Songs Don't Die - Fall Newsletter 2021

    It's possible that from a playground song I learned which words to leave out. Here's the song in question:
 

    Miss Susie had a steamboat the steamboat had a bell, Miss Susie went to heaven, the steamboat wen to Hell-O operator, please give me number nine, and if you disconnect me, I’ll chop off your behind the ‘fridgerator there sat a piece of glass, Miss Susie sat upon it and broke her little ask me no more questions, I’ll tell you no more lies, the boys are in the bathroom zipping up their flies are in the meadow, the bees are in the park, Miss Susie and her boyfriend are kissing in the D-A-R-K D-A-R-K Dark, Dark, Dark. The Dark is like a movie the movie’s like a show the show is just like Nick-at-Nite and that is all I know I know my ma, I know I know my pa, I know I know my sister with a 40-acre bra.
 

    Then the memory deteriorates.

    Please give me a nickel?

    Please give me a dime?

    Something about a motorcycle, or a car, or a boyfriend?
 

    Or are these different lyrics, the folksongs of America regurgitating endlessly in my memory? How do I know I know the words? I understand this song is how I learned what not to say. Instead of being spoken the bad words bleed into new sentences. If you pause too long you’ve said Ass, you’ve said Hell, you’ve said flies as in zippers. But there was one on the playground of Ordway Elementary who was not afraid to say swears and that was Aubrey Shepherd Smith and she said fuck.
 

    This was the worst word. I was terrified of the sound. Madison said it too after Aubrey. I couldn’t. I couldn’t form that morsel of language. It didn’t seem right. It was a curse. God would remember. But Aubrey’s family were Gods. Her uncle was in a band called Soundgarden, which, in that year, 1996 or 1997, would have been at an all time career fuck you high.
 

    This was the pacific northwest. There were badasses in the shadows. Cool kids on the back of the bus. Rollin’ down the street smoking Indo, sippin’ on gin and juice, laid back, got my mind on my money and my money on my mind. A boy sang this and others listened and learned, and learned, that this was cool. What was Indo? I knew what juice was. I thought I did. Came in a cardboard box with a straw.
 

    Sometimes I think about all that trash. What if everything I ever threw away showed up in the same house on the same day? What would I recognize? What would agonize me to see again? I think it’d be the simple fact of gross accumulation. This is what disturbed me most as an 18-year-old living in Bulgaria. There were piles of single-use plastic and garbage lining the highways and clogging the intersections going into villages. Ditches were dammed along the fields of shepherds. It was a country so unused to waste that it knew not how to hide it.

    Waste. Silences. I’m looking at you. When there is too much there is either an excess or you be quiet. What to do with the overflow. God what an annoying and impossible thing to even talk about.

    And that’s the very disturbance that brought me to my mom’s yearbook. The sense that her past on Bainbridge Island was hidden too well, and how could that be? How could she had undergone an existence here and leave so few traces of it? There was the yearbook, and there was the 1984 Bainbridge Island High School Senior Cruise VHS tape.
 

    My grandfather had a home video camera long before this was a normal practice. He was and documentary film-maker disguised as a general contractor and auto-mechanic. In the video, he’s on the senior cruise, interviewing the fresh graduates. I see my mom at 18. I see her friends and their hair, and how they used to move. I compare this with how they move now. I know them as adults. My mom and I grew up in the same down. I know the slanted road leading down to the public dock that’s in the video. I’ve been here many times. Or is it there? The ship pulls away and out into Eagle Harbor, and the graduates burst into a chorus of Help Me Rhonda. Did my grandfather egg them on? Or was this spontaneous?
 

    This song sticks with me as a child. Help Me, Rhonda. Who is Rhonda? How do the graduates know her? Why do they in 1984 all know this piece of music? I have no context. I’ve never heard the original version by The Beach Boys-
 

    but when I’m on the ferry with my girl scout troop, troop 133 in the back of an SUV, we listen to Oldies 97.3 fm and some how, we are all singing the words to songs from the 1950s and 60s which I have no recollection of hitherto hearing. I just know them. American music.
 

    My grandfather sticks me and my 2nd cousin in the backseat of a refurbished Model-T Ford. He is one of the premiere restorers of automobiles alive, in the world, today. Same one who made the home videos.
 

    Is part of my familial lineage an obsession with the refurbishment of the past? Or is that a general American Way? Anyway. I’m in the Ford.
 

    And we are going to a secret place in the farmlands around Kingston, Kitsap County, Washington. On the drive my 2nd cousin asks me, who is your favorite musical artist? I respond, J-Lo. I know I am being slightly disingenuous. I do like J-lo. Especially on the track popular at that time, featuring Ja Rule, I’m Real. But I am also saying J-Lo because I know it will make me sound cooler.
 

    I find great relief when we turn down the private lane, almost hidden in the tall grasses. The road winds until we reach an oasis. It’s a secret drive-in. A metallic diner lodged deep in this field. Brought here but someone else obsessed with maintaining this portion of history as a social club. Yes, my grandparents did literally meet at a drive-in like this in high school. We park in a slot flanked by vintage automobiles, which were so ubiquitous in my early life on account of my grandfather’s profession, that I really just believed they were everywhere.
 

    And we went into the diner, the My Girl Drive-In, and we bought milkshakes and sat in vinyl booths and watched an Elvis impersonator go through the motions. Rock n’ Roll played from the jukebox. I enjoyed the sounds I was hearing. This was different from my relationship to pop radio. There was no forcing the interest. A Marilyn Monroe impersonator also appeared. It was 2002, but part of us was stalled mid-century.
 

    It was even that way, it seemed, for the high school seniors, screaming ’84! and Help Me Rhonda! on the VHS tape I worshipped, watching over and over over childhood, trying to make tangible the stuff of my mother’s past.
 

