Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs Read online

  I’ve been running all my life.

  * * *

  Notes

  27 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1947).

  28 For a precise and technical analyses of ideology and its functioning, see Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London, UK: New Left Books, 1971). See also Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999); Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 2, no. 2 (1985): 91-114; Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York, NY: Verso, 1989).

  29 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1964).

  30 See Erin Morton, For Folk’s Sake: Art and Economy in Twentieth-Century Nova Scotia, (Montreal, QC: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd Edition (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001); or Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Routledge, 2003).

  31 In fact, the box fell onto the floor after I was already several steps past, on account, I believe, of having been filed away by my often too-hasty fellow intern, Steven. For rhetorical purposes, however, I have preferred the classical eureka moment metaphor and have evoked it often in my lectures and presentations.

  32 See, for example, Terry Seguin, Information Morning, CBC Radio One, 2003–Present, Fredericton.

  33 This rhetorical play is known by sociologists as the self-fulfilling prophecy: “If men [sic] define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas, The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs (New York, NY: Knopf, 1928), 571–572.

  34 In the Book of Revelation, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse burst onto Armageddon with well-known fury and energy. On the other hand, in Canadian football the “horsemen” instead clear a path for the kickoff or punt returner: after the ball is launched by a kicker, four players assemble—on some teams and at some levels even holding hands to establish their connectivity and immovableness—and then move forward with an unfathomable solidity and, but perhaps it is the same thing, solidarity. See Evelyn Bloch, The Language(s) of Canadian Sport(s) (Regina, SK: University of Regina Press, 1995).

  35 The first North American folklore department was established in Indiana in 1949. There are currently only two PhD programs in folklore in Canada, one of them focusing exclusively on Ukrainian folklore. For a personal, subjective analysis of the American context, see William A. Wilson, “Building Bridges: Folklore in the Academy,” Journal of Folklore Research 33, no. 1 (1996): 7–14.

  36 Paul Blackmore and Camille B. Kandiko, “Motivation in Academic Life: A Prestige Economy,” Research in Post-Compulsory Education 16, no. 4 (2011): 399–411.

  37 It is clear, then, that the folk music revival was a distinctly international movement. To scratch the surface of this complexity, see Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Ronald D. Cohen and Rachel Clare Donaldson, Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014); Gillian Mitchell, The North American Folk Revival: Nation and Identity in the United States and Canada, 1945-1980 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Pub, 2016).

  38 See Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Cybernetics and the Making of a Global Proletariat,” The Political Economy of Communication 4, no. 1 (2016): 35–65.

  39 The cimbalom is an ancient Eastern European folk piano. Rather than pressing keys, the player strikes the strings directly with mallets. For a history of this fascinating tool, see Jesse A. Johnston, “The Cimbál (Cimbalom) and Folk Music in Moravian Slovakia and Valachia,” Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society 36 (2010): 78–117. Politran’s cimbalom weighed hundreds of pounds and required five people to move—which, in Gannat, often included me.

  40 “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, Volume 5 (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1976), 47. Although technically they were professional musicians, the gutterality and irrepressibility of Peter’s and Josef’s voices taught me about this category of collectivist liberty months before I was to encounter young Marx’s words.

  41 The (intentional) paucity of information regarding where and when, exactly, Livingston recorded each song in his Sessions is in no way ameliorated in the case of the French-language performances; French-Canadian football players are as likely to be playing for Montreal as, for example, Vancouver. Charles Gluck, “‘Drop-Kick Me, Jesus’: Religion, Faith, Language, and Ethnicity in the Canadian Football League,” The International Journal of the History of Sports 19, no. 10 (2002): 1374–1397.

  42 According to Marxist geographer David Harvey, “time-space compression” describes the complex socio-historical transformations wrought by the emergence the post-Fordist paradigm and its correspondingly flexible techniques of capital accumulation. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (New York, NY: Blackwell, 1989), 284–307.

  43 One of the most incisive critiques of which remains the following succinct statement by musician Big Bill Broonzy: “I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing ’em.” Big Bill Broonzy quoted in Robin D. G. Kelley, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Folk,’” The American Historical Review 97, no. 5 (1992): 1403.

