Transcript

7.30.26 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for Radio Eye, and today
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Speaker 1: I will be reading from a special edition of Smithsonian
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Speaker 1: Magazine America at two fifty the Revolutionary Spark. As a reminder,
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Speaker 1: radiois a reading service intended for people who are blind
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Speaker 1: or have other disabilities that make it difficult to read
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Speaker 1: printed material. Please join me now for the first article,
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Speaker 1: which is the second part of Alan Lomax spent years
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Speaker 1: traveling the country to record the sounds of America. The
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Speaker 1: legacy of his obsession will live Forever by Chris Heath.
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Speaker 1: Part one profiles Alan Lomax as a pioneering folklorist whose
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Speaker 1: decades of field recordings preserved an extraordinary range of American
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Speaker 1: musical traditions. While Lomax is often remembered for discovering or
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Speaker 1: encouraging famous figures such as Muddy Waters, the author argues
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Speaker 1: that his deeper achievement was not talent scouting, but documenting
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Speaker 1: the everyday songs, stories, work, music, spirituals, and regional traditions
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Speaker 1: of communities that might otherwise have vanished from cultural memory.
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Speaker 1: The opening account of Lomax recording Muddy Waters in Mississippi
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Speaker 1: shows how hearing himself on playback helped waters imagine a
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Speaker 1: musical future, but it also framed that moment as only
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Speaker 1: one part of Lomax's broader mission to capture the true
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Speaker 1: history of America through sound. Part one traces Lomax's work
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Speaker 1: through three major regions, the Mississippi Delta, coastal Georgia, and
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Speaker 1: northern Michigan. In Georgia, his recordings with Zora, Neil Hurston
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Speaker 1: and others preserved ring shouts, work songs, spirituals, and the
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Speaker 1: voices of performers such as John Davis and Bessie Jones,
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Speaker 1: whose singing later reached new audiences through recordings and sampling.
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Speaker 1: In Michigan, Lomax documented lumberjack songs, immigrant musical traditions, lake
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Speaker 1: sailor ballads, and other overlooked repertoires, despite financial straining, theft,
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Speaker 1: and difficult travel. Together, these examples show Lomax's legacy as
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Speaker 1: a vast archive of American expression, some famous, much obscure,
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Speaker 1: but all valuable as a record of communities, histories, and
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Speaker 1: human experience that continue to be available for anyone willing
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Speaker 1: to listen. Here now is Part two. It's a blessing
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Speaker 1: that we have both these recordings and some surviving field
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Speaker 1: notes because somewhat perplexingly later in life, Lomax himself wasn't
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Speaker 1: always the most reliable witnessed the events of his own
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Speaker 1: and other's past. In his nineteen ninety three memoir The
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Speaker 1: Land Where the Blues Began, for instance, Lomax wrote plenty
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Speaker 1: about these Mississippi adventures, but a fair amount is verifiably askew.
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Speaker 1: He conflated two Mississippi journeys in consecutive years, nineteen forty
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Speaker 1: one in nineteen forty two, and to a single nineteen
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Speaker 1: forty two visit, and he incorrectly stated not only that
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Speaker 1: this second date is when he discovered muddy waters in
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Speaker 1: the location he misidentified, but that he did so while
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Speaker 1: in search of the legendary Blues guitarist Robert Johnson, though
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Speaker 1: there is clear evidence that he must have known of
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Speaker 1: Johnson's death, Johnson died in nineteen thirty eight, some years before,
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Speaker 1: and though he mentions that he was in Mississippi as
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Speaker 1: part of a joint project with Fisk University in Nashville,
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Speaker 1: the region's pre eminent black university, more than eighty years later,
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Speaker 1: deep contention remains about the ways in which Lomax may
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Speaker 1: have inappropriately taken sole credit for a shared endeavor. In
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Speaker 1: his memoir, for example, he states that the project was
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Speaker 1: his idea, even though good evidence seems to suggest that
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Speaker 1: it had been proposed by the folklorist and composer John
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Speaker 1: Wesley Work the Third, who was with him on that
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Speaker 1: first day with Muddy Waters. Fortunately, in the case of
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Speaker 1: some one who became famous like Waters, other material exists
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Speaker 1: to help pin down exactly what happened and win. We