    There was also her yearbook. These were hallowed pages full of clues. I came to know the high school seniors of 1984 almost like friends or deities. Their pictures, their senior quotes, their hairstyles are etched in my memory. For the most part, the images were glamour shots, stylized in the fashion of the time.
 

    But there was one at the end of the alphabet, who did not conform. He was called Andrew Wood. And the name of his first band, MLFNKSHN, was written in the space where his senior quote should go. His face was painted stark white. His eyes were rounded by dark paint and his mouth with black lipstick. His long blonde hair cascaded to his shoulders and led to a body just out of the frame.
 

    I asked my mother about Andy. Sometimes multiple times a day. She told me he was dead. He had become a rock star. She told me he didn’t say much in class, but every once in while, he’d raise his hand and say the most profound thing.
 

    The music of Mother Love Bone, is not my favorite, exactly, but the personage of Andy Wood, frontman, is. He died of a heroin overdose just before his band got big. But not before the release of a record which is considered the origin place of all Seattle grunge which followed it. Andy Wood is not well known, but his influence is extremely far-reaching.
 

    His blend of of glam and stadium rock - a football fan in lady’s clothing - howling long ballads into the furthest reaches of wet basements - is the stylistic foundation of the grunge genre which bloomed in his wake. And Andy dreamed it up on Bainbridge Island. He dreamed it up while in school with my mom. He’s not on the VHS tape of the senior cruise. He’s not on the boat. But he is somewhere, ephemeral, he lives on in the recordings- a song called called Chelsea Dancer, in the bleach blonde hair of Kurt Cobain, in the bandmates who dispersed after his death becoming Pearl Jam, becoming Temple of the Dog, brushing against Soundgarden whose code of coolness seeped to Aubrey and then into my ears the day she said fuck on the playground.
 

    Transmissions. An unbounded oral history that no one talks about. There is a connecting thread between times. This is what I believe. This why I am so disturbed by the idea that things can just be thrown away. Because it’s not true. Garbage is just buried. There are rusted out cars in the 2nd growth forests. Andy Wood lived here and we sing songs as we jump rope, clap hands. The radio transmits oldies and newbies alike. Shift the dial, mind on my money and money on my mind Rhonda you look so fine.
 

    I am so sure of the constant drone between generations. I am so sure that the chants of the graduates, ’84, ’84, ’84 were echoing still when in 2009 Lady Gaga howled Pokerface on the school bus as we waited to board to boat. This time I was graduating high school. It was my senior cruise. I coaxed the others around me into incantation, ’09 Box of Wine, ’09 Box of Wine.
 

    I chanted as through my grandfather was making a home video of the moment. One that my theoretical daughter would watch to learn how to be, how to speak, what to say, what to omit. I was chanting the way my mom’s generation taught me how. I was chanting as though I was part of something sonic and singular, and the waves crashed underneath the piers of so-called Elliot Bay, where for some generations, some of the population has pretended that when people die their songs die with them.

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Photo of Annie Ford and Melanie Curran by duskin drum

E Kreiz an Noz, Volkslieder, dxʷləšucid, Wind as Original Speaker, Circle Pits, Glottal Stop, Local Television, Rock n' Roll School Teachers, and Jack Kerouac's Hotel

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Jack Keroauc’s Hotel from my window…

It brings me great pleasure to write you, as I have been so inspired lately, with an imagination full to bursting. This newsletter is going to be longer than the others have been, with many links, anecdotes, and ideas. So curl up with your cup of nog, or other festive beverage of choice, and come along for a ride into the depths of my mind on Bretagne.

This story starts with the first Breton song I fell in love with, called E Kreiz ah Noz by Youenn Gwernig. I encountered it while listening to a youtube mix of Breton music that might have been created by the algorithm. Youenn Gwernig was a poet who had to leave his Breton homeland for work in America. While living in The Bronx, he befriended Jack Kerouac and some other beatniks. Jack (Jacques) Kerouac and Gwernig made good friends, as Kerouac became more interested in his own Breton ancestry.

A gentleman in the bar below my apartment tells me that Jack Kerouac, when he came to Bretagne to discover his roots, inspired by his pal Youenn Gwernig no doubt, stayed in the hotel down the street. Apparently Kerouac was drunk and dejected for his entire stay on my road, la rue Victor Hugo, and had no success in finding the meaning he sought. I feel lucky to be enmeshed in the spaces named for and shared by dead poets.

 I hope I can be a living poet though, and shed some light upon the also alive reality of Breton-ness. Breton is the language native to the place where I am in France, and bears no resemblance to French. Close linguistic relatives to Breton include Welsh, Cornish, and Gaelic Irish.

The language is considered ‘Endangered’ by UNESCO. Breton, like native North-American tongues, was forcefully forbade from being spoken in schools, and in public spaces, during the early half of the 20th century. These policies were a very effective way of taking Breton out of everyday life. I am a visitor to this part of the world in the decades following the Breton revival, which occurred hand-in-hand with the live amplification, and the recorded dissemination of Breton music during the 1960s and 70s.

A song is a welcoming thing, and thus it was the door I walked through when approaching the possibility of making the sounds of Breton myself. It is a language new to me as of this October. Each language is at its foundation musical, I believe, and each speaker of language is therefore a musician. If you don’t believe me, try speaking a sentence aloud, very slowly, while moving the tone of your voice up and down. Tell a story while doing this. This is how a song is created. Case closed.