  44 See Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Daily Life (Norwell, MA: Anchor Books, 1959).

  45 Regretfully, I made a tactical blunder by attempting to woo a redheaded Finnish kantele player who turned out to be a Pentecostal fundamentalist. “All I need is Jesus,” beautiful Päivi said when, after a week of flirtation and long walks through the countryside, I had found an opportunity for us to kiss. See Kimberly Ervin Alexander, “Pentacostal Women: Chosen for an Exalted Destiny,” Theology Today 68, no. 4 (2012): 404–412.

  46 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Shorcken Books, 1968), 253–264.

  47 See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan press, 1994).

  48 My interpreters deploying Propp’s Morphology may wish to draw their attention to the villainy or lacking motifs, in which the hero discovers that they are suddenly without a key potion or weapon at a decisive moment. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folk Tale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin, TX: University of Austin Press, 1968), 30–36.

  49 Which clearly foreshadows my looming vocational transition, given the significance of the “cold black stream” in Canadian folkloristics. See, for example, Edith Fowke, Lumbering Songs from the Northern Woods (Toronto, ON: NC Press, 1985).

  50 “In literature the term [synesthesia] is applied to descriptions of one kind of sensation in another.” M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Seventh Edition (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1985), 315. In folk song, however, as my experience attests, synesthetic perception is possible without any descriptions at all.

  51 During the 1960s and 1970s, there were two CFL teams who incorporated “rough riding” into their brand—the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Ottawa Rough Riders. In fact, the Rough Riders and the Roughriders coexisted in the Canadian Football League from 1958 until 1996 when the Ottawa team folded. They even faced off in the 1976 Grey Cup championship game, with the Rough Riders out-steering the Roughriders 23-20. It is considered by many to have been the most exciting game in CFL history, and, by
me, as the most beautiful. It is also the final CFL game that Staunton R. Livingston would have been able to watch in his short life.

  52 The “chop” or “cut” block is a specific technique in the game of Canadian football whereby the blocking player directs their energy downwards—to the thigh, knee, shin, or ankle region of the defender. This move is particularly useful for players who lack size or strength in comparison to the opposing player whose path they are striving to obstruct. Due to the high level of injury risk involved in chopping or cutting, the NFL has banned the practice since the 2016–2017 season. See Danny Kelly, “Here’s What the NFL’s New Chop Block Rule Really Means,” SBNation.com, March 23, 2016. It remains common and legal, however, in the Canadian Football League, so long as performed within particular parameters, which I do not have the space to explore here.

  53 See, respectively, Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1984); Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1977); Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1983); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, NY: Pantheon Books, 1978); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York, NY: Routledge, 1979); Jacques Lacan, Écrits (Milton: Taylor & Francis, 2012); Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York, NY: International Publishers, 1971).

  54 This might be read in one of two ways. First, there was a generous pragmatism brewing in my thinking as I became initiated into the university life, an openness to practically infinite ways of doing and being. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). And second, there was an irrepressible independence, a constant refusal to be contained or controlled by any one tradition or school. See Jeremiah 2:20, New International Version.

  55 I often wondered whether this basement had not been used primarily for archaic hazing practices, which are forms of folklore in their own right. Jay Mechling, “Is Hazing Play?,” Transactions at Play 9 (2009): 45–61.

  56 My maternal grandfather was a farmer, as well as a tall and brawny man; earlier that spring, upon his passing, I had inherited from him a large plastic bag full of rustic clothes, which became my primary garments from 2006–12. Albeit unawares, I would therefore come to participate in a longstanding tradition: See M.A. Kucherskaya, “Wearing Folk Costumes as a Mimetic Practice in Russian Ethnographic Field Studies,” Archaeology, Ethnology & Anthropology of Eurasia 47, no. 1 (2019): 127–136.

  57 Although his recent publication history was scant, Bronnley had made a name for himself with a widely cited essay on the performative conventions of televised celebrity talk show programs. Cameron Bronnley, “Hi, Dave: Repetition, Reversal, and Dialogism on Late-Night TV,” Cultural and Social Texts 32, no. 3 (1991): 1204–1227.

