DAVID GREENBERGER is the editor and publisher of "The Duplex Planet". An artist and musician, he also writes on music for "Pulse", "Spin", and other publications. His essays are regularly heard on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered".

Baseball caps

Baseball caps are doing phenomenal business. Take a look around you - you can't spit without hitting one. At their essence baseball caps address a well-articulated utilitarian purpose - to keep the sun out of one's eyes. It's a visor attached to a cap. However, that functional use has been superseded in recent years as the cap itself has become a billboard for everything from John Deere Tractors to Castle Rock Films. It's hard to find many companies or organizations of more than fifty people that don't have their logo emblazoned on headgear. And good luck finding a plain cap declaring absolutely nothing more than its mission to ceaselessly shield our eyes from the glare of our nearest star. However, that is not the problem. The problem is that blocking the sun and advertising have been joined by a third use. Mike Love, Ron Howard, Chevy Chase, and countless others on the visible front of our culture, regularly appear on talk shows wearing baseball caps. We all know they're bald. Wearing the caps not only violates the longstanding etiquette wherein men remove their hats indoors, but it also looks like a desperate ploy on their part to be seen as youthful working Joes. They should leave the cap in their dressing rooms and have someone in makeup powder their dome to cut down on the glare. They could also make an appointment and get fitted for a toupee, or - and this will take a bit longer - grow a comb-over. They're in the entertainment business, and the complex engineering of a comb-over is the very definition of entertainment. This nonchalant behavior is permeating nearly every social and civic gathering, from public school concerts to church bingo games. Not every man wearing a baseball cap indoors is bald, but they're all contributing to the devaluing of yet another aspect of our national aesthetic. We know the guys wearing obvious toupees are bald, but they at least made a financial commitment, without turning their foreheads into advertising space. Genetic destiny can only be properly hidden under a twelve dollar obscurant when outdoors. Men of little or no hair, please make a decision: either celebrate our robust economy with the purchase of a hairpiece or let your epidermal crown stand naked and proud.

"Goldene's Photo Album"

About twenty years ago I drove across the country. On my way back east I stopped in South Bend, Indiana to visit my grandmother, Goldene Greenberger. While there she got out a photo album and we looked at it together. It was filled with many familiar images, having often seen duplicates or related shots in my parent's scrapbooks while growing up. There were also quite a few unknown to me. For all of them she was giving me a running commentary on who was in each photo and what the event was. There were weddings, picnics and birthdays, uncles in uniform and babies in strollers, world travels and family visits. The photographs spanned most of the century up to that point. We encountered one photo which was taken on a merry-go-round in the early 1920s. She told me who everyone was in the photo, but was uncertain of two men - she knew the names for the two distant relatives, but could no longer recall which identity belonged to which man. We looked at the back of the photo and there was nothing written on it. I was quietly aghast - my tenuous and tangential relationship to these men was such that the only person anywhere who would know the answer to the question was the very person who was showing me the photo and no longer knew. This went against my desire for a neat and orderly world where systems run smoothly and information is in its proper place. But this mild panic of frustration was quickly replaced by something else - a calm accepting. For I realized that this forgetting was as it should be. What if we were to carry forward every bit of data from three and four generations back? There'd be no room to live our own lives in the present. The generation of my grandparent's parents is one I never knew. They were presented to me as photos and stories by those who actually did know them. The generation before that gets sketchier, there being perhaps no photos. Stories become anecdotes, which, going further back, fade away or get retold and become legends. And a legend is a poor vessel for carrying forward the smaller human movements that allow us to truly feel we know someone. We live in the information age but nothing can change the nature of how we connect with our family and our heritage and how much room we need to maneuver and engage our own lives in the present. I try to write the facts on the back of my photographs, but I also understand that a date and some names will not allow future generations to see what was going on outside the frame of the picture.

