I'm far from a veteran, in the sense of expert, when it comes to the local folk music theme. However, another family, the Pinneys, pivotal in transforming Stark Street facility into a real Quaker meetinghouse, knows the folk music scene inside-out, and Sonya, the matriarch Pinney, personally invited me to this elite gathering at Reedwood Friends Church. I was more than happy to accept her extra ticket and perform as chauffeur, a preferred role.
Bobby Jenkins, far different from me, is indeed an expert, both in the lore surrounding, and in the playing, of folk music using authentic folk instruments, in the string family especially I gather, including the Theremin (a "stringless" violin). Tonight he featured the banjo and the classical guitar. He would return both instruments adroitly as a part of the performance, as the range of tunes he was covering were by now means all designed for the same scales. If that sounds like I know music theory, trust me, I'm faking it.
Jenkins leverages the fact that he doesn't need to masquerade in blackface and come off like a phony white person pretending to be otherwise (whites are good at that, like parrots or minah birds, just witness their stand up comics). He knows Portland really well and had QuarterWorld in mind for his destination after the show, as he's a connoisseur of pop culture and knows what Portland is known for. The guy is originally from Brooklyn NYC, with those famous STEM schools, but with a lot of North Carolina background.
The narrative he delivered, which I found no reason to contradict, was that what we call the banjo was primarily a slave class instrument, and its vocabulary, in terms of native tunes, turns towards the defiant, as well as the encrypted. African cultures needed to find a way to self perpetuate, despite the imposition of a Christian framework, which they learned to adapt towards their own purposes, all of which accounts for the vitality of the all-Americas music scene to this day (Bobby knows a lot about the evolution of Reggae).
The audience, unlike me, were indeed veterans of the folk music scene, many like my friend Sonya with season tickets and a long track record of getting educated along these lines, by a variety of accomplished shows on the road. I'm reminded of the Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture Series, produced by ISEPP, where I was a veteran, in terms of how a certain "trans-episodic shoptalk" bleeds through. That's a fancy way of saying insiders seem to know what they're talking about, whereas as outsiders within hearing distance (like children peripheral to the council of elders) pick up on what they glean and formulate their own conjectures and speculations.
Now that slavery and apartheid have ended, although we'll continue paying karmic costs, it pays to go back and do what the Civil Rights Institute in Bellingham does: revisit the past in meticulous detail. Overcoming a chapter does not mean turning one's back on the content, but rather diving in with gusto, without the polarizations of the past. Novel perspectives, low hanging fruit, is easy to come by, another way of saying such scholarship is rewarding. Jenkins, highly skilled, even brings some of the higher hanging fruit within the comprehension range of a noob such as myself.
I was surprised to learn from Sonya about the death of one of my peers in Quaker-verse, Laura Martin. The Martins, along with the Pinneys, Jumps, Urners, and Hazel Hephill, were among the original families of our nascent Quaker meeting on Stark Street. As we awaited the show starting, sitting in those Reedwood pews (I don't access this space very often), I shared with Sonya our saga as I'd come to learn it, about the heroic exploits of one Doug Strain, the conscientious objector who helped our Quakers get their show on the road back in the mid 1900s. The Urners had recently moved from 57th Street Meeting in Chicago, their new son (me) in tow.
Bobby's performance reminded me of Dan Ryan's. Dan would specialize in offbeat blues bordering on what never made it on the record, again inheriting bigly from slave subcultures in the north American southeast, around the Mississippi Delta and so on.
