History Mixtapes
History Mixtapes explores how music and history intertwine. We will explore how the past can come alive by using music as a primary source, but also think about how listening to music and musical exploration can help us see the past through different lenses and lead us into new ways of connecting. We all tell stories with music: in playlists or mix tapes or other myriad mechanisms. And no one puts their story -- or the past's story -- to the same soundtrack.
History Mixtapes
HISTORY MIXTAPES - Joshua Greenberg
In Episode 2 of History Mixtapes, historian Joshua Greenberg discusses how his research unfolds in conversation with music. Check out his playlist here and stay tuned for more news about History Mixtapes!
Welcome to the History Mixtapes, a podcast about when music and history meet. I'm Katherine Ray Juul, historian of the business and politics of culture and author of live from the underground, a history of college radio. And the first episode I talked with Kevin Kruse, a former college DJ, like myself to think about how to approach this podcast series. We came up with a few ideas, which I have now implemented. In each episode, I ask my guests to make a mix tape. And part one, they tell a story with a mix tape, whether is it about their research, their writing process, or the themes and topics that drive them to study the past. In part two, they suggest a pairing of songs that gets at a tension or a dissonance. And in true Genex material culture style, I give them a chance to enter bonus tracks in the mixed tape. If it makes sense. In this episode, Joshua Greenberg presents a vastly different relationship to music and his research process. Then either Kevin or I have. Neither of us can listen to music with words while we write. But as you'll see, in this episode, Josh develops his relationship to his early American and 19th century topics about labor, family, and money in conversation with the music he listens to.
Joshua Greenberg:Hi, I'm Joshua Greenberg. I'm the editor of Commonplace, the Journal of Early American Life. I was previously a professor at Bridgewater State University, and I've written some books about labor and paper money and things like that. When I started, I was technically a labor historian. I was working on labor and gender issues and then the focus on money, which is what I've been doing recently, comes out of the labor story. So that all fits together in my mind, but I guess it's economics and capitalism and all that jazz.
Kate Jewell:So you've got this interest in money and labor and the 19th century, but who are you as a music fan?
Joshua Greenberg:Music is a big part of my family. My grandfather was the president of Savoy Records for about 40 years. The stories I got from my grandfather were unbelievable. I was very close with him and would ask him questions about people he had interacted with. He was an A& R guy and a producer and a songwriter while being the president of Savoy Records for decades. His story was amazing and I got to learn a lot about the music industry via these stories that I would hear from him. I grew up in New Jersey, very close to New York. So you spend a lot of time going to New York, but I grew up in West Orange, New Jersey, and right next to West Orange was East Orange, where at the time there was a college called Uppsala College, which had WFMU and WFMU was my local station. I grew up listening to WFMU and you hearing college radio from when I was a little kid as well. That was another entry point and from there, I just always have had music on. Even my original Library of Congress I. D. card photo from my 1st year of graduates school, I have earphones around my neck that I had just taken off when I had entered the Library of Congress.
Before we dig into Joshua's totally contradictory relationship to music from my own, while researching or writing. I had to knew more about his grandfather's experience at Savoy records. So voice is a legendary label for jazz, blues, and gospel artists. They recorded Charlie Parker, miles Davis, Dexter Gordon, as well as avant-garde artists from sun RA, Archie Shepp and Valdo Williams.
Joshua Greenberg:What I always found fascinating about my grandfather's story and the history of Savoy was that it had changed as a label over time. It went from being a jazz label to a blues label to eventually gospel. And by the time I was growing up, it was primarily a gospel label. And my grandfather, at that point, an older Jewish guy, was very influential in this world of gospel music, which I found fascinating. Just hearing the stories from the past about, these blues artists that he had worked with, Muddy Waters and Nappy Brown and Big Maybell and all those stories, to me were interesting and fascinating because I was not that interested in gospel, but I found the story of the transition and the different types of music that my grandfather had a hand in fascinating. And I think that was reflected in what I thought was cool as a little kid or a young person about college radio, which was that, depending on who was the DJ at that moment and what show was on, you got radically different things. It wasn't my dad's radio station that listening to the same 60s and 70s songs all the time. As a Gen X kid, you always want to be listening to things people don't know. So you could say, Oh, did you hear this random B side of this thing that you don't know? I know this thing. That's very Gen X of us. And so, learning all these obscure EPS and things like that was, I thought, you know, cool. I think I felt the same way about learning some of these things from my grandfather. No one I knew knew anything about the blues or 1950s jazz or things like that. And so even having an interest in that as a 13, 14 year old was unusual.
