Episode #27: “The Ballad of Jesse James” watch and hear Craig Finn’s live 78

We’ve been quiet this winter, planning for the road ahead, and pausing momentarily to take in all the beauty of the last two years. They have been eventful and exciting, and full of singular moments like this one.

This video and acetate by Craig Finn were shot and recorded at our joyful homecoming screening at IFC Center in New York City last June. He closed out the night with his distinctive interpretation of “The Ballad of Jesse James.”

Craig told us all how he had been drawn to a particular phrase in the song – He’d a hand and a heart and a brain – and when he sang it that night, that phrase summed up the spirit of the song perfectly: the danger of the life of an outlaw and the love of a lost hero.


Craig Finn – “The Ballad of Jesse James”
Shot at IFC Center in New York City, June 4, 2015

Thank you again to IFC Center for being our generous hosts. 

Episode#26: The Spirit Music of Gerard Dupuy

Winter’s spirits are all around us, in the bare trees and the silent snow. It brings to mind the spirits we met during our time in Louisiana and our unforgettable stay at the home of the musician Gerard Dupuy.

The following video of and writings about our time spent in Gerard’s generous company originally appeared in the Oxford American.

This article originally appeared in the Oxford American, May 2014.

The Spirit Music of Gerard Dupuy

Inspired by the field recordings of Alan Lomax, director/producer Alex Steyermark and producer/recordist Lavinia Jones Wright created The 78 Project, an ongoing documentary journey to record today’s musicians with yesterday’s technology. Using just one microphone, an authentic 1930′s PRESTO direct-to-disc recorder, and a blank lacquer disc, the musicians are invited to cut a record anywhere they choose. The result is an artifact—a 78rpm record—and a new connection to our cultural legacy. 78 Project participant Rosanne Cash called the experience “time-travel.” Click here for “Back to the Future,” author William Gibson’s introduction to the project. 

Last summer, The 78 Project visited southern Louisiana to film and record Cajun music at the source, as Lomax had done in the 1930s.


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“Bonjour! Comment ça va?”

The Cajun Stump Jumper starts each phone call in French, and laughs in a deep, delighted rattle when he realizes that his French is not understood.  Fifty percent of The 78 Project speaks French fluently, but that half is always driving.

He barrels on in English, inviting us—commanding us, really—to stay in his house. His wife will make us dinner and we’ll go for a ride in his truck, check out his old cabin from the 1920s. Every sentence comes through the phone with an infectious joie de vivre. “A little pleasure with our business!” he says twice.

Though well-spoken, Gerard Dupuy’s English—like his French—flirts with slang, and, perhaps as a result of his having taught Adult Education at Angola prison for 30 years, he can be disarmingly direct. His accent is bending, and the tone of his voice commands the mood of the conversation. Throughout most of the summer, Gerard has been painting his house. He’s not finished yet, he tells us, but it is pas de problem—we can come whenever we’d like if we just give him about a week’s notice. He’ll cancel that day’s painting. He gives us his address and two routes to his place. One, he says, is more scenic. Then he pauses for a moment, listening to someone else in the room with him. “My wife says you all gonna get lost.” He laughs. “Don’t use your GPS. It’ll get you to my place eventually, but it’ll take you through a swamp.  It’s pretty! But I don’t think you’d make it.”

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We meet Gerard at a scrapyard in Moncla, and follow him down a long dirt road to his house. “We’re the north fort of Cajun culture!” Gerard tells us, as he parks his truck to lead us across his lawn and into the kitchen, where he removes the tobacco pipe from his mouth and takes a drink of water.

Moncla is a tiny corner of the town of Marksville, located in the ankle crease of Louisiana’s boot. The seat of the Avoyelles Parish, Marksville is a late-eighteenth-century hub of immigration where French, French-Canadian, Spanish, African, and Native American people mingled together. When Gerard calls it the north fort, he’s referring to the fact that these days the hub of traditional Cajun music sits to the south, in and around Lafayette—where we spent the early part of our week—in the arch of the sole.

Nothing we saw around Lafayette is a more genuine piece of folk art than Gerard’s house.  As he leads us through it, he explains how he has constructed it over his lifetime, one winding and intuitive section at a time. It’s a glorious, rambling narrative, varied in material and construction. The top-floor landing is flooded in the colored light from a grand 5-foot stained-glass church window, as if the house has one steady, kaleidoscopic eye on the bayou.

Gerard, wanting to show us the rest of his property, offers to drive us along the Red River that scribbles its northern border. We climb into his truck, worn-out from years of off-roading and construction work. The heat is stuck on in the cab. There’s a trick to getting the door to shut. Bottles, knives, and tools rattle around on the dashboard, musical instruments bang around in the bed.