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Speaker 1: know Water's own perspective of that summer day when his
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Speaker 1: music was first recorded from interviews he gave over the
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Speaker 1: years that were collated in writer and filmmaker Robert Gordon's
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Speaker 1: two thousand and two biography Can't be satisfied the Life
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Speaker 1: and Times of Muddy Waters that, for instance, when Lomax
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Speaker 1: and his companions turned up, waters first thought hearing that
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Speaker 1: a white man was looking for him was that the
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Speaker 1: authorities had found out he was selling whiskey, and that
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Speaker 1: Lomax had to gradually win Water's confidence before he could
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Speaker 1: succeed in convincing the musician that he really did just
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Speaker 1: want to hear him play his music. As for the
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Speaker 1: house that once stood where I found a vacant, grassy plot,
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Speaker 1: well that has its own remarkable story. For many years
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Speaker 1: it lay empty. In nineteen eighty seven, it was damaged
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Speaker 1: in a tornado. That year, Billy Gibbons, Zizi Top's lead
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Speaker 1: guitarist and singer, visited and took away a cypress roof timber,
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Speaker 1: which he dropped off with a guitar maker in Memphis
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Speaker 1: who crafted two guitars from the wood. Subsequently, during a
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Speaker 1: post tornado clean up, the three damaged outer rooms, the roof,
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Speaker 1: and the porch were removed and taken into storage by
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Speaker 1: stove All Farms, leaving only the original nineteenth century central cabin.
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Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety six, the cabin was leased for five
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Speaker 1: years by the House of Blues, the restaurant and entertainment chain.
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Speaker 1: It was taken apart and shipped off to be reassembled
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Speaker 1: in different House of Blues venues and exhibitions, appearing that
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Speaker 1: first summer in Chicago and Atlanta. The House of Blues
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Speaker 1: apparently even sold Muddy Waters Cabin World Tour t shirts. Eventually,
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Speaker 1: in two thousand one, the central cabin structure returned closer
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Speaker 1: to home, taking a permanent place in the middle of
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Speaker 1: the Delta Blues Museum in Clarksdale. Clarksdale's centrality in the
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Speaker 1: story of the Blues was recently reinforced and fancifully reimagined
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Speaker 1: in the movie Sinners. That is how last fall, inside
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Speaker 1: the museum, I was able to walk into the actual
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Speaker 1: home where Lomax's first recording session with Waters took place.
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Speaker 1: Light streaming through the gaps in the aged horizontal wood beams.
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Speaker 1: Within and around the cabin were various objects from or
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Speaker 1: relating to Water's life, including one of the guitars Gibbons
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Speaker 1: had made from the cabin's timber. Also parked right there
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Speaker 1: inside the exhibition hall, next to where waters Porch would
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Speaker 1: once have been as a nineteen thirty nine Ford de Luxe,
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Speaker 1: the model Lomax was driving when he pulled up to
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Speaker 1: the cabin, its trunk propped open to show the kind
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Speaker 1: of hefty recording equipment Lomax used to record and cut
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Speaker 1: sixteen inch acetate discs. Two days earlier, in Memphis, I'd
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Speaker 1: met with Gordon Waters's biographer. He had plenty of interesting
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Speaker 1: and complex opinions to share about Lomax, including a discription
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Speaker 1: of an awkward scene in his recent documentary Newport and
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Speaker 1: the Great Folk Dream, where Lomax seems paternalistically controlling of
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Speaker 1: a group of blues artists rehearsing for the nineteen sixty
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Speaker 1: four festival, but Gordon, none the less reaffirmed what he
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Speaker 1: sees as Lomax's central achievement. I think Alan Lomax found
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Speaker 1: great artists, and he made great field work recordings some
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Speaker 1: of them. Man, he is cutting into the red and
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Speaker 1: they are just all the more powerful for it. You know,
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Speaker 1: he's getting the grit of it. He understands it. Lomax
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Speaker 1: returned to Mississippi several times. Far from all the recordings
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Speaker 1: he made there involved blues artists, he also collected oral
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Speaker 1: histories and children's songs, and extensively documented diverse forms of
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Speaker 1: religious expression at church services, drawing on a wide range
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Speaker 1: of musical idioms. Perhaps most notably, in nineteen forty two,