Kate Jewell:I remember when I got into the blues in high school and it was like I might as well have been into an obscure punk band, like nobody had Robert Johnson and King Biscuit to Hour Radio stuff on their radar. It was like a weird thing to be into. But I have to ask, what's one of the best stories from your grandfather?
Joshua Greenberg:So my grandfather was an amazingly straight laced guy. And he told me the story once. So he had a very close working relationship with Big Maybelle. If you know anything about Big Maybelle, her name was Mabel Smith, and then my grandfather was the one that came up with the Big Maybelle name for her. And he was telling me a story about how they were once in, I think they were in Cincinnati, Louisville, I wish I could remember now, it was a long time ago. They were somewhere in the Midwest, they were in a city. And it's a very late at night, and she's about to go on, and she was a heroin addict. And my grandfather was very much not into anything. He was the most straight laced guy, and she is asking him to go find her some heroin and he's sort of sitting there. He said, trying to figure out like, oh, I don't know where to get heroin in Louisville. It's like 2 o'clock in the morning and he's telling me the story and I could just picture him all frazzled and he's telling me the story obviously, decades later, But it came out as quite just a hilarious story and my grandmother would always hear his stories to be like, Oh, don't tell that story," It was just an amazing thing. She also, she was my old Jewish grandmother, but then you find out, well, back in the thirties, she was a Rockette as well. And so they, they had all these really wild stories about their past, but I knew them as my Jewish grandparents.
Kate Jewell:Obviously, I had to know more. And asking Josh for more detail about how his grandparents ended up in entertainment. He told me the lovely story of how they met.
Joshua Greenberg:I was looking at old newspapers and I found some pictures of her when she's about 17 as part of a dance troupe in Texas. She had gone down there on her own at 17 and was dancing. She later danced for Billy Rose and was a Rockette. He was working, and went into eat lunch at a dinette or something like this. And he was looking at one of these magazines, you know, ladies of Broadway kind of thing. And the woman at the counter says,"Oh, you see that woman there" and points to a picture and says,"do you think she's cute?" And he says,"Oh yeah, of course she's cute." And she says, oh, you do you want to meet her?" And it turns out that it was a picture of my grandmother that he was looking at. And the woman at the counter was my grandmother's best friend. And my grandmother happened to just be in the back of the dinette hanging out with her friend. And so she just sets them up and then they meet and that's it. So they were both in that world. And in the 40s and the 50s they lived this interesting life.
Kate Jewell:So I tasked you, and everybody on this podcast to make me a history mixtape. So what's the story you're telling and what does each song take us through?
Joshua Greenberg:I was listening to your conversation with Kevin Kruse, and one of the things that jumped out at me is that you mentioned that you don't listen to music when you're writing. And for me, I have to be listening to music when I'm writing. If I'm reading, I might put on only instrumental music, but if I'm writing, I have to have music with words. And when I'm listening to music, it's actually helping me organize my thoughts because the hardest part of writing for me is always organization. I always have, like everyone, massive amounts of data and you found all these quotes and you found all this stuff, but how are you going to organize this conversation? And it is my endless struggle to figure out, for both of the books I have written, how to organize all this information, which is way too much for the space you have. Songs for me and music have often been ways that I've thought about trying to come up with organizational structures, or a line in a song may help trigger some idea for me. And because I'm working on 19th century topics, usually these are not necessarily literal songs that are telling me one thing, but it's somehow related or metaphorical or just triggering the thought in my head. So the first song I wanted to start out with is a song by Bow Wow Wow. Uh, one of my favorites. They have a song called Work, W period, O period, R period, K period, and then has a very long parenthetical, no, no, my dad, you don't, whatever. The song is very much about, people not working hard and trying to avoid work and technology ruining employment opportunities and things like this, labor and family and technology, which is very much in a weird way about what the first book I ever wrote in my dissertation were about. My first book was called Advocating the Man, and it's about organized labor and masculinity in New York City in the early 19th century. One of the struggles I had was trying to figure out, well, I know the, the players, I know the story, I know these organizations I'm talking about, but how do I wanna organize this? And I was listening to that Bow Wow song. It had been released in the early eighties, but then it, in the nineties, it came back on a compilation that they had released. And so it was in my frequently listened to playlist in the mid to late nineties as I was working on my dissertation. And I've spent weeks trying to figure out if I could have each chapter of the dissertation be related to a line in the song
Kate Jewell:Huh.