So I hunkered down with the youtube video of E Kreiz an Noz, listened to it over and over again, used the slow-down feature to write down the lyrics phonetically, eventually committing the sounds as I heard them to my memory, until I was able to sing them back by heart, despite not really knowing what the words meant. Most Breton music, whether lyrical or instrumental is learned by ear, without tablature or written notation. E Kreiz an Noz, and Breton music in general, feels particularly accessible to me, as a person with very little formal musical training.

My life as a musician baffles me. My musicality “shouldn’t be”, according to the tenants of formal, western composition. And yet it is! As I reflect on my years making sounds wrongly, I realize how much of the music I know was learned by proximity to other musicians.

Just faking my way through Irish Trad Music Jam... Picture by Alexandre!

This summer, three high school friends and I visited a new exhibit at the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum in Washington State, where we grew up. Fearless Music “explores four decades (1980 - 2018) of a vibrant, independent music scene on Bainbridge Island”. The exhibit featured interviews and artifacts literally collected from the people I visited the exhibit with. A recording of Charlie talking about The Blood Barn played back from a speaker on the wall. A flyer with John’s face on it hung amongst others preserved from shows at the Bainbridge Grange. The ephemera of the music we made and danced to as teenagers stared back at us. As we walked out of the museum, one of us vocalized what we were all feeling. “Well, we’re history now”.

Was the museum wrong in creating boundaries around a time, and a movement? Was the existence of the exhibit itself the final death blow to it? Those who had created the exhibit had found that punk and DIY scene on our island had existed as a forty-year continuum. Now there was little to no sign of it occurring. This fact is corroborated by my younger siblings, who did not spend their weekends thrashing in moshpits, nor have the multifarious options to do so as I did. Commemorating the music now made sense.

The droning heavy metal, the circle pits, and the handmade fliers that accompanied performances which to me bordered on ritual, had fallen asleep, decomposed, gone back to the island whose boundaries created the conditions for a homemade creativity, as we were compelled to invent our own entertainment.

I watch videos of Bainbridge Island musicians from this period of "Fearless Music", online. The first takes place in 1983 or 84, and features frontman of Malfunksun, Andrew Wood, pandering to his audience. I write down what he says, as it seems to me a manifesto for the forty years that followed him: “We’re here. We’re not just going to let it go on like a little show. We want to see the whole place going wild like these smart people over here. Now you people, you’re wasting the floor! Go sit at the bar if you’re gonna do that. I want you to all sweat.”

His message is clear. Either you participate, or you get out of the way. Malfunkshun’s proto-grunge drone begins, and the people start to writhe. Another video exists from 1992, of a band called The Rickets playing at Island Center Hall on Bainbridge. The camera focuses less on the musicians and more on the audience, who appear between flashes of strobe, flailing their limbs in all directions as they run around in a circle, knocking into one another, bouncing off one another, becoming an extension of the music, which sounds a lot like the Malfunkshun song played ten years earlier.

From 2006-9, when I was in high school, I spent my Friday nights in that very same hall, making the very same motions, albeit in a smaller and more dense circular nebula of bodies, to bands that basically sounded the same as Malfunkshun or The Rickets. I didn’t know why we did what we were doing. Only now do I realize that these nights were manifestations of oral tradition, were intergenerational imitations, were expressions that adhere to the very definition of a regional music and dance.

Typical Herder.

 Maybe more specifically, to the first category of what a folk-music is, according to the person who invented the concept of folk-song in the first place. Johann Gottfried von Herder, a German philosopher and student of Emmanuel Kant, coins the term “folksong” with his 1778 classic, Volkslieder. The “most pure” version of folksongs, are “songs transmitted from generation to generation by the oral voice, amplified in the mouths of peasants, fishermen, etc.” (translation mine)

We teen folk of Bainbridge Isle, in the period from 1980-2018, were this “etc”.

The band I danced to then, WEEED, continues to play together now, and toured in Europe this (r)oc(k)tober. Afterwards, drummer Evan and his partner Claire came to visit me in Brest. We went to a small Fest Noz together. A Fest Noz is an event of Breton music and dance that takes place at night, and a Fest Deiz is the same thing, but in the day. Musicians play and/or sing Breton pieces, and a circle of people dance arm-in-arm, in coordination. This continues for hours.

At the Fest Noz, I watch as Evan records some of the music as a voice-memo on his phone. “This sounds exactly like a WEEED riff,” he says of the Breton melody.

Rolling around with Evan and Claire at Ateliers Capucins

 Interesting.

When I arrived at my first Fest Noz this September, I had the distinct feeling I’d been at something similar to it, before. The circle of bodies, the droning modal music, the cheap entry fee- it all felt so familiar somehow. As I walked into the mist down by the beach to reflect, I understood how the DIY musical renaissance in Bretange was, not only analogous to the homemade hardcore shows of my youth, the “fearless music” of my home island, but to square dances and honky tonk dances I have been playing and participating in for the last ten years of my life.
 

The Breton Beach of Pays Pagan

 I look up another video online. It’s a clip of my friend and bandmate Joanne Pontrello calling a square dance in the Tractor Tavern in Ballard, Washington while the Tallboys String-Band plays in 2011. The band only exists because the people dance. The people dance only because the band exists. Circles form, strings moan. Joanne directs.

Call this youtube spiral of mine extreme home-sickness, but it is also something else. Through the internet, I see myriad expressions of the regional creativity of the place I am from, and appreciate what I know and do not know about it. The Tallboys used to play at The Pike Place Market. I heard a reflection recently from writer Sean Jewell, that anyone who busks at the Pike Place Market long enough, develops a kind of grating voice as a device to cut through the sounds of crowds, fishmongers, and the downtown drone of vehicles. This vocal quality is evidenced clearly in a video of Baby Gramps from 1984. I am told that I too have developed this vocal quality, which is basically just abrasive projection. I am sure this comes from having had to scream at the market while playing music.

