If the folk music of John Jacob Niles is so unlistenable, how come I can’t stop listening to it? I should add that I’ve never heard anyone say his music is unlistenable—I’m saying it.
Niles sings in an eerie falsetto that makes me think of a wraith come from some dark and haunted holler to collect my soul and take it no place good. He brings to mind a patient in a 1930s state-run insane asylum, his voice echoing down the dim corridors long after lights out, and you KNOW with a shiver this guy is never getting out and you’re never getting out either. I can watch a horror movie and go straight to bed. Niles I won’t listen to after ten o’clock in the morning. I don’t want to hear that voice in my sleep.
Niles is acknowledged as a major influence on the folk music of the fifties and sixties. Dylan dug him. Me, I listen to him accompany himself on his homemade dulcimer and I want to hide. You’d never guess (or I never would have) that Niles, who was born in Louisville, Kentucky on April 28, 1892—the same day the Dalton Gang bit the dust in Coffeyville, Kansas—was trained in the Schola Cantorum de Paris and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, transcribed Appalachian folk music from oral sources when he wasn’t writing his own folk songs, and published classical compositions for choir and art songs for voice and piano. He wasn’t some squint-eyed, half-deranged inbred from Yoknapatawpha County, come to Gerdes Folk City to be born. He had no Faulkner yokel in him. He was a civilized and worldly man.
Needless to say he wasn’t one of your commercial folk singers like Harry Belafonte or the Weavers. Nor was he a populist guitar slinger like Woody Guthrie or cowboy troubadour like Cisco Houston or bellows-voiced force of nature along the lines of Odetta or Lead Belly. John Jacob Niles was never going to win a wide audience. What surprises me most about John Jacob Niles is he HAD an audience, and presumably still does. You watch yellowing film footage of the man and what you see is this white-haired old gaunt who looks like a small-town pharmacist strumming on a dulcimer and when he lifts his head and opens his mouth wide (too wide, it ain’t natural) you expect him to bray like a donkey.
Instead you get this high-pitched voice, like a dead, drowned girl come to haunt your waking dreams, weird American opera. He was Tiny Tim before his time, but Tiny Tim was entertainment. John Jacob Niles was a card-carrying member of the supernatural. We’re all standing at the intersection of time and space but he was elsewhere, his voice rising, fluttering, transcending the natural order like some otherworldly bird on its way to the Underworld. Frankly he gives me the creeps.
Niles had a knack for the theatrical. Listen to “The Hangman” (which Led Zeppelin would use as the basis for “Gallows Pole”) from 1967’s The Best of John Jacob Niles and what you hear isn’t a song, but performance art. The guy’s a natural born thespian but he’s anything but subtle. He labors on the fringes of hysteria. Just listen to Niles’ take on “The Roving Gambler.” He doesn’t sound like any roving gambler ever to lay down cards in a folk song. The man is playing dice with your peace of mind. “The Dreary Dream” is all flashing knives and murder and sorrow but it’s Niles’ voice that inspires dread. He might have done the same with “Pleasant Valley Sunday.” Which is to say there are far scarier things than homicide. Even his laugh in “Little Mohee” makes your skin crawl.
Look, I can’t talk intelligently about these songs. I can tell you that some date back centuries (the Sixteenth Century in the case of “Mary Hamilton”) and were brought to our shores by Scots and Englishmen and have been kept alive by everybody from Burl Ives to Dave Van Ronk and Bob Dylan. In London in 1580 you might have passed a teenage William Shakespeare singing “Frog Went A-Courtin’” (it was in the Renaissance Top Forty!) when it went by the name “A Moste Strange Weddinge of the Frogge and the Mouse.” And you could have heard it in Scotland decades before that under the name “The Frog cam to the Myl dur.”
Others are of more recent vintage—”Jack O’Diamonds” is said to have originated in the gambling halls of Texas—but they’re all older than anybody walking above ground and carry a whiff of a strangeness far more pungent than swamp gas. But nobody you’ll ever hear made them sound stranger than John Jacob Niles did. The Best of John Jacob Niles is a collection of field recordings from another dimension.
Some Niles wrote himself. “I Wonder as I Wander” he wrote based on a fragment of a song he heard in the town of Murphy (county seat of Cherokee County) in Appalachian North Carolina. Here’s his account:
“A girl had stepped out to the edge of the little platform attached to the automobile. She began to sing. Her clothes were unbelievable dirty and ragged, and she, too, was unwashed. Her ash-blond hair hung down in long skeins. … But, best of all, she was beautiful, and in her untutored way, she could sing. She smiled as she sang, smiled rather sadly, and sang only a single line of a song.”
Now where do you think that song fragment originated? Seventeenth Century Aberdeen? Her? Folk is a world where all of time comes to a single point and I would submit that saying John Jacob Nile wrote that song is an untruth because every folk song ever written was written by everybody and nobody. Who first heard the first singer sing “Mary Hamilton” for the first time? Folk music is an impenetrable fog, and operates according to the principle that first things never happened.
Niles is best known for writing “Go’way from My Window.” He wrote it in 1908 at the age of sixteen for a girl who didn’t think much of the song, or of Niles for that matter. There’s a first thing for you, but the way Niles sings it makes you doubt it. I think he snatched it from the firmament, from that place where past and present are one, and you can hear it in that otherworldly girlish voice of his. He sounds like a cursed Scottish maiden, jilted, or like a young butcher boy bound for the gallows. 1908 is 1586 is today according to the folk calendar, and no one I’ve ever heard, including the otherworldly Dock Boggs, the devil-dealing Robert Johnson, or the not-long-for-this-world Hank Williams ever captured that sense of the eternal indeterminate as viscerally as John Jacob Niles. His voice isn’t timeless and God knows it isn’t timely. It was never timely.
No singer, period, folk or otherwise, has ever trucked so directly with the uncanny. And that’s why I can’t stop listening to John Jacob Niles. I’ve never heard such otherness. Here’s a guy who was wounded in WWI and worked for the Burroughs Corporation for a spell and sang for FDR at the White House and met Gertrude Stein and toured the US and Europe with contralto Marion Kerby, but those are just facts. His voice goes beyond facts, beyond the realm of the corporeal, beyond such trivialities as life and death. There is no life and death in that voice. It was never here. And its neverness scares me. It comes from someplace else, someplace that doesn’t exist and where you never want to go.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