Joshua Greenberg:Eventually this didn't exactly work, but it it oh it almost worked. There's a line about my daddy don't work and that and there's another line about technology is the demolition of daddy. There's another one that says, uh, work is not the golden rule. School is not the golden rule. There's a line about demolition of the work ethic and one about bosses can reverse all the rules. And this way of thinking about what families are doing and education, which I have a whole chapter on the Working Men's Party in New York City and their educational platform. I believe that if you could find a model for organization that made sense within a song, it may help make sense of this material. I didn't exactly get there, but the quest to do this was actually very helpful to me because it was helping to separate what different ideas were in the research and how I wanted to talk about them separately. Issues of family life might be over here issues of how technology at the workplace is working over here. I didn't know how to unpack these things. And listening to a Bow Wow Wow song was helping me crystallize these ideas. I know none of this actually makes sense to anyone outside my brain, but I think that's part of the story, which is that you can listen to a song, by Bow Wow Wow and it's somehow trigger something in your mind that helps crystallize something about the Working Men's Party 200 years earlier. And that's, you know, interesting,
Kate Jewell:Yeah. I mean, when you first said structure, I was thinking like,"Oh, he's using like the ABBA," like structure, literal structure, outlining structure to think about it. But that's actually much more of a, connection the way we structure these experiences of work into art and in some ways you were doing a similar creative act rendering this human experience into a creative form that was engaging with that artistically or creatively.
Joshua Greenberg:And that was really important to me. I mean, central to the whole project was the idea of getting away from class consciousness and what had been at the time traditional views of early organized labor. I was attempting to tell a story about organized labor from the household outward and from the family outward. That's the whole premise of the book. What does it mean for organized labor if the individuals involved are husbands and fathers.
Kate Jewell:As historians, we oftentimes are so caught up in the intellectual problem of what it is we're doing or the scientific problem of getting our sources and organizing them in certain ways and having these very structured conversations that are dictated by the norms of the profession, and we forget to think about ourselves as creators and people engaging in this other level of inquiry and conceptualization. So now I'm intrigued that you've got me. You've got me into the subject through Bow Wow Wow. Where are we going next?
Joshua Greenberg:Well, now we have to go to Johnny Cash because somehow Johnny Cash should always wind up either on a playlist or playlist adjacent. I always have to remember that I'm not a beautiful writer, but one thing that I like to do is both organize things really well, as you can gather from the first song, um, But also insert humor whenever I can. Humor is a big part of how I think about the world. It's a big part about how I think about history. And so I don't want to forget about humor when I'm talking about these issues. The next song Johnny Cash's"1 piece at a time," is both a very funny song, but also one about the work ethic and capitalist alienation, which is what's going on in the book. For those people that don't know"One Piece at a Time," Johnny Cash is narrating a story where he's gone to Detroit and gotten a job at a Cadillac factory and he decides that he would like to have a Cadillac, but he obviously can't afford a Cadillac. So he decides that he what he's going to do is steal every piece he needs to build the Cadillac one piece at a time, and he's going to slowly sneak them out of work his lunch box. And then later, he has a friend's motor home that they figure out that can take some of the larger parts. And over the next 2 decades he's grabbing pieces so that he can bring them home and assemble a Cadillac by himself. One of the lines in the middle of the song that's repeated over and over is"I'd get it one piece of the time and it wouldn't cost me a dime." He's stealing from work, and it gets even funnier later in the story when he's trying to put the pieces together and he realizes they don't actually fit together because since it took him decades they're different models of Cadillac. So he only has an engine from 1 year, but then he tries to attach it to other things and they don't fit. So he has to drill holes in and it's a big mess. And there's another line in here where, again, on the capitalist alienation part, and I know people think I'm sort of nuts here, but the line is"I never considered myself a thief, but GM wouldn't miss just one little piece." What the corporation is, it's profits and his role as an employee of GM doesn't really matter. It's about him stealing and assembling this this Cadillac and at the end his wife wants him to take him for a ride. They try to drive it. It starts falling apart. It's a big mess. He eventually goes into town to try and register the car and the joke is that the license is like 60 pages long because the model year for the car is 20 different years. It's funny, but it's telling a story about work, the importance of work or not to this guy, his relationship to his employer, the corporation, and it's doing so with unbelievable humor. I didn't want to forget that part of the story because when you're talking about organized labor, sometimes it gets very intense with within the historiography and it sucks the humanity out of it. And I, I didn't wanna forget about the humanity of the people involved in what I was talking about. So when these individuals form an organized labor union or a Workingman's political party in the 1830s, they're not forgetting about other parts of their life. They're all incorporated into one story.