"Bird Wondering"

I'm not an ornithologist, but the other day I followed a bird for about 40 yards. I was only following by default, because I was walking along the sidewalk and this particular bird - I know it was a robin - was walking along in front of me. It wasn't walking so much as running, in order to move forward at the same speed I was or better. What got my attention was that the bird maintained its course down the sidewalk in front of me. At any moment I expected it to take flight, or divert from its course onto the adjoining lawn. But there it remained, running along leading a parade of me. Obviously, it was just trying to stay out of my jaws of death, or whatever danger it perceived I might be. Finally the sidewalk crossed a wide paved driveway and the bird turned ever-so-slightly to the right. It stood in the driveway as I continued straight along my way. Without trying to anthropomorphize too much, it occurred to me, perhaps the bird thought I had turned and it had outrun me. I don't know. As I continued walking to my office I thought about this incident. Perhaps the bird couldn't fly? Not at all likely, as our neighborhood sports a wealth of free-ranging cats and dogs. Any earthbound bird would do just as well to turn themselves over to the nearest feline, unless they'd really rather succumb to a heart attack while getting a crash course in fangs and claws. Why did the bird not fly? Clearly, I'm so used to the fact of a bird flying off as I stride down the sidewalk, that this deviation became the most bird-wondering I've ever done. As I walked and wondered, another thought struck me: that I was enjoying the wondering more than I cared to know the real answers to the questions. I'm sure there are people out there who could fully inform me about all this, but I'm also sure I'd remember more about the person who informs me, than the information about birds they'd provide me.

Alan Lomax: a radio script

HOST: intro MUSIC: Vol 3, track 8 ("Emmaline")

One room at the Association for Cultural Equity's office is temperature controlled. Step inside to the hum and feel of cooler air. Thousands of tapes line the walls of shelves. In this room is a world of music - prison work songs, mountain fiddle tunes, fandangos, calypsos, stornellos, ballads, laments and celebrations in dozens of different languages. One of the things all of these recordings have in common is that they were all performed for a small audience - sometimes just one man - and that man was Alan Lomax.

MUSIC: Vol 2, track 1 ("Old Joe Clark")

Lomax, now 82 years old, suffered a stroke a couple years ago. The projects are being carried out by a devoted circle of fellow ethno-musicologists, family, and a small staff. His passions for the music he spent a lifetime finding and recording never wavered. According to his sister Bess Lomax Hawes, and his daughter Anna Lomax Chairetakis:

ANNA: "He was always looking for something - there was a common thread of things that he was always looking for throughout his career. And also there were new things he was looking for at the same time."

BESS: "One of the interesting things about my brother is that he has just one or two or three real purposes - and he's had them since he was seventeen, and he's never much changed them. And one of them was giving, in every way possible, voice to the voiceless, to the people who couldn't ever get their ideas out. He thought that was the purpose of what he was doing. And he would do it on radio or he would come and take pictures, or he would record them, he would write books, he would get their life stories."

MUSIC: Vol 5, track 16 ("Dangerous Blues")

Alan's first work was with his father, the pioneering folklorist John Lomax. They embarked on recordings throughout the south, southwest, the Bahamas and Haiti for the Library of Congress. They recorded in southern prisons and work farms, believing that a rich trove of cultural heritage was to be found there. One of their excurions brought them to the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola, Louisiana where they met and recorded Hudie Ledbetter, known more commonly as Leadbelly.

BESS: Father was very admiring of black singers, and he was very interested in the oldest repertoire, and hopefully finding some of the slave repertoire, which had pretty much died out . His hypothesis was that if there were any songs from slavery being remembered they would be remembered in the prisons where the work gangs still worked in very much the same kind of conditions. And so he wrote letters to the governors of all the southern states and asked permission to go into the prison farms where outdoor group labor was still going on. And most of them gave it to him. He was a very respected southern scholar at that point. They thought it was kind of nutty, but they did let him go in.

MUSIC: Vol 5, track 8 ("Early in the Mornin'")

ANNA: "I think he and my grandfather came from a stock of very genial people. they're warm and they're kindly and really interested in other people, and that's just sort of a a basic characteristic. And they're great talkers. My grandfather was a great storyteller and he was extremely charming. My father always thought that he couldn't equal him, but he wasn't bad himself."

BESS: "My father was, philosophically speaking, a populist. He believed that the people of the United States were remarkable; that they had remarkable experiences of their own and that they had forged a great history, and they weren't gettin' enough time on the air, so to say - they were not able to speak what they knew because nobody was listening to them. And Alan picked that philosophy up very early."