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Speaker 1: Lomax met near the small town of Senatobia, a blind
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Speaker 1: multi instrumentalist named Sid Hempel, who, among his many skills,
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Speaker 1: played the cane fife, a simple side blown flute. Fife
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Speaker 1: and drum bands were a Civil War era military staple,
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Speaker 1: but the version of fife and drum music that had
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Speaker 1: developed in this pocket of the South was something distinct
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Speaker 1: an outcropping of African music in North America, Lomax would
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Speaker 1: excitedly proclaim. Hemphill suggested that Lomax come the following day
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Speaker 1: to one of the picnics, where fife and drum bands
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Speaker 1: played for hours. Lomax did so, recorder in hand, and
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Speaker 1: toward the end of his life he would describe this
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Speaker 1: as the main find of my whole career, the African
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Speaker 1: fife and drum dance bands of the Mississippi Hills. Lomax
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Speaker 1: returned to Mississippi again during his nineteen fifty nine Southern Journey,
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Speaker 1: where he revisited and recorded hemph Heel then eighty three
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Speaker 1: for the final time. He also made one further discovery
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Speaker 1: when while recording some other musicians near by, their neighbor,
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Speaker 1: a farmer in his mid fifties who had been picking
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Speaker 1: cotton all day, walked out of the surrounding trees, carrying
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Speaker 1: his guitar and started playing for Lomax. This was the
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Speaker 1: man who, following this serendipitous encounter, would go on to
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Speaker 1: have a significant degree of late life fame as Mississippi
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Speaker 1: Fred mc dowell. But it was a recording made at
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Speaker 1: another Mississippi stop during those nineteen fifty nine travels that
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Speaker 1: would much later have perhaps the most improbable after life
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Speaker 1: of all six Mississippi incarceration. The Mississippi State Penitentiary was
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Speaker 1: colloquially known, as it still is to this day, as Parchment.
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Speaker 1: It was a place Lomax visited several times, first with
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Speaker 1: his father and later without him. What had initially drawn
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Speaker 1: the elder Lomax was the notion that prisoner's isolation might
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Speaker 1: preserve a pure wellspring of song, particularly songs sung during
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Speaker 1: forced labor, untainted by modernity. His son, who had recorded
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Speaker 1: there twice in the late nineteen forties, had a more
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Speaker 1: nuanced and complex read. He'd write of how the prisoner's
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Speaker 1: songs conveyed quote verse after verse of sardonic irony and
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Speaker 1: of veiled protest end quote. But he was clearly also
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Speaker 1: drawn by what could be heard in this sequestered world.
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Speaker 1: When he went back in September nineteen fifty nine, he
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Speaker 1: was hoping to capture the kind of prisoner's repertoire he'd
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Speaker 1: heard before. With the more modern equipment. He now had
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Speaker 1: a suit case size Ampex stereo reel to reel tape recorder.
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Speaker 1: The visit lasted three or four days. On the last
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Speaker 1: Lomax recorded a group of prisoners singing, accompanied by the
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Speaker 1: staggered syncopation of their axes hitting tree trunks, the rhythm
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Speaker 1: of work, the rhythm of song, the rhythm of punishment.
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Speaker 1: Among the many songs Lomax recorded were two versions of
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Speaker 1: po Lazarus, about a man named Lazarus being hunted down
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Speaker 1: and shot. The second version was led by a prisoner
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Speaker 1: named James Carter. The song went on for more than
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Speaker 1: eleven minutes. At the beginning, Lomax encourages the prisoners to
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Speaker 1: get their axe drops in time. Later on he interjects again,
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Speaker 1: go ahead. A minute more after Lomax discusses with them
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Speaker 1: the song's history, then concludes, well, I think we got
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Speaker 1: something good. The final few minutes of this version would
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Speaker 1: appear a couple of years later on an LP titled
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Speaker 1: bad Man Ballads, one of a series of Southern Journey compilations.
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Speaker 1: Then it was largely forgotten, but nearly four decades after that,
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Speaker 1: the music producer T. Bone Burnett putting together music for
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Speaker 1: the Cohen Brothers movie O Brother where Art thou set
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Speaker 1: the film's evocative plantation chain Gang opening to this recording.