Kate Jewell:Yeah, and there's an interesting irony within the story itself in the way that the worker is castigating the idea of the production process itself is absurd. At the moment that he's caught in a double bind within it that he wants to be a participant in this material world that he's creating, but the act of actually working there, it gives him no entry into it.
Joshua Greenberg:Right. And from a historian of capitalism perspective here, there's a very interesting line between this guy as a producer and a consumer, obviously, he very much both wants to see himself as a consumer and is really working to be a consumer. There's a song, by the band Metric called Handshakes, which has a line in it that goes, buy this car to drive to work, drive, uh, the work, drive to work to pay for this car," and it's that whole storyline wrapped up in that line from the Metric song, which is that your whole job is literally about paying for the car that you need just to make it to work. The other thing about, I should point out about this Johnny Cash song is I was re listening to it. It was reminding me of things--I hadn't heard it in quite a while--is at the time I was listening to this in late 90s, early 2000s, one of the bands I was listening to a bunch was the Reverend Horton Heat Johnny Cash describes the car and a couple of places in the song as a psycho Billy Cadillac. And I looked it up'cause I was like, I wonder if that it, it, it's, it's one of probably in music, the first u uses of the term psychobilly in, in terms of lyrics. And so at the time listening to a lot of Reverend Horton Heat and hearing that line, uh, it also sort of triggered something for it.
Kate Jewell:So we've got the structure of the ideas and we've got the voice and the humor. Where else are we going?
Joshua Greenberg:Where we're going from here is I, is in a sense more toward the second book project because I wanted to focus on a song by The National, called"Blood Buzz Ohio." When I was thinking about the prompt and thinking about the relationship between music and writing in my head, I wanted to cite Bloodbuzz Ohio because it has one line in it that is important to me and I find it both fascinating and amazing that you can be listening to a song and one line will just jump out at you and it will mean so much either to something that you're doing or you'll remember that one line for so long. I'm oddly not a person who's very good at recalling lyrics. I can sing along if the song is on, but I'm not the best person and just extemporaneously remembering an entire song. My daughter can do that. You give her one note and she can tell you the entire lyrics to any song that she knows and it's unbelievable. I don't do that. But there's a line in Bloodbuzz Ohio that says,"I still owe money to the money to the money I owe." And it's, it's the best, probably one line description of a song that came out around the Great Recession for the financial moment that the country was in. The song came out in what, 2009, 2010, right around there. It's very much a song of the Great Recession moment. This is when I was transitioning to the second book project, which is about paper money. It's about financial transactions and the movement of paper currency through the economy, monetary velocity and exchange. This one line encapsulated so beautifully that the money you owe is money that's owed, that's money, that's owed, and the connection and connection and connection, it summed up so well, what I was trying to wrap my head around as I was trying to trace that. The movement of random banknotes through the 19th century economy, which is what a lot of the 2nd book wound up doing, which is tracing banknote monetary exchange and how convoluted and how complex it was. And the line spoke to me over and over, even though it's 1 line in the song.
