The 'Elephant Dancing' columns, Interview magazine 2006-2008: Two Traffic-Stopping Street Bands

December 2007/January 2008

Walking out of a class at the New School in downtown Manhattan, I headed for the Astor Place subway. The class had been about old American music; the murder ballad “Pretty Polly,” recorded by the Virginia mountain banjo player Dock Boggs, was played. Students whose great-grandparents might not have been born in 1927, when the record was made, were listening as if they could will themselves into the song’s past, or the song into their present. They’d been reading Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One, where he talked about how for him, when he was the same age as the students were, “the stuff that was happening” wasn’t what was on the radio, wasn’t what was in the papers. It was characters and adventures rising out of the old songs: “the ghost of Billy Lyons, rootin’ the mountain down, standing ’round in East Cairo, Black Betty bam be lam.”

I had to have been a block away from the subway station when a harsh, irresistibly dramatic sound seemed to burst out of the wind—seemed to make the wind, to twist the breeze. It was a mountain melody—getting louder by the step, rougher, more demanding. It was “Pretty Polly.” But then it was “Shady Grove,” and then it was “Liza Jane.” Then it was a song without a name—it was all of those songs and more.

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A voice came out of the noise. Across the street, I could see two men sitting in front of the station, one with a fiddle, the other with a banjo. But they seemed too small for the trouble they were making.

Standing in front of them, I and a few other people who’d stopped saw two African Americans—one, Norris Bennett, with the banjo, older, the other, Henrique Prince, with the fiddle, not so old: “One of the last black string bands in America.” They were the Ebony Hillbillies, the CDs in a guitar case announced, though I read it as the “Ethiopian Hillbillies.” From the minstrel days in the 19th century, black entertainers called themselves Ethiopians because it offered a hint of class, of the exotic, of King David and the Queen of Sheba—anything but plain old Americans who, America had decided, weren’t Americans at all.

Close up, the music was a degree less shocking, less supernatural. Because you could see the musicians in front of you, the sense that it had come not out of the hands of human beings but out of the ground, right out of the subway tunnels, right out of the tunnels beneath them, the ones that lead to the hollow center of the earth, began to fade. But you could remember it. Maybe you could even take it home.

For $10 I bought a CD, the new I Thought You Knew (theebonyhillbillies.com), knowing it had to be terrible, not caring. We got on the subway. The train wasn’t out of the station 20 seconds before a big, handsome, young African-American man began moving through the car, talking—speechifying, really—about MPC, a.k.a. Most Popular Criminals, a Bronx-based hip-hop outfit. But no drugs in our songs, he announced, no rape, no killing; the MPCs are all college graduates. On their website (profile.myspace.com/mostpop) you could read that they formed 10 years ago at South Carolina State University and now take the subway as their stage, as the all-American open road that goes everywhere and never ends.

He wasn’t an ordinary subway hawker. You got the idea he was loving what he did, as if people were actually going to listen to him, as if people wanted to hear what he had to say. He boomed. He knew how to project, to make himself larger than life, more real than ordinary life. He made you curious—who was he? Why was he here?

He had a box of CDs too—but after $10 for the Ebony Hillbillies, I could hardly say no to $1 for the MPC’s.

With melodies and cadences that were a match for those on Bruce Springsteen’s 2006 folk extravaganza We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions—they’re drawing from the same well—it was no surprise that the Ebony Hillbillies shriveled up on record, the voices thin and hesitant, the playing flat. They clearly love “Gypsy Davy,” “Waltz Across Texas,” “Cluck Old Hen,” ‘‘Anna Mae”—but as they say, that and $2 will get you on the subway. They’re a street band; they need a change in the weather from moment to moment; they need the unique thrill that comes when they can ambush a listener, create that special pop moment when your head jerks around as if you had nothing to do with it, asking all on its own, What’s that? And it wasn’t a surprise that MPC comes across quietly, insinuating, dropping hints, making you go back to their record again and again to pick them up. This wasn’t music that was coming out of the ground. It was music that was reaching up to make it to the street. And what would it do there? Both the Ebony Hillbillies and MPC carry their stages with them; their stages may also carry them.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, December 2007/January 2008