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Speaker 1: The film met great success, and its sound track was
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Speaker 1: a sensation. It won multiple Grammy Awards and sold more
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Speaker 1: than eight million copies in the United States alone. Afterward,
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Speaker 1: a search began for James Carter. Perhaps against the odds,
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Speaker 1: he was found, a then seventy six year old man
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Speaker 1: who had been living in Chicago since his release from
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Speaker 1: prison in nineteen sixty seven. Carter, who subsequently gave a
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Speaker 1: couple of interviews in which he seemed both gratified and
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Speaker 1: bemused by the attention, recalled little of being recorded by Lomax,
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Speaker 1: though he did remember learning the song itself from an
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Speaker 1: older convict named Red Kid. He was a knife man,
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Speaker 1: and he certainly remembered how they would sing as they labored.
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Speaker 1: See back in them days, work was work, swingin' that axe.
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Speaker 1: But you get that song going, you can get along
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Speaker 1: pretty good. Lomax's daughter brought Carter a check for twenty
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Speaker 1: thousand dollars, just the first advance on more royalties to
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Speaker 1: come and a platinum disk. Knowing that I was going
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Speaker 1: to be in Mississippi, I imagined that I would drive
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Speaker 1: down to the prison stand outside and take in whatever
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Speaker 1: distance sense I could of where Lomax was I expected
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Speaker 1: little more. Prisons are rarely much keener to let people
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Speaker 1: in than they are to let people out. But when
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Speaker 1: I wrote to the authorities anyway, they responded positively, And
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Speaker 1: when I turned up at the appointed time, I was
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Speaker 1: met by an inmate named Huston Jones, who was waiting
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Speaker 1: inside the front gate. I soon came to realize why
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Speaker 1: he may have been chosen to guide me. In the
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Speaker 1: nineteen sixties, an inmate band known simply as the Parchment
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Speaker 1: Band garnered a degree of attention. They issued an album
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Speaker 1: in nineteen sixty nine, and around three years ago some
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Speaker 1: inmates restarted the band with Jones at its center. More
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Speaker 1: than that, he is clearly trusted within the prison system
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Speaker 1: and is a personable and persuasive advocate for how Parchment
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Speaker 1: has been changing. After meeting with Scott Middlebrooks, then the
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Speaker 1: prison's superintendent, Jones and I headed out to explore just
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Speaker 1: the two of us in an ATV. Parchment doesn't fit
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Speaker 1: conventional archetypes of what a prison is. Its boundaries extend
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Speaker 1: over eighteen thousand acres or about twenty eight square miles,
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Speaker 1: and around much of its perimeter there is no solid
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Speaker 1: barrier Over the next couple of hours, we visited several
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Speaker 1: now vacant housing units, walking through deserted old cells and
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Speaker 1: common areas. It appears that when buildings are abandoned here,
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Speaker 1: they are just that, left as they had been on
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Speaker 1: the last day they were used, then allowed to fall apart,
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Speaker 1: roofs collapsing in like an experiment in entropy. The most
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Speaker 1: overgrown of all what was once camped for, we reached
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Speaker 1: by gunning the ATV off track through the undergrowth. It's
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Speaker 1: going to be a bumpy ride in there, Jones predicted,
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Speaker 1: but I think it's worth it. The vegetation took over,
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Speaker 1: even inside the crumbling stone structures, creepers making their way
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Speaker 1: across the ground, rubble standing there, the past oozes all
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Speaker 1: around you. Even so, what I'd really hoped to find
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Speaker 1: was one of the places where Lomax actually recorded in
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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine. I knew that the place where Carter
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Speaker 1: sang Pohl Lazarus was at the former Camp B on
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Speaker 1: another site that was no longer part of the prison,
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Speaker 1: but I'd hoped to find either Camp seven or Camp eleven,
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Speaker 1: where Lomax spent whole days recording. But Jones, who knows
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Speaker 1: this land fairly well told me that they no longer exist,
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Speaker 1: and that he had no idea where they had been. Instead,
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Speaker 1: I did what I told myself Lomax would have done,
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Speaker 1: just listened to understand what I could of what is
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Speaker 1: here now. We toured an active area Unit twenty eight,
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Speaker 1: the housing unit for the prison's garment factory, where, among
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Speaker 1: other things, prisoners make the striped clothing they all wear.