With Davey Haul at Pike Place Market in 2016 I think. Picture by Heather Littlefield!

  In the most mystical manifestation of a Christmas Miracle I could ever dream of, fish monger and proprietor of Jack’s Fish Spot in the Pike Place Market, Jack Mathers, has created this Christmas music video, “The Brand New Christmas”, which is filmed at the market, and features a wide variety of characters who hang around and work there. Jack has been the employer of least two generations of my family members, the Currans, so witnessing his creative output hits extremely close to home.

My mom wrote in our family text chain about Jack’s music video, “Now if that doesn’t get you in the Northwest Christmas spirit, u r NOT from the NW!” True. My sister wrote, “That’s the most Seattle thing I have ever seen. He even managed to make it 4:20 minutes long.” Which is remarkable, because the song itself only lasts 3 minutes and 40 seconds. My father writes one thing only: “Yes this is real”.

Although my father’s comment may seem redundant, the reality of the video’s reality, is something worthy of pointed focus. The Brand New Christmas is evidence that on December 19th, 2019, a regional, brand new, old school, low-budget, living folkloric creative entity thrived into digital existence, and defies the categorization of what traditional music even is.

When Herder decides in the late 1700s, who the real “Folk” are, he also does the initial work of removing the idea of these artists from the academy, the city, and the state progressing toward modernity. Herder was a romantic, in that he was a leading force of the romantic movement, which cast the “backwards country people” under a blanket of nostalgia.

Viewed from a place of remove by the experts, the “people” and their art forms always seem on the verge of disappearing. The authentic and pure forms of humanity, unsploit by modernity, are described in word that turns what is occurring right now, into already being history. Songs, poems, and stories are therefore relics, artifacts, excavated gems. In 1918, Breton music was described by a French intellectual Charles Quef, who came to the region to analyze Breton music:

“It is the Breton tenacity (proverbial in France) which has been able to preserve their precious and ancient artistic heritage almost intact and with many traces of its primitive origin. We must rejoice over this, for we are enabled by that tenacity (we might almost say stubbornness) to possess a jewel wherein we can admire one of the finest and most peculiar branches of the popular musical art of France.”

For hundreds of years now, the modern, advanced, knowing world has been making relics of very real, existing, arts of those tenacious enough to "preserve their precious and ancient artistic heritage."
 

Charles Quef, were you jealous? Were you unable to see yourself as other to something unknowable to you? Did it cross your mind that that jewel you possessed (Bretagne) might have had as much intellectual and creative power as anything you’d been touched by in your life? Did it hurt you to have this line of demarcation etched in your brain and heart? To believe so hard in the division, between the traditional, and its opposite, the now-happening?

I personally like to mess with “the traditional”, in terms of old-time music. Consider this term! Old Time. What time is that? When did it become old? This month I created a Youtube banjo video with my updated version of Fred Cockerham’s clawhammer hit from I think 1939, Roustabout, which is a tune that goes back even further in African American banjo music, first recorded by Dink Roberts, and Josh Thomas. I call my song Roustabout for the Modern Woman. In the same vein, I made a song/video a few years ago called Shady Grove for The Modern Woman.

I create these updated old-time songs mostly to entertain myself, but they function as resistance to the notion that a folksong lives in an imagined, and more authentic past.

Bretagne (Breizh) especially bears the brunt of being shrouded in a past tense by the outside world, that de-authenticates its current expressions. But they are alive! I will give you an example from a couple nights ago.

I am standing outside of a bar in Brest, talking to a couple guys in the rain. I ask them my usual questions. Are you musicians? Do you speak Breton? One of the guys says yes to both. Feeling particularly fearless (this moment brought to you by Correff Bio), I say that I know only one song in Breton. I proceed to sing E Kreiz ah Noz, the way I have learned it off of Youtube.

To my joy, he starts starts singing with me. I purposely slow my singing down, just a touch, so that I can echo his pronunciations. I self-correct in correlation with him, and learn a different way of making the sounds I thought I knew, kind of.

By having a living, breathing person in front of me, agreeing on the sounds in real time, making music in coordination, I sense the Breton language as not so endangered, but as manifesting in ways not yet considered active.

This person goes on to tell me that he himself has written a song in Breton, recently. It is about the first time a Jazz band to ever came to Europe. The band arrived by boat, here, in the harbor of Brest, he tells me, describing the arrival of a black band from America. He starts to sing his song. I recognize few words. “Jazz Afro-Americain”, and Brest, and a refrain of our/my Brest.

A song emerges that defies what an elderly archivist told me a couple months ago. If you are here to collect songs Melanie Curran, you don’t need to. All Breton folksongs have already been collected.

This is a traditionalist’s definition of tradition. I long for a more absurd definition or conceptual frame.

Ahem, for example:

The ideal field recording to me, is the one I made of the only Breton song I know, E Kreiz an Noz, being screamed by young drunk men on a shuttle bus at 6 in the morning, heading back to downtown Rennes.

In this field recording, captured on November 24th, 2019, one hears the lyrics of Bretagne’s Bob Dylan, Youenn Gwernig’s E Kreiz an Noz, being “butchered” by a very loud and passionate male. Others on the bus attempt to sing with him, while forgetting the lyrics. Other voices are heard speaking French, as the bus prepares to drop off its passengers from the night they have shared in an airplane hanger on the outskirts of the city. They were at The Largest Fest-Noz in Bretagne, Yaouank, which in Breton means “Youth”. Bretagne’s local television channel, France 3 Bretagne, created a 2 minute and 43 second spot on the event, and described it as having been “12 Hours of Dance”.

Such a huge event.

