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Gamboling With Gamble Rogers

Itinerant south-central Florida troubadour ain’t no Rodgers and Hammerstein

Yet the New York Public Library lovingly preserves his songs and yarns, from ‘Habersham County Mephistopheles’ to ‘Bovine Midwifery’

Spoilers: His father swam at Dartmouth; His grand-uncle designed Yale’s library; He became a kind of folk-song Faulkner after drinking with the man himself at U. Va., just as Stephen Malkmus might have done.

By Chandler Fritz

The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound contains over half a million physical recordings stored in individually labeled slipcases so as to be easily retrieved by the hard-working archivists at the New York Public Library. The archive contains recordings of Billy Sunday preaching sermons, Irving Berlin singing his own songs, and Toscanini performing at the Metropolitan Opera. It is named after Richard Charles Rodgers and Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II, a New York-born songwriting duo who made a gazillion dollars creating Broadway hits set in places where neither man had ever traveled, such as Oklahoma!, a musical about a farm town in which the biggest word used by any of the hick characters is “Oklahoma” (unless you include compound words, such as “smart-alecky”). The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives is also home to a rare 12-inch LP titled Sorry Is As Sorry Does, recorded in 1986 by the itinerant postwar troubadour Gamble Rogers, five years before his sudden …

Concert

Richard Thompson and Friends

Being a folk singer means being a home to all the people who sing through you

The universe wants us to jubilate

Folk genius fills a ballroom in seedy, smelly New Jersey

By Noah Rawlings

Some of the oldest written music was melismatic. Melisma — that’s an oozy, radiant musicological word for the technique of singing multiple notes to articulate a single syllable. Think of Joni Mitchell’s sudden soaring on Blue’s penultimate track: I could drink a case of youuu-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oO-OO-Oo, darling — shooting the one-syllable you to the sky with eight extra tones. Think of the vocal acrobatics of a circa-2007 American Idol contestant, or of Bach’s Mass in G Major: Gloria. One word. Three syllables. 21 notes. That’s melisma. Early Christian mystics felt melisma to be the ultimate externalization of spiritual feeling, an irrepressible gushing of holiness. Medieval monks called it “jubilated singing.” Sometimes jubilated singing meant one word was sung with 300 notes. St. Augustine called it “the expression of a mind poured forth in joy.” Augustine’s view proved tenacious. Over time, the tie between joy and jubilating grew so tight that the two terms effectively fused, …