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Speaker 1: Jones is in green and white, the most permissive of
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Speaker 1: four categories, and we passed field after field where inmates
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Speaker 1: farm soybeans, watermelon, and turnip greens. We visited the horse barn,
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Speaker 1: swept past a lake where Jones said he's seen bald eagles, coyotes, bobcats, otters, beavers,
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Speaker 1: and muskrats. And we went to the inmates church, where
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Speaker 1: I met an affable man named Henry, who has been
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Speaker 1: at Parchment for more than thirty years. I could but
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Speaker 1: imagine what he had seen. Even if the kind of
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Speaker 1: slave labor institution Lomax visited is long in the past,
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Speaker 1: some horrific accounts of events and practices here are far
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Speaker 1: more recent, but Jones argued that this prison has been
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Speaker 1: making great changes Parchment now if you have to be
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Speaker 1: an inmate. This is a great place to do it,
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Speaker 1: he attested, there are so so many things to be
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Speaker 1: involved in. Another place we stopped was a metal shed
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Speaker 1: where the new Parchment Band rehearses, and where later that
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Speaker 1: afternoon I sat and watched a long rousing rehearsal. They're
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Speaker 1: good and talked a little with the band members. Naturally,
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Speaker 1: they have a variety of stories, but many of them,
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Speaker 1: like Jones, have murder convictions. Before that, though, at lunch time,
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Speaker 1: supposedly at the end of our explorations, Jones took me
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Speaker 1: to the Rudimentary Museum, in a building near the prison entrance,
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Speaker 1: a precursor to something more substantial. The prison is planning.
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Speaker 1: One large room displayed a few historical documents, and looking
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Speaker 1: at the exhibits, there's a copy of the nineteen sixty
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Speaker 1: nine Parchment Band album, for instance. I came across a
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Speaker 1: hand drawn map, clearly old but undated, of the prison site,
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Speaker 1: apparently drawn by a prisoner, and it indicated many old camps,
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Speaker 1: including Camp seven. I took a photograph for reference and
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Speaker 1: asked Jones whether we could try to find it. He
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Speaker 1: was willing to. Day is an adventure that is for sure,
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Speaker 1: he said. So. After lunch, we headed back out several
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Speaker 1: miles toward the prison's western perimeter. Eventually we came to
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Speaker 1: an open area used for burning trash, but there was
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Speaker 1: no sign at all of any buildings past or present.
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Speaker 1: Looking at the map, Camp seven should have been a
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Speaker 1: little north of here. It was not easy going. The
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Speaker 1: vegetation was often above head height, much of it brambles,
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Speaker 1: and the ground underfoot was chaotically uneven. But feeling stubborn
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Speaker 1: about it, I pushed on Jones gamely followed. Just when
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Speaker 1: it seemed like nothing but folly, I came across a
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Speaker 1: few broken bricks. Soon we were clambering over a huge
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Speaker 1: ramshackle brick pile, until suddenly the vegetation fell away and
18:57
Speaker 1: we were on the flat stone floor of a long
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Speaker 1: gold I stopped. Alan Lomax's day here at Parchman's Camp
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Speaker 1: seven came right toward the end of his prime recording years.
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Speaker 1: He filled two reels of tape with sixteen songs. Scribbling
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Speaker 1: on the front of the tape box the names of
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Speaker 1: the prisoners he was recording, the titles of the songs,
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Speaker 1: and in the margins occasional notes and observations, large group
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Speaker 1: hoeing and lovely singing and recording, and tender sweet in truth.