 At minute 1:10 in this video, a young male-appearing person in a tank top emerges on the screen. He is, in fact, someone I danced a waltz with that night. Of the Yaouank experience, he expresses the following sentiment for the news camera (translation mine): "I have the impression that life often lacks a social connection. And the fact that it is found here, with so many people, linked arm-in-arm- makes me see how it is missing the rest of the time. It reconnects our hearts, and it reconnects us to others.”

Scene.

Through channel France 3 Bretagne, Bretagne can see itself reflected as existing, although through a kind-of removed journalistic tone. The tone is like - wow! We can’t even believe all of these things are happening, right here in Bretagne! Even though we live here! There have been multiple times in the last couple months when I’ve met someone, googled their name or organization, and found videos about them and their work by Bretagne 3. The station’s headquarters is located a few minutes walk from my house. But this local TV station’s power to represent the people of this land, pales in comparison to what is probably the most amazing homemade social networking website in the world, www.tamm-kreiz.bzh.

This website exists for one reason and one reason only. To tell people where the Festoù-Noz and Deiz are, and when they are happening. It is also a way to see who is playing at them. You can click on the name of a group and find out which musicians are in it. Then you can click on the name of the musician and see what other bands they are in. You can see when those bands are playing and where. You can see who is attending the event. There is a rideshare message board. Tamm-Kreiz gives me hope that there can be alternate social medias, people’s-facebooks, sites that actually foster human relationship in real time, at real events, instead of propagating isolation and anxiety as many report instagram does.

On Tamm-Kreiz, I have accidentally stumbled upon the profiles of people I’ve met in person. The website shows me what incredible, prolific musicians they are. One of these people is the highly badass Sterenn, who plays in many groups, one of which is this fabulous all-female trio called Dixit.

The evening of Yaouank, I meet Sterenn for the first time and get to stay at the house of her and her roommate in Rennes. I have been put into connection with the two of them through a musician named Gab in Brest, who I, of course, met at a bar. I promise I am not spending this entire Fulbright period in bars. They are absolutely a part of my ethnographic strategy, though.

Sterenn’s apartment is sort of like the Fearless Music exhibit, in that the walls are covered in flyers from Festou-Noz/Deiz she has attended, or played at, or both. Also on the wall is the of an elderly Breton man side by side with a Native-American. Which reads, Bretagne / America, 500 years of Resistance.

A vintage poster in a Rennes living room

What is different about this space, is that it is not a museum, but a place in the act of resisting. It is a smoke-filled, people-filled living-room where people in their early 20s are harmonizing together, singing what sound to me like ancient medieval ballads in many part harmony.

They do this between plays of songs on Youtube, such as Super Freak and Crocodile Rock, and other more modern songs I don’t know the names of, because I have a tendency to only notice things from the 70s. Eventually they ask me what kind of Breton music I have started to listen to.

Thank God for you, Youenn Gwernig. I put on E Kreiz an Noz, the only song I can remember, which I can barely spell at this point. I find the song on youtube mostly because I recognize the picture of Youenn, standing stoically in a field, and looking off into the windy horizon, hands in pockets.

The song plays, and every person in that room sings along. It’s beautiful to me. These young people are admittedly all Breton musicians, but for a moment I want to believe that all young people in Bretagne sing old songs together on Saturday nights. I understand that some of the people at this party knew each other from having been classmates in the Diwan, or bi-lingual Breton school system.

The system of bi-lingual Breton schools is referred to by France 3 Bretagne as this struggling, archaic entity. There is a hard-hitting news story called, What Future for the Diwan Schools? The more I learn about Diwan, the more I am impressed by the way they have resisted being un-futured by the outside world, and apparently their own local news network.

How Diwan was made is a legend of rock n' roll and passion. In 1977, a child in Bretagne was hard-pressed to find an elder who could speak to them in the native tongue. So effective was the process of language repression, that most primary speakers had been silenced.

With the Breton musical revival in the 70s, came the recording of songs and oral histories, which resulted in a boundless creativity, as younger musicians riffed off what came before them, now accessible at the newly invented Festoú Noz and Deiz, or through records.

Young musicians entwined new genre influences in their song-writing, while remaining in fidelity to lyrics and rhythmic structures of Breton sound. The most well-known pioneers of the revival, is Alan Stivell, whose 1971 album Renaissance of The Celtic Harp, is a cornerstone of Breton recorded sound from that period.

It is the band Storlok though, which is given the title of the first Breton Rock Band. The leader of this band, Denez Abernot, is described on wikipedia as a auteur-composer-interpreter, a fisherman and boat captain, and an actor. He was also the first teacher of the first Diwan class in 1977, which consisted of five children. The height of his rock n’ roll career and his teaching career occurred simultaneously.

This gives me hope. That a local rockstar/fisherman can start teaching kids the language of their elders, at a homemade school. Diwan started with five kids and a singer. Now there are 4,337 students in attendance at 54 Diwan schools in Bretagne.

Writing about and from this place, I see the Puget Sound in glimpses of memory. For the first time in my life, I look up the Suquamish Tribe’s website. These are the people whose land my ancestors homesteaded on Bainbridge Island, and whose land my family still occupies.

As I look at the map on the Tribe’s website, I see that many of the beaches I grew up on are the sites of permanent winter settlements, long-houses, and places where Tribal life articulates in the dxʷləšucid / Twulshootseed. Albeit no longer with those structures in place. Those beaches look like waterfront property and no-trespassing signs and road ends and parking lots and kayaks stacked up.