Words spill from Gerard in a continuous, melodic stream, as if his whole lifetime of stories sits spring-loaded at the front of his mind, ready to unwind for each new set of ears. Though he stands only around five feet, he is solidly built and incredibly strong. In driving, his movements are light, quick, and confident. When he talks, he looks back and forth between the road and our faces, the worn leather hat that has molded itself to the shape of his head accenting the gesture. His stature and style cut a profile eerily similar to what you might imagine his French ancestors looked like two hundred years ago. His precious fiddle lies across our laps and bangs our knees as we barrel over the ruts and dips in the dirt road.

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Louis Michot of the Lost Bayou Ramblers, who we recorded in Lafayette last week, recounted a story of his cousin in Marksville. He’s a fiddle player from the older generation, Louis said, and his signature is a Cyprus stump that he brings with him to gigs. He once saw Gerard fall back on the stump and continue playing wildly, rolling around, overcome, while his accordion player played on unfazed.

He’s the Cajun Stump Jumper, we said.

Cho! Co!

I didn’t know he was known that way!” Louis seemed excited at the new connection. “Just thought he was a guy who jumped a Cyprus stump.”

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Driving through the woods past his daughter’s house, Gerard asks us about our week in Louisiana so far. He wants to know about the young musicians we’ve seen and recorded in our travels around the country: from his own cousin Louis in Arnaudville to Sea of Bees in Sacramento, Little Wings in Topanga Canyon, Ella Mae Bowen in Nashville, Adam Arcuragi back home in New York, who Gerard knows from a bill they once shared in Marksville. We tell him we’ll record the band Feufollet in a few days in Lafayette.

The New Cajun is a culture of welcome. Welcome is what we have found everywhere. Xenophobic, insular culture, c’est passé. Today everyone can be Cajun. The young people of Louisiana tell us that they are learning to speak French by choice, learning accordion and fiddle out of respect for their heritage. For Alex, speaking the French of his mother’s Quebecois family each day is a deeply personal experience. And the curiosity of the musicians, their sincere eagerness to collaborate and share, is moving to us both. We all yearn to belong to something bigger than ourselves, and though each of our stories will be different, we are bonded by our journey to find them.

When we mention Feufollet, he wants to know what we know of the feux follets, the fires in the swamps; the little lights that some Cajuns believe lead you home and some believe lead you to mischief.

“Patchafa.” He says. He sees the lights sometimes, late at night. “Patchafa,” he repeats. “The swamp devil.” Gerard stops the truck periodically, grabs his fiddle, and jumps out to play it, trying the sounds everywhere, testing the air, singing a bit. His dogs, Hooch, Kijo and Gypsy, who’ve been following us, stop and wait patiently when he does this. Once Gerard feels satisfied, we move on.

Dupuy’s property is overgrown, and the road through it is worn with ruts so deep the truck gets stuck sometimes and we have to rock it out. He tells us the story of one Christmas when he was working at Angola and his truck got stuck in a snowdrift far out on the farm.  He had to radio for help and wait for the inmate on duty to come pull him out. Angola is a huge place, and he waited a long time in the dark.

We turn a bend in the road, and the 100-year-old wooden cabin appears. The forest around it crowds in close, but Gerard’s handiwork and love for the structure has kept it from being taken. He loans out the cabin for Civil War reenactments, he tells us. It doubles as a fort, and he doubles as a rebel (Dupuy’s grandfather was a Civil War soldier with a survival story that involved a hollow log and a spider web).

On the back porch we meet the famed Cyprus stump. Gerard shows us how it works, playing his fiddle while seated on the edge of it, stomping out a rhythm on a homemade pedal-and-pipe machine. He does not jump, the mood never reaches that pitch. It’s more of a mellow, early evening song.

Moving inside, he improvises a blues on guitar and harp.

Patchafa! The first will be last and the last will be first! 

He plays the whole house. The ceilings answer his feet on the floor. He is telling the story of our day so far, singing to the people and ideas that have passed through our conversation.

The song is done. A light rain starts to fall. A little look at the river, then it’s time to relax. A short mission into town and the truck is loaded with boudin, dried shrimp, Coors Light. He drives us up the levy road under a big moon as armadillos scurry to avoid the truck’s tires.

“What the shit you all doing on a back road in Louisiana right now, eh?” He chuckles.Gerard woods3Sml

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When the sun comes up, work begins on the house (Gerard is repainting) and the sounds of ladders hitting the wall wake the household. His energy is miraculous considering that 3 a.m. this morning had found us in the Fort DeRussy Cemetery, asking the advice of his spirit acquaintances.

Keep the lights on and the motor running. Watch out for loup-garou. Werewolf. Nous sommes invités.

This morning we are tired, but the night’s long efforts had paid off. Inspiration had struck! We would be ready to record tonight.  The reason for the song may have been discovered: Unpredictability is the key to survival. You have to unchord.