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Speaker 1: Beyond the former camp's crumbling floor, there was not much
19:33
Speaker 1: to see, just a few twisted bits of metal and
19:36
Speaker 1: an old broken payphone relics that looked a little too
19:39
Speaker 1: modern to have been there in nineteen fifty nine, and
19:43
Speaker 1: in fact, later studying old satellite photos, I saw that
19:47
Speaker 1: there was a structure here as recently as twenty ten. Evidently,
19:51
Speaker 1: in this part of Mississippi, it doesn't take long for
19:54
Speaker 1: the wild to reclaim its own. Even so, just finding
19:58
Speaker 1: this place felt like a small triumph. Maybe the most
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Speaker 1: obvious lesson of this search for Alan Lomax's elusive imprint
20:06
Speaker 1: across Mississippi was that very elusiveness. He didn't document and
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Speaker 1: record what would always be here. He documented and recorded
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Speaker 1: what would soon be gone. He's not here, and the
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Speaker 1: men he was with are not here, but what he
20:20
Speaker 1: recorded remains. Maybe his true achievement is measured less by
20:25
Speaker 1: what he helped popularize in his day, and more by
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Speaker 1: the huge well of music, along with the cultures, ways
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Speaker 1: of life, and forms of expression it revealed and safeguards
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Speaker 1: that he alone rescued from fading away into silence. Quiet now, everybody,
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Speaker 1: Lomack's instructed at one point on that September day in
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Speaker 1: nineteen fifty nine, here at Camp seventh, before preserving for
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Speaker 1: all to hear the yearning beautiful unaccompanied voice of a
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Speaker 1: man named Leroy Jackson, which rang out in the air
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Speaker 1: somewhere close to where I stood. Really quiet, Okay, now
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Speaker 1: go ahead and accompanying this article key takeaways tracking Alan
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Speaker 1: Lomax's essential early travels. Beginning when he was eighteen, Lomax
21:12
Speaker 1: criss crossed the country to make recordings for the Library
21:15
Speaker 1: of Congress, first traveling in nineteen thirty three with his father,
21:19
Speaker 1: John Lomax, across Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia.
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Speaker 1: By June nineteen thirty five on his own for the
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Speaker 1: first time, he recruited two folklorists, Zora Neil Hurston and
21:34
Speaker 1: Mary Elizabeth Barnacle, to join him in Florida and Georgia,
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Speaker 1: where he recorded blues music work, songs, ring shouts, children's
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Speaker 1: field calls, ryebald ballads, and oral histories from people born
21:46
Speaker 1: before the Civil War. In nineteen thirty seven, he made
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Speaker 1: recordings in Washington, d c. And visited Kentucky and Ohio,
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Speaker 1: and the next year. Between Washington recording sessions, he traveled
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Speaker 1: to Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey before clocking eighty
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Speaker 1: four hundred miles in three months while touring the Upper Midwest,
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Speaker 1: where he captured everything from Balkan folk music to Michigan
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Speaker 1: lumberjack songs and lake sailor tales. He closed out nineteen
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Speaker 1: thirty eight in New York City recording performances and interviews
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Speaker 1: connected to Carnegie Hall's spirituals to Swing concert, as well
22:22
Speaker 1: as sessions with Lead Belly. Next, the man who created
22:28
Speaker 1: a written language for the Cherokee did it so efficiently
22:31
Speaker 1: and elegantly his peers thought it was magic. Sekoya's Syllabarry
22:37
Speaker 1: faced suspicion initially, but after a demonstration his version of
22:41
Speaker 1: talking leaves was widely embraced, and then the word spread
22:46
Speaker 1: by Andrew Lawler. At first they laughed, then they scoffed.
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Speaker 1: Finally they accused him of witchcraft. The Cherokee silversmith named
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Speaker 1: Sequoya had spent years scratching strange marks on paper. In
23:00
Speaker 1: eighteen twenty one, his fellow tribespeople disturbed by his obsession,
23:05
Speaker 1: put him on trial for practicing black magic. Sekoya insisted
23:10
Speaker 1: his invention would allow Cherokee speakers to write out Iroquoian
23:14
Speaker 1: language for the first time. To test his claim, tribal
23:18
Speaker 1: elders ordered Secoia's young daughter, Aeoka to another room. Father
23:23
Speaker 1: and daughter separately made marks on paper and told their
23:26
Speaker 1: minders in each room what the marks said. Then the
23:30
Speaker 1: papers were exchanged. When each was able to read the
23:33
Speaker 1: other's messages aloud, suspicion turned to wonder. The astonished elders
23:39
Speaker 1: immediately asked him to teach them his revolutionary transcription method.
23:44
Speaker 1: Within six months, one in four Cherokee or Zilagi could
23:48
Speaker 1: read and write. Within a quarter century, Cherokee people had
23:52
Speaker 1: achieved a higher rate of literacy than the country's non
23:56
Speaker 1: native population. The unprecedented development came after years of work
24:01
Speaker 1: by a man whose name means pig's foot, perhaps a
24:04
Speaker 1: reference to his pronounced limp. Born in seventeen seventies, Tennessee
24:10
Speaker 1: to a Cherokee mother and a white father, Secoya was
24:14
Speaker 1: raised in his mother's culture and didn't read or write English.