Locations of Suquamish Winter Settlements

 I switch to present tense here on purpose, as a way of suggesting that the indigenous language of the Puget Sound, described often as coming literally from the land, is still there. That a white/anglo linguistic reality has been superimposed over this space, and it doesn’t completely fit. English lacks the capacity to describe and make real the Puget Sound environment, and the American environment, even to colonizer-Americans, who seem to be ever-longing for their roots.

Take Jack Kerouac, in his hotel room, drunk, finding nothing of himself in Bretagne. Listening to the same tones of wind, pulsing as they do now, down the rue Victor Hugo.

I also notice on the map that the sites of settlements of the Suquamish on Bainbridge, are now public beaches. Places that I went often alone growing up. Places I return to when I am back home now. I got to these places because I find it easy to do a few things while at them: To play music, to write poetry, and to clear my head, by listening. Tom Waits says “A song is just something interesting to do with the air.” I think the air on those beaches is the kind of air that wants to be made interesting.

The map points to the location of one such settlement in what is now called Eagle Harbor, where the Bainbridge / Seattle ferry comes. A memory comes to me. I walked down to that beach once, and put a stone in my mouth. I sucked on it, desiring for the stone to tell me something about the way my mother had lived on the island, the way my grandparents had lived on the island, and back and back. I did it simply because I felt like I didn’t know enough about the place I grew up. I wasn’t stoned or anything, I just had the literal feeling that I could access a new sense of how to understand, by putting the rock in my mouth. Sort of like learning a new word.

I enter cautiously into my research of Salish languages. As I do in Bretagne, I feel like I am a visitor to these websites. What I want to know is how language revival looks for the tribes whose land I grew up on. I am aware that I have never made an effort to consider this before. Bretagne points me toward the investigation of the place I am from, and the language that is indigenous to that place.

I learn many things online.

I learn that the indigenous language of the Salish people is alive, evolving, and being taught. The Puyallup Language Program is a very active group of people working for the language. Their mission statement is straightforward: "Our goal is to revitalize the Twulshootseed Language. The method we find most effective is to just speak the language."

One of the practices for described for implementing dxʷləšucid into daily life is to create “a language nest”, or a designated place in the house where only dxʷləšucid is be spoken. In this way, learning a language, and making it part of your life, becomes an act of performance art, according to Zalmai Zahir, who “may be the most fluent dxʷləšucid speaker now alive”.

Concurrent with state-sanctioned efforts to mute Breton language in school and public places, was a similar, but more violent effort to do the same in America with indigenous tongues. To reverse this, the making-daily of language has to be somewhat forced. Institutions like the Diwan schools in Bretagne are an example of how designating a space for a language to live, is how a place can teach a language back to its listeners.

I suggest that grunge, droning rock n’ roll in Kitsap county community halls, circle-pits, square dances, vocalizations of Pike Place buskers, are a version of authentic oral patrimony of the Pacific Northwest. That these music forms are repetitions and reactions and impressions of sounds made by ferries docking, rigging hitting metal, trees shaking, rain falling, sewer grates clogging with pine needles, the gathering of sap underneath bark, the collapse and crunch of the cement and rebar of the viaduct being torn-down. 

As I watch instructional Youtube videos about the dxʷləšucid / Twulshootseed language, I think of how generations of my Bainbridge Island family have both been deaf to, and have accidentally heard this language over more than a century.

In Port Madison bay, dxʷləšucid is not lost, or dead, but rather is in the process of being concealed by a history of real estate proceedings, architectural marvels, overfishing, yachts. My family, the Johnsens, possess a text of dock, bulkhead, basement, hot tub, elevated porch, and living room, where in a few days my family will spend Christmas together. There is a language of Nat King Cole, and a language of gift paper unwrapping. How can activity of my family’s settlement at the head of the bay be interpreted as music, and a music which allows for the vocalization of dxʷləšucid?

The other night I went to sleep asking my Puget Sound ancestors, both related to me by blood and not, to let me know what I needed to understand to be a writer, artist-musician, and active-ator-ist of “the traditional”.

In my dream I was on a windy outcropping by the raging sea, in the rain, in Bretagne. It could have been a Puget Sound place too. There were many large tents designated for music making. I had to help take them down so that they wind wouldn’t blow them away. As I did this, I saw another, smaller tent, made for camping. There was blood pooling out of the back of it, where a head might be laying inside. I said to aloud, What is that, the death of a language?

I woke up to the sense that my room was full of people, who were all making the glottal stop in unison, a sound I’d practiced that night when repeating the sounds of the dxʷləšucid alphabet, from an online video.

I opened my eyes and looked around for these people, but my room was dark and empty. Outside the wind howled through Brest. The way a dream leaves you with an idea you are absolutely sure of. For example I knew then that wind taught people to create both language and song. That the hitting of something rhythmically on my window was a potential origin of the glottal stop.

To hear dxʷləšucid, I listen to the storytelling of Vi Hilbert, watch videos made by the Puyallup Tribal Language Program, and watch Zalmai Zahir narrate the process of frying an egg. I listen to an episode of the All My Relations Podcast on the importance of activating native language use in North America, where I learn that a person who is able to tell their creation story in their tribal language, is much less likely to commit suicide than someone who can't. 

Words are the foundations of poems and lyrics, through and with them, meaning, time, and physical space, act.

I hope that by sharing the Breton world I witness, I can use language to make verbal, to make into verbs, the words that stand-still, like nouns! Folk (ing) Volks (ing) People (ing).

By preferring verbs, can I use language to help in the decolonizing of regions affected by the destructive migration of people who have had the same skin color, facial structures, light eyes, as me?

As a white person, as an English listener/speaker, as a scholar, as a writer, can I accept what I do not understand, without imposing English on what I witness? Can I listen to Chet Baker’s Almost Blue and not hear the words as words but only as raw sound? I almost do this in my living room one night, and it's sort of like when you repeat a word over and over until you forget what it means. 