Today, before we make our record, Gerard wants to take us around town in the daylight, improvising our tour like he improvises his songs.  We take our little gray Kia and he sits shotgun, pointing out noteworthy places and announcing unscheduled stops. The car feels powered by his enthusiasm, guided by the track of his sweeping, looping narration. “That’s the oldest establishment in town, there! You like crab burgers? Let’s get us some!”
Gerard asks us a lot of questions about New York. He wants to know about Coney Island and the Bronx, Hurricane Sandy and September 11th. He wants to know about our backyard gardens at home—what do we grow? His memory is fantastic and he can converse on almost any topic. There is a hunger to know, to relate.  He hasn’t travelled much, besides a recent music-driven pilgrimage to France, but he knows about people.

Gerard tells us repeatedly, jovially, that he is not technically Cajun or Acadian. Nor is he, technically, Creole. He identifies most as French Colonial, his ancestors having come to the area in the 1700s and maintained their European cultural ties. It’s the reason that the trip to France, which he mentions often, was so meaningful for him. And he has an intense pride and interest in Civil War stories. He feels the importance of his people choosing to fight in a war to defend a land they had only newly adopted as their own. In his mind, he is a Frenchman who fought for the South.

He takes us to the nearby public wildlife refuge so we can see the gnarled Cyprus roots, the swamp weeds, the alligators. We watch a gator slowly stalk a bird, gliding toward it like a log. Gerard bends down to the water to wiggle his fingers below its surface. Can it be safe to be so close to the water with gators in it? We’ve hiked down the embankment to the water with him. “They’re timid. Timid,” he declares. “Till you draw blood.”

In the car as we head back to his house to record, he’s pensive, a little tired from the three hours of sleep. He says very little for the first time since we’ve been with him. In the heat and the tiring light of the Louisiana afternoon he suddenly seems his age.

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We return to the house and start to set up. Gerard naps, briefly, and returns to the kitchen recharged and smartly dressed in a clean black t-shirt, blue jeans, and boots. The weariness of the afternoon is gone like a mirage.  His hat, his constant companion, sits with integrity at the top of the new outfit.  His performance attire.

He is far away again, somewhere just distantly off this plane of existence, not quite in our reality now, ready to converse with his French Colonial ancestors and whatever other spirits might be out tonight.

We have set up in his music room, attached to the kitchen by two French doors, and he joins us there, taking a look at the Presto, and then wandering over to inspect his bass, guitar, and fiddle to see which is speaking to him. As he tries each one in turn, he explains that his intention when he plays is usually to affect the experience of the room as a whole. To create a common experience.  He explains that he can’t know what we’re thinking about as we’re listening, just as we cannot be privy to what he’s thinking about when he’s playing.

“But at least I’m controlling the feelings with the vibrations.”

The first song he calls an interpretation of a traditional Cajun Mardi Gras captain’s call, the other is an improvisation. Both are completely dragged into being on the spot and neither contains a trace of traditional song structure.

Gerard plays the instruments by bowing them at various levels of tension and hitting them with short lengths of PVC piping. He slides the short pipe between the strings of the bull fiddle and bows it until it emits a high-pitched, faraway moan. Wind through a reed. His shredded bow draws rhythmically across the low, coiled strings. They tremble with the intensity of the gesture and respond, quivering at his beckoning.

“Mardi Gras!” He hollers. He waits, then hollers more. He is invoking. Defante! Defan Pauvre! He seems to say. Nous sommes en d’oeuille. We are in mourning.
His music tonight is a war chant, an exorcism, a question to the universe about what’s just beyond the furthest reaches of our sense of sight and sound.  The spirituality it expresses exists beside and beyond the Catholic pageantry of his French ancestry, the scholarly Mormonism of his wife, the witchy Voodoo of the swamp woods all around.

Dit mon la verite’!

It feels like a new religion he is inventing on the spot. There seems to be no bottom to it, no satisfying finish possible once things have gotten this far away from the ground, but the songs eventually conclude. They must. The record is full and the Presto switches off.

He is back in the room.

“Great spirit,” he says. “Uncharted waters, man.”

“Farther Along” by The National Reserve – Happy Holidays from The 78 Project

CSqt14VXIAIW5a8Family is always on our minds this time of year, as it was for Sean Walsh of the National Reserve when we cut a record together at this year’s AES convention. Sean and Roy Williams joined us this Fall to record our last 78 of 2015, choosing the hymn “Farther Along” to honor a beloved family member of Sean’s.

We hope yore having a warm and happy Holiday Season with your family close at hand and at heart.