24:18
Speaker 1: During the War of eighteen twelve, he served alongside American soldiers,
24:23
Speaker 1: sometimes using the English name George Guess. The experience likely
24:28
Speaker 1: exposed him to written language, or what he called talking leaves.
24:33
Speaker 1: After the war, Sequoya moved to Alabama and began experimenting
24:38
Speaker 1: with an idiogrammic approach to written Cherokee, in which each
24:41
Speaker 1: word was a symbol, but he abandoned that as cumbersome
24:45
Speaker 1: and too difficult to learn. Eventually, he hit on eighty
24:49
Speaker 1: six syllables that expressed specific sounds. Each syllable represented by
24:54
Speaker 1: symbols borrowed from Greek, Hebrew, and English, later reduced to
24:59
Speaker 1: eighty five symbols. Sequoia's celibarry was not simply a creative triumph,
25:04
Speaker 1: but a new means of self government and cultural memory.
25:08
Speaker 1: By eighteen twenty seven, the Cherokee had a written constitution,
25:12
Speaker 1: and everything from hunting guidance to sacred chance could be
25:16
Speaker 1: recorded for posterity. The Cherokee Phoenix, the first native newspaper
25:21
Speaker 1: in the United States, rolled off the press in eighteen
25:24
Speaker 1: twenty eight using his symbols. Others followed. The syllabary was
25:30
Speaker 1: widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it
25:34
Speaker 1: far easier to grasp than English. The superiority of Guess's
25:39
Speaker 1: alphabet is manifest and has been fully proved by experience,
25:43
Speaker 1: wrote Albert Gallatin, a U. S. Treasury secretary, diplomat and linguist,
25:48
Speaker 1: in eighteen thirty six. The boy learns in a few
25:52
Speaker 1: weeks that which occupies two years of the time of hours.
25:56
Speaker 1: Yet sudden mass literacy didn't curb the U. S. Governments,
26:00
Speaker 1: growing appetite for Cherokee homelands in North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama,
26:05
Speaker 1: and Tennessee. Soon after Gallatin made his comments, the government
26:10
Speaker 1: forced tens of thousands of Cherokee to migrate along the
26:13
Speaker 1: Trail of Tears to a territory now called Oklahoma. Despite
26:18
Speaker 1: this tragedy, the Cherokee carried the syllaberry to their new
26:22
Speaker 1: home and maybe even across the Atlantic. In Liberia, a
26:26
Speaker 1: Cherokee named Austin Curtis, who married into the indigenous v community,
26:31
Speaker 1: is said to have used the syllaberry to devise a
26:33
Speaker 1: script for the Vy, which went on to inspire written
26:37
Speaker 1: works throughout West Africa. Sequoya himself moved to Mexico, where
26:42
Speaker 1: he died in eighteen forty three. Today, with only a
26:46
Speaker 1: few thousand Cherokee fluent in their ancestor's tongue. The syllaberry
26:50
Speaker 1: is a key tool in safeguarding Silagi culture. Teenagers use
26:55
Speaker 1: it to text one another, Children's books use it to
26:58
Speaker 1: convey traditional tales and official documents, and road signs communicate
27:03
Speaker 1: in the mode Sequoya invented, moving reminders of how a
27:07
Speaker 1: single individual's brilliance and tenacity can change the world. And
27:12
Speaker 1: accompanying this article, did you know where did Seqoja go?
27:17
Speaker 1: It's unclear why Sequoia left for Mexico when he was
27:21
Speaker 1: eighty years old in eighteen forty two, but according to
27:24
Speaker 1: an expert with the Cherokee National History Museum, he may
27:28
Speaker 1: have been in search of his fellow Cherokee who had
27:30
Speaker 1: settled there even prior to their forced removal from the
27:34
Speaker 1: Southeastern United States. Many Cherokee resettled in the early nineteenth
27:38
Speaker 1: century in East Texas, which at the time was under
27:42
Speaker 1: Spanish rule. After Mexican and Dependence and the later fight
27:46
Speaker 1: for Texan and Dependence, these Cherokee lost contact with their
27:50
Speaker 1: countrymen Over the years. Many attempts have been made to
27:54
Speaker 1: find Sequoia's grave site, but none have been successful. This
28:00
Speaker 1: concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine For today, your reader
28:05
Speaker 1: has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you for listening, and have
28:08
Speaker 1: a great day.