If you are not bi-lingual or poly-lingual, I can only encourage you to let yourself enter the space of not understanding a language, of being confused by it, willingly. Knowing not knowing as an alternate wisdom.

There is enough that has already by agreed upon and rationalized. 

The internet provides many opportunities to get lost. I impose confusion on myself by listening to a Breton language radio station for a day. Or to the Sicilian songs sung by Matilde Politi. To music made by the Ainu people of Japan. I have no idea what the words mean, and yet, I have ideas about what they might imply, which I let pass through me like small tempests.

There is still so much I don’t know about in Breton life, and probably never will. I take account of the things I witness, I put them down in an order according to the way my brain makes meaning of experiences.

The most intricate dance in Bretagne is called The Fisel. I watch a video of a Fisel competition. Even though this is a public event, and individuals are scored, I notice how the dance relies on being passed around the circle, from person to person. One cannot do it alone.

I meet a person in a bar who is young and organizes the Festival Fisel. He is wearing a baseball cap that says Folklore, and says Folklore is like his sports team, because he doesn’t play like soccer or baseball. This hat is created by a French Canadian musician with incredible red hair whom I have met at Fiddle Tunes.

I play Irish music with my friend in Brest, who has learned tenor banjo through youtube videos. He makes a recording of me singing John Prine’s Paradise, and saying phrases about saving the environment. He puts these recordings of me to electronic beats in his apartment. This is regional music in Brest in the sense it is music created in Brest.

Yann Tiersen, the composer of the soundtrack for 2002’s Amélie, is from also from Brest (Brestois) and recently performed at a free concert for Diwan Schools, which I attended. I noticed how his compositions, particularly one for the violin, rely on what I understand as a drone in modal music. He recently released an album which was recorded on the most Northwestern island in Europe, Bretagne’s Ouessant, where he now lives.

The droning violin song is call Introductory Movement. I find it on Youtube. The recording features the use of heavy guitar, played by Stephen O’Malley, one half of drone-metal band Sunn O))). O’Malley and his band hail from Seattle, Washington.

The weather here is familiar to me, in the sense it is like Seattle’s. Rain and Grey skies abound. I hear the calls of seagulls in the morning. What I am not used to though, is the wind.

The wind sweeps away weather like a sponge over a counter-top. The wind comes from all directions at once, and transforms the day I thought I was having in the morning, to a completely different kind of day by afternoon. I am still. The lyrics of E Kreiz an Noz, speak of the phenomenon of these winds, blowing through a concentrated center. E Kreiz an Noz means, In the Middle of the Night.

“It’s weird that you like this song,” said one of the musicians in Sterenn’s living room, the night of Yauoank. “No, like, it’s weird because of the fact you’re American.”

I’m still trying to figure out what was meant by this.

I get a Breton/French dictionary from the library.

The song’s first four verses talk about four winds. A wind from the East- a metaphor for the influence coming from Paris, or the centralized French government which suppresses Breton language / culture, I think. A wind from the West, or America, where Gwernig immigrates to find employment, and also meets Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac, the saint of wanderers, Sûr la Route, On the Road. A third wind that comes from the sea, and a fourth wind that comes from the earth itself.

Each of these winds arrive in the middle of the night, and blow over the place where Youenn, or any Breton person, lives. House as is Chez as in Pays as in home-country as in father-land. The fifth and final verse says, It doesn’t matter from which direction the winds come, because every kind of wind carries both the desire to live with, and the potential of having already acquired, liberty in Bretagne.

The noun Kreiz, middle/center, sounds like the verb that follows it in the chorus, c’hwezit, meaning blowing.

The still middle can resemble an active blowing. A woman in a bar (yes another bar) asks me if I have ever stood in the middle of the bridge Recouvrance, which spans the Penfeld River dividing Brest in half, during a windstorm.

“The other night,” she says, “I stood at the midpoint of the bridge while the wind was blowing furiously. And I tell you, the bridge was singing.”

Wind as song maker, wind as storyteller. Wind as original musician playing the material of the earth.

I take the Breton word for “wind”, avel, and put it into Dastum’s search engine. Dastum is another miraculous Breton website, where the entire recorded archives of Breton music, called the “oral patrimony”, are available online. Following the word avel, I listen to a snippet of an old woman singing, a conversation in Breton, and a beautiful melody.

A singer in town tells me she uses the Dastum resource often to learn new songs, which she then teaches her students, by ear, by call and response. Word of mouth, literally mouth to ear, or bouche à l’orielle.

Are we not better equipped to be singing, living, and creating new traditional music today, having the company of so many ghosts?

These traces of musicians, remaining through recordings, are not limited to Bretagne. The American website, slippery-hill, has a similar archive of field recordings of fiddle tunes. Including very recently made “field recordings”.

Barba Loutig in the Vauban Basement

 The most beautiful Breton band I have seen so far is called Barba Loutig. This is a four person, all-female band that employs voice and percussion only. Theirs was one of the the most powerful live performances I have ever seen. I was crying a lot. My emotions had something to do with the way they took Breton music, and wove other sounds from around the world.

I go to a conference on the digitization of traditional music, and the opening sentiment is from a man who says that traditional music is not here to amuse. It is instead a river that is growing, that is gathering more force. He uses the active verbs.

Someone else on the panel says Breton music has a habitude de mélanger, a habit of mixing. I watch the Barba Loutig that evening, at a musical festival in Brest called “No Border”, which is how their music sounds.

I was at a jam session the other night, in a bar forcement, of course, and a new friend named Gab attempted to play George Michael, Careless Whisper, as a traditional Breton gavotte, on his violin. When I ask Gab, a full-time musician, what he thought traditional music is, he says “it’s whatever the audience needs.”