 

 

 

The National Reserve

“Down in the Willow Garden” – Hear Honus Honus’ 78

A confession may come with remorse, but not always. HonusHonus.02+And a murder ballad, though its murderer is long since buried, can still feel full of menace.
Honus Honus was not one to let a listener off the hook when he performed “Down in the Willow Garden”, smuggling the song’s jagged edge in behind a playful keyboard riff.HonusHonus.16+

Our first road trip was just beginning when Honus Honus invited us over to a friend’s home in Philadelphia. The setting was perfectly evocative and we were all eager to cut a record. But this time the tale of woe wasn’t just in the song. The dead of summer proved to be the death of Presto #1.

A tense few moments passed as we worked away. Off came the platter, the belt, the tubes.
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Honus Honus waited patiently by with his accomplice Kara Nelson. When at last the disc was spinning, their gruesome tale began in terrible perfection. 

 

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The 78 Project Movie Out Now on DVD

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We’re thrilled to announce that The 78 Project Movie is out on special edition DVD with over 30 minutes of bonus materials. Beginning today you can purchase the DVD in The 78 Project Shop or find it in your local independent record store.

The 78 Project Movie and bonus materials are also now available to stream online on Vimeo On Demand and VHX TV in rental and purchase packages and deluxe Soundtrack bundles.

The 78 Project Movie is the acclaimed feature length movie of our road trip across America to cut 78rpm records with musicians in their homes and hometowns on a 1930’s Presto. The DVD and digital releases include 19 extraordinary never-before-seen musical performances, are packed with fascinating and fun historical info, and come loaded with over 30 minutes of new bonus materials – including complete performances by John Reilly & Tom Brosseau, Star & Micey and Victoria Williams and never-before-seen interview footage.

Running time: 95 mins + 30 mins of Bonus Content

The 78 Project Movie DVD in The 78 Project Shop

“The 78 Project grabs American music by the roots.”
USA Today
 
“A one-of-a-kind documentary that is part road movie,
part concert film, and part journey through the past.”

The Commercial Appeal Memphis
 
“For fans of pure recording and its history, it’s compelling and informative.” 
Billboard SXSW: The Fest’s Top Films

 

“Rises above simple vintage worship and does more than just glorify
the past – it helps us experience it.”

The Village Voice

“The ineffable romance of old recordings makes for magic…ripe with wonder.”
The Austin Chronicle

Buy or Rent The 78 Project Movie online

Watch the movie online now with never-before-seen bonus footage and complete musical performances.

We’ve been looking forward to this day, and now it’s here! The 78 Project Movie is available to buy or rent online starting today. We’ve added bonus footage and complete performances and soundtrack bundles to make your movie experience even sweeter. Find the movie by clicking the button below or go to the78projectmovie.vhx.tv.

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The 78 Project Movie will screen at IFC Center in NYC on June 4!

With a live 78 recording with special guest Craig Finn of The Hold Steady after the movie!

The 78 Project Movie
at IFC Center

Thursday, June 4
8pm
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave at W. Third Street
We’ll be there for Q&A!

We’ve spent a lot of days on the road this year, screening The 78 Project Movie in dozens of cities on our Nationwide Theatrical Release Tour. All the while we were eagerly awaiting the day we’d get to show it at home again. Which is why we’re so thrilled that IFC Center in New York City will host our homecoming screening on June 4th. And we couldn’t be happier to announce that Craig Finn of The Hold Steady will join us to cut a 78rpm record live at IFC Center after the screening.

It’s a special occasion when The 78 Project Movie is playing in New York.  Don’t miss this chance to see it on the big screen!

Tickets are now available on the IFC Center Website, and at the theater box office.

 

** Pre-screening Happy Hour at Goorin Bros Nolita **

Join us before the show at Goorin Bros Nolita Shop! Our great friends there will be hosting a special happy hour to celebrate The 78 Project Movie homecoming. Come for cocktails and great discounts on their fantastic hats.

 

The 78 Project Movie + Goorin Bros Happy Hour
June 4, 2015 5pm-8pm
Goorin Bros Nolita Shop
26 Prince St
New York, NY 10012

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Episode #25: “O Bli Hos Meg” watch and hear Sondre Lerche’s 78 cut at Rough Trade on Record Store Day

We were the grateful guests of Rough Trade in Brooklyn this past Record Store Day, assembling in the afternoon with Sondre Lerche and his guitar in the store’s balcony to cut a record as part of their day-long celebration. In the din of a day of loud fun at Rough Trade, the folks who had gathered to watch Sondre record, stood perfectly still. He sang delicately, letting the space close in around him, the walls creep closer to listen. As we watched, we were taken in, the song became an urgent lullaby.

Sondre Lerche – “O Bli Hos Meg”
Shot at Rough Trade NYC, Brooklyn, NY, April 2015

Thank you again to our great friends at Rough Trade NYC. We’ll never stop singing your praises.

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