of course, thanks to Emily. Finally, this album is dedicated to Elliott Mills, who hated playing this music so much he died to get out of it. Just kidding, Elliott was a great source of encouragement, which actually changed my life. I’m eternally grateful for the time I got to spend with him. Here he is, deep into his 80s, kicking my over-playing guitar-center ass with nothing but a snare.
Sadly, Etta Baker’s artistry was suppressed for most of her life, a sign of the ongoing obstacles to everyday culture.