Kate Jewell:What I love about your work is the way that you show how financial literacy and literacy about currency becomes opaque to the ordinary person. In that moment of the financial crisis, I just remember going back to the Big Short where in that movie, they had to have a supermodel come in and explain these complicated financial concepts to the viewer so that they would understand what's happening in the movie. It makes me wonder, do you see that song as happening in a moment where we tune back in to, Hey, these financial structures actually have power in our lives. Or is it more that these things are out there and getting caught up into culture of a particular moments, particular ways, but they're always circulating.
Joshua Greenberg:Well, I think it's that the system has been constructed in a way, where things are purposefully hidden and the song and the line, I think, are a reminder you're connected to all these things, even though you don't know who or what they are, and you're not supposed to know. It's not really your job to know. And there's no expectation that you do know. The epilogue of the book, even though the book's about 19th century paper money, the epilogue is about. Crypto in the great recession, and I actually have a mention of Margot Robbie in the bathtub in that scene in
Kate Jewell:it was Margot Robbie.
Joshua Greenberg:Yeah, because it's such a powerful image and speaks to what I was, I'm talking about there, which is that wherein during the bank war in the 1830s, there is an expectation that even though everyone doesn't have equal information about what's going on, everyone should be familiar enough with what the bank war's about, that they can understand it, or if they picked up a newspaper and either they read it or someone read it to them, they'd know who the players are and, you know, maybe have a side that they're on in the bank war. Even if it's not the same side as their friends, they're on a side. By the time we're at the Great Recession, and obviously well before, there's absolutely no expectation that anyone understands banking or understands the currency system at all, unless you're a banker or someone who does this for a living. Even when the news tries to explain what the Fed, is doing, when the Fed is making a certain move through quantitative easing or whatever it's doing. These are words that don't mean anything to anyone, even when they're on the news. And you just have to, in, in a sense, put faith or not, in the government that it's doing the right thing. And obviously when a moment like the Great Recession hits, you don't have that faith anymore. This takes me to the last song in this section here, which is also related to financial information. It's a Built to Spill song. I saw Built to Spill the other night. I took my daughter to see a show in LA cause they're on a tour So there's a Built to Spill song, of course, it comes from an EP that you don't know about, but I'm going to tell you about. Uh, but, it's a song called,"When Not Being Stupid Is Not Enough." And it's one of my favorite Built to Spill songs. And The the main line in the song is that"just because you're not wrong doesn't mean that you're right." The idea here is that when you're in these financial transactions, about banknotes in the 19th century, it's an asymmetrical information moment, meaning that because the banknotes that people are using to pay for things don't have necessarily face value, there's a face value written on them, but they're not necessarily worth what it says. The person who is holding the note and trying to give it to the next person has way more information about the value of that note than the person they're handing it to because they know how much they got it for. The idea of having less information doesn't necessarily mean that you're stupid. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're not a sophisticated member in this economy. It just means that you have less information and asymmetrically bad information to the person that you're dealing with. And then you layer on top of that, all of the fraud that's going on, it makes all these transactions unbelievably fraught. And it's that moment of fraught financial transaction that's captured for me so well in that notion of, is this about intelligence or information or is it is it just about larger systemic things?
Kate Jewell:And so I'm wondering if you took up the charge of a song pairing that, and this comes from Kevin. This was not, I can blame him for making people pair some contrasting or corresponding songs,
Joshua Greenberg:I had a good pairing, at least in my mind. So the first song in the pair is Fugazi's"Five Corporations." And I'm pairing it with the Ani DiFranco version, and that's important, of"Which Side Are You On." Because"Which Side Are You On," is a labor folk song going all the way back to the 30s, but it's gone through a lot of iterations, and the lyrics change every time someone else does it. I love the Billy Bragg version more than the Ani DiFranco version, but it doesn't help in this pairing. The reason why I paired these two songs is that"Five Corporations" by Fugazi is very much a dark song about it's almost a fatalistic song about capitalism. It's about a small number of corporations gobbling up everything and consolidating more and more. And very much the conceit of the song, is that it's being done so slowly and so methodically that it seems natural. There's a line something about,"it's moving so slowly." It's like they belong and they've been here all along is I think the line. And so how natural and sinister, corporate consolidation and profit taking is, is the Fugazi conceit in"Five Corporations.""Which side are you on" is a labor protest song. It's about calling for action. It's about positivity in a sense, because it's about taking steps to thwart corporations. It's originally written as a protest song in Harlan County, Kentucky during the mine wars, the 1930s. The Ani DeFranco version, though, is written during the Obama years, and it's very much a call to vote for Obama for reelection. But it goes to say, they tried to steal elections. But the people have won because they voted, meaning I guess they voted in 2008 for Obama, and then they're going to win again. But, if they vote for Obama again in 2012, one of the lines is literally like, we voted out corporations and we've triumphed, or at least we've started to triumph. It's a call for action, but we're on the right path here. Looking back 12 years later, it's interesting to think about that moment, but at least in the way that she's taken that song and changed the lyrics, it's a hopeful anthem of fighting corporate greed and power.