I need E Kreiz an Noz. First I am an audience to it. Then I am a student of the song. After enough practice, I am one of the song’s carriers. The song becomes a way to combat my isolation as foreigner. As I sing it for the first time with another person, outside of the bar, I sense myself as having arrived at a new center, though I have stood outside of this bar’s door a few times now.

Center as a place where the wind blows through. Where the element of wind instructs us on how to speak and sing.
 

While the West destroys, it also catalogues what it has muted. The art of creating systems of remembrance can take on many forms.

My friend and fellow Fulbrighter Ross, who has just finished his period of research in Bretagne, said of his Fest-Noz experience: It was not for entertainment.

Andrew Wood says to those in his 1983 audience, You’re wasting the floor. Breton music and dance is also not for watching.

Ross also suggests the Fest Noz is an opportunity for trance. Stephen O’Malley, from Seattle’s Sunn O))), who is now collaborating with Yann Tiersen in Bretagne, describes trance and audience engagement in a collective experience of the heavy, heavy drone metal, as the goal of the live experience of Sunn O))).

I never listened to hardcore music alone, on records. As a teenager, I didn’t care for the genre in any other form than the live experience. I could lose myself, while becoming a part of the others around me, without thinking, and without feeling judged for the way my body interacted with space.

I also admit that I’ve never really listened to old-time music. I have never really sought out field recordings, or old-time CDs, or playlists, for my at-home entertainment. Instead, I have contacted and learned that music through the live experience of square-dance, or through playing the tunes and singing songs with other people.

My favorite musicians, my favorite bands, and the most brilliant songwriters I am aware of, are people that I know and have known. People I can call on the phone. Perhaps you.

I still doubt myself everyday, and fight against a feeling that I am not good enough, nor in anyway entitled to the title of bard. Despite the many experiences I have had to the contrary, I can’t shake the sense that I have no right to make music.

How much of my anxiety comes from centuries of a cultivated intellectual and social division between the natural, authentic, folk impulse of the peasants, the fisherman, etc. as decreed by Johann Herder and those who followed him- and that of the modern world, which deals in progress and the death of things all things that came before it.

All things that are still resting.

This is why I encourage every person I know to create something, even something “really dumb”, that will not make them famous, or make them money, but will instead function as a liaison between self and environment. I will have a lot more of this kind of musical output for you soon, in the form of my second full-length-double-length album, The Great Jet-Setter Heart Disaster ! Coming out someday! More on that after I write a bunch of grants and try not to freak out about how to get money for art and try to settle more into the state-mandated relaxation period of French Vacances that starts after I press send on this letter to you all. 

And remember! If you are socially awkward (me a lot of the time here!!! Even if it doesn't seem like it from this newsletter!!!) maybe just sing a song to an audience of ‘inanimate’ objects. They're great listeners. Maybe we can also be great listeners to them. 

E Kreiz an Noz is now a song I carry. My body, my life, has become a vessel for it. This song is not a burden, it has no weight, but is instead like the visitation of wind, which makes bridges sing, and bodies too.

Clearly going a little nuts... In a good way!!

I am thankful to be joined in my nerd-dom by some choice correspondents.

My penpal and other inhabitant of the head of Port-Madison Bay, Emily Abby, had started to write a blog. I have long been astounded at how Emily’s family home is just down the hill from my family’s original homestead on Bainbridge. I feel this imbibes us with a similarity of language and thought.

Check out Danica Boyce’s Fair Folk Podcast, which rediscovers and shares “the sacred song and folk traditions of Europe”. With episodes like Gnome for Christmas: the Midwinter Household Spirit, and Winter Solstice, Queen of Feasts, one can gain a nuanced understanding of why we do what we are doing during the Holidays. Except I don’t know if any amount of research can explain the pagan roots of Jan Terri’s “Rock And Roll Santa”. I am excited to be hosting Danica in the spring for a collaboration in Bretange!

I am lucky to have a correspondence with fellow Northwestern-island-human turned scholar-living-abroad-who-is-thinking-a-lot-too, Duskin Drum. He has started sending out a newsletter from his post in Shanghai. I am so thankful for his perspectives on language, time, and weird regional creativities. Much of this Winter newsletter has been sparked by ideas coming on winds of him.   

Anyone who is anyone knows that the best way to support Living Traditions, is to give money to the Living Traditions non-profit organization! Otherwise known as The Jalopy Theatre and School of Music in Red Hook, Brooklyn! All gifts will be matched, up to $25,000 through January 6th. Please, if you have money, consider giving it to this incredible space and entity, that also employs many of my friends, fellow musicians, artists, and performers, who together resistance the past-ing of music from the past.

If you are getting tired of Christmas music and want to listen to some badass, all vinyl playlists, please look no further than Maison Dufrene, my friend from the internet Paul Dufrene’s lovely sonic curations.

Brian Harnetty is a new correspondent in Ohio, who weaves archival sound materials, interviews, his own compositions, and sounds of nature and sounds of fracking, to create musical reflections of a time, a local history, and a brand new traditional musical vernacular in his project Shawnee, Ohio.

As always, let me know if you are creating a weird thing, and want it talked about on this newsletter. Please feel free to share this newsletter with others you think they might enjoy it.

How will I ever explain it all???

I did really want to share about a thousand other things with you, but I must prepare myself for the evenings' Fest Noz, and not go insane sitting in front of a computer anymore. I apologize for typos, my eyeballs are done. 

Bonnes fêtes!

Happy solstice! Happy Holidays! and Happy New Year!

Love and love and more love, 

AND the returning of the light,

--Melanie Beth Curran