MUSIC: Vol 3, track 10 ("Little Sally Walker")

After graduating from the University of Texas in the mid-thirties, Lomax became the head of the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress. Having started at a young age at his father's side, he was already perfectly suited to his life's work. He had discerning ears and an easy manner with a wide range of people.

ANNA: "He really was so brilliant at developing rapport with people and he really made an extreme effort to try and understand where they were coming from and what their music was all about, and I think that people respond to that tremendously."

BESS: "He has a remarkable ear, and even more remarkable musical memory. He remembers tunes in his head all the time. And it's made it possible for him to relate very quickly. When he hears somebody sing a song he can remember something he's heard that's very like that, even if it was from another country or somewhere else. He can move right into the style of the person he's talking to with great speed - I've seen him do it many, many times. He also has a facility of making people feel that this is really important, what they're doing, and so they should do it as well as they possibly can. And they really let loose every once in a while for him."

MUSIC: Vol 2, track 11 ("Fox Chase" - NOTE: fade up so the howling and dogyapping starts after the above text)

Making the best possible recording was of paramount importance to Lomax. He was one of the first to utilize stereo recording in the field. Indeed, some of what he was recording desperately needed the breadth that stereo provided.

MUSIC: Vol 1, track 21 ("Last Word on Copernicus")

Lomax also sought the best performance from the people he was recording. If need be, he'd have them start over again, or check their tuning.

ANNA: "Alan's style of doing field work was to look for the people that he felt were artistically the most brilliant, but also were the most representative of what he would call the deepest level of the culture."

MUSIC: Vol 4, track 16 ("My Lord Keeps a Record")

He wasn't only recording their songs, he was also capturing their stories and dreams. He was always after the voice of the individual more than the doctrine of history. He once said, "Oral history is not literal truth, it's the big dream."

ANNA: "It was the feelings behind things that really interested him themost - although he was interested in the stories that songs told."

MUSIC: Vol 1, track 15 ("Sink 'em Low" - NOTE: Use only the song, which comes in after spoken intro)

BESS: "He told me that there was a knock at his apartment door one day and he opened the door and there was Bessie Jones with a suitcase, and she said, "Alan, I decided to come up and tell you everything I know." And Alan said that she then proceeded to do that! (LAUGHS) Took her a number of weeks! (LAUGHS) "She saw it as keeping the record, for generations to come. I think an awful lot of performers felt that about Alan."

MUSIC: Sampler, track 4, ("The Titanic")

BESS: "Alan recorded her at great length, both when she was a member of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, and when she came to see him in New York." "She had known both her grandparents, maternal and paternal. They all remembered slavery and she came out of talking to her grandparents (aboutslavery) with a very strong conviction that the slaves at that time mayhave been fettered and put down, but they had retained their sense of dignity and who they were. And she said, "I'm proud of my foreparents. theyhad a hard road to hoe and they did it real well, as well as they could."

MUSIC: Vol 1, track 1 ("D Day")

BESS: "She was a very thoughtful woman. She had a great many ideas that grouped things together. She was an intellectual, she organized things in her mind. I always thought she was one of the most remarkable human beings I ever met."

MUSIC: Vol 6, track 1 ("Sheep, Sheep...")

ANNA: "He felt that just like in any other artistic tradition, like classical or otherwise, that the great artists needed to be identified and known and brought out so they could shine for everyone else." Pete Seeger once said, "Alan did not only collect - he preached and he converted. He focused on great singers and musicians and brought them to the attention of millions worldwide." That's the key here. Lomax was capturing the human spirit in song. He was working at a grass-roots level, recording people in their homes and their towns. And he wanted - and still wants - that human spirit to connect in a real way to other people in their homes and towns all over the world. The music moves us. and it moves us not only because the traditions it documents are disappearing -- but because it lives and breathes anew each time its heard.

MUSIC: Vol 2, track 17 ("Fly Around..." - NOTE: singing comes in afterabout 30 seconds, use some of that)

I'm David Greenberger

NOTE: ADDITIONAL MUSIC TRACK TO DROP IN SOMEWHERE: Vol 2, track 10 ("Sally Anne", solo banjo)