Kate Jewell:What's so interesting about that too, is the way that people like Ian Mackay were forming basically alternative economies. They were dropping out of the music industry and at least in the early 80s and, around Discord Records, not opting in to anything about the corporate music industry, not even college radio. As he says, you couldn't even play most of our songs on college radio, but they weren't into that promotional game there. It was much more of a early 20th century radical re envisioning of society in which, it was anarchist in its orientation to the local, to dropping out of these systems. And then, on the other hand, you have, we can work within the system, the political game, if we just elect the right people and get the ideas out there, the system can work and that is the tension within the labor movement, we see these themes coming up over and over again, even among musicians who are doing the business of music but also commenting on politics.
Joshua Greenberg:Right. And of course, another layer to that is Fugazi being a Washington, D. C. band, and being in D. C. and seeing all this up close. I went to grad school at American in D. C., and in the years I was there over the summer, they had a concert series. There's a park very close to where American University is called Fort Reno. one of these old Civil War fort's that's a grass field now. There was a concert series there over the summer called Fort Reno concerts and there'd be random local bands playing free out in the field. And it was always amazing. And after classes, or after work, we would go and see the show. And then the way the concert series worked is that the last show of Fort Reno every year in those years was Fugazi. It was always the way to end the summer was that you'd go see Fugazi in Fort Reno. And again, it was free. It was out in the open. Everyone showed up. I think the last time I saw it, there was a torrential downpour where I don't even think they got to finish the show, but it was communal in that way that you're describing. They are not about the powers that be. That was their ethos and it was all happening within DC.
Kate Jewell:I'm wondering if at the end here, you want to throw in a bonus track, anything that you've thought of as we've been talking, or that didn't fit into your story that you think needs a mention
Joshua Greenberg:You and Kevin talked about teaching songs. And as a person who taught early American and 19th century history, I didn't have a lot of songs that I played in class. But I would, because I'm at least making jokes to myself while lecturing, I would often make references to music when I would lecture. As part of labor history I would always give a lecture talking about the apprentice journeyman, and master artisan system and what the difference is and how the whole artisan system works and the breakdown of the artisan system due to industrialization. And the joke I would always make about that was a reference to the Beastie Boys song, the"Skills to Pay the Bills," because I would describe journeymen as having the skills, but being unable to pay the bills. And that's why they were journeymen and not master artisans.
Kate Jewell:That's brilliant. I'm going to steal it Like, yeah, laughing to myself
Joshua Greenberg:The only way to do it.
Kate Jewell:Joshua Greenberg, thank you so much for doing this and for sharing your mixtape with us.
Joshua Greenberg:Thank you so much for having me. This has been a lot of fun.
Kate Jewell:I hope you've enjoyed today's episode of History Mixtapes with Joshua Greenberg. We are just getting started here and I have lots of ideas for episodes I want to record and things I want to ask the audience to share with us, but for now, if you would be so kind, please share our episodes and pass them along to anyone you think might appreciate a good mix tape. So I went to college at UC Santa Cruz. So we had a very good college radio station. KZSC was a great station. But I grew up on FMU and then I, you know, and then I would still listen to FMU because you could stream it now. I still listen to it all the time. My only time even approaching DJ level was that I ran the internal radio station at the Jewish summer camp that I worked at when I was in college.
Joshua Greenberg:not exactly the same thing, but, you know, they were, they were very confused by my song choices.
