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November 8, 2021
Henry Adam Svec's Playlist for His Novel "Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Henry Adam Svec's novel Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs is inventively told and engagingly entertaining and thought-provoking.
Sean Michaels wrote of the book:
"A book that twangs and spirals—sui generis in the history of Canadian literature. Svec exhibits the acumen of Marshall McLuhan, the heart of Rita MacNeil, and the meticulous truthfulness of Farley Mowat."
In his own words, here is Henry Adam Svec's Book Notes music playlist for his novel Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs:
Henry Adam Svec’s Playlist for His Novel “Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs”
In my new novel, Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs, Henry Adam Svec discovers a box of tapes in the basement of Library and Archives Canada. It turns out that these recordings were made in the late sixties by an iconoclastic folklorist named Staunton R. Livingston, who was committed to documenting the folk songs of the Canadian Football League. Inspired by this Livingston character, and in spite of warnings from his grad school supervisor, Henry abandons his current dissertation plans and becomes an honest-to-goodness folk song collector. Inspired also by the game of Canadian football, he brings a scrappy, combative attitude to the new quest. Heartbreak and hilarity ensue.
The novel is in the shape of an anthology of songs. However, as Henry argues in the introductory section, an authentic anthology should additionally include behind-the-scenes information about the collector’s personal trials and tribulations. So, across footnotes and interspersed micro-essays that connect the song lyrics, he describes battles with his accumulating enemies in academia, a hot and paradigm-shifting love affair with an installation artist, and the many psychic costs of the folkloristic vocation. Will Henry’s co-invention of an artificially intelligent database assuage his most recent crisis of faith?
I wrote most of the songs in the book myself. This project actually began about a decade ago as an ongoing performance and recording project—a pseudo-scholarly/musical hoax that involved pretending to be a strumming and singing folk song collector. For one of my albums, I even did some actual song collecting, sort of, asking some of my favorite musicians to rewrite traditional tunes once retrieved by the folklorist Edith Fulton Fowke. Some of those songs are presented in the book too, by gracious permission of the authors.
Like all self-aware song collectors, whether virtual or actual, I have been concerned with the difficulties of translation between the fields of music and literature. What gets lost in the movement of information from sound waves to signifiers? What are songs and books for, and, more importantly, what can they be called upon to do? Here are some of the recordings that have helped me along the way.
I Pity the Country, Willie Dunn
Contemporary collectors can record or write, but they can also gather. Kevin “Sipreano” Howes’s Native North America, Vol. 1 is an assemblage of dozens of stunning, formerly forgotten cuts of Indigenous folk, rock, and country music made between 1966 and 1985, which I immersed myself in while thinking through the durability of the song-collecting impulse. I particularly like Willie Dunn’s opening track, a sharp and hummable critique of the settler-colonial nation state of Canada.
Day of the Locusts, Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan’s adventures in the mid-'60s, with electrification and rock band backing, have made him an interesting case study regarding the aesthetic limits of folk revivalism. What happens when the machine pierces the pastoral garden? A timeless Promethean tale. It’s hard to pick just one or even two Dylan songs, as I find myself almost endlessly cycling through his periods and LPs, with the odd break between. But “Day of the Locusts” nicely resonates with my novel’s many jabs at the institution of academia. “It smelled like a tomb!”
If I Had a Hammer, Trini Lopez
The idealism of the topical folk singers is nearly incomprehensible from our contemporary historical vantage point, which is one