  58 Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

  59 G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Peter Fuss and John Dobbins (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019)

  60 The first text along these lines that Bronnley suggested, if memory serves, is Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

  61 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (Evanston, IL: University if Illinois Press, 1973). See also, for example, Simon Frith, “‘The Magic That Can Set You Free’: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock Community,” Popular Music 1 (1981): 159–68; Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York, NY: Routledge, 1992); Alison Hearn, “John, A 20-year-old Boston Native with a Great Sense of Humour: On the Spectacularization of the Self and the Incorporation of Identity in the Age of Reality Television,” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 2, no. 2 (2006): 131-147; Keir Keightley, “Reconsidering Rock,” in The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, eds. Simon Frith, William Straw, John Street (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 109–142; Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1974).

  62 See also Jody Berland, North of Empire: Essays on the Cultural Technologies of Space (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Richard Dyer, Stars (London: British Film Institute, 1979); Paul Gilroy, “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987); P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

  63 In addition to letting you substitute pancakes for toast, at Campus Hi-Fi they always had a pleasant mix of classic rock hits playing softly on the stereo. On the relationship between place and broadcast radio, see Jody Berland, “Radio Space and Industrial Time: Music Formats, Local Narratives and Technological Mediation,” Popular Music 9.2 (1990): 179–192.

  64 Of course, although they can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, these sentiments are not uncommon in the Canadian folklore scene. Dale Ricks, for example, often decries the “noises” encountered in the urban song-collecting milieu. E.g., Dale Ricks, “Some Songs of Winnipeg,” Canadian Journal of Folkloristics 103, no. 1 (2012): 51-72. Unlike Ricks, I am at least trying to be honest, self-reflexive, and ultimately critical about this shared positionality.

  65 Another fortuitous bit of foreshadowing, given the centrality of ghost stories within Canadian folklore. See, for instance, Helen Creighton, Bluenose Ghosts (Toronto, ON: Ryerson University Press, 1957).

  66 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–252.

  67 Poles of modernity known in sociology as Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft. Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, trans. Jose Harris and Margaret Hollis (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  68 My denticles departed as the result of a sucker punch earlier that year, in February, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I was in a heated argument with the friend I was visiting at the time, regarding the correct definition and application of defamiliarization. I stared at my friend and said, “I dare you to hit me,” in response to which he exited the public house. Minutes later, although I was sitting peacefully on a barstool, unprotected and unbraced, I found myself suddenly on the floor: a sidewinding hook, ex nihilo. Coincidentally, I remembered later that the line—“I dare you to hit me”—is something that, as a boy, I had heard one of my father’s old football buddies recount while telling a story about their roughhousing days. I’m not sure why it came to me then, but it is fascinating, indeed, the power that folk songs and stories have to shape our minds and worlds—and mouths. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1972).

  69 Jacques Derrida has offered a name for this hot affliction: “archive fever.” Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

  70 Nonetheless, I was defiant in my right to acquire infinite texts from the library, rhetorically asking the circulation desk attendant, after his sassy reprimand, whether he would like also to make comments about my usage of the postal system. It is important that citizens in a democratic society have free access to clear channels of communication. Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New York, NY: The New Press, 2016).
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  71 I drew in particular on Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

  72 Paradigms are static, seemingly universal structures, but only until they crumble back to dust, from which new paradigms often emerge after either prolonged or brief—though often bloody—battle. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962).

  73 The offense is only given three opportunities or “downs” to advance ten yards, at which point, if successful, they receive a new set of downs. If unsuccessful, the other team’s offense assumes control. In American football there are four downs. Anonymous, “Down (Gridiron Football),” Wikipedia.

  74 In Canadian college and professional football, the field is significantly larger than in the American variation, by 10 yards in length and 11.67 yards in width. See Anonymous, “Canadian Football Field,” Wikipedia; Anonymous, “American Football Field,” Wikipedia.

  75 There are currently only nine teams in total.

  76 This is perhaps, at time of writing, no longer true. See Robert Sparks, “‘Delivering the Male’: Sports, Canadian Television, and the Making of TSN,” Canadian Journal of Communication 17, no. 3 (1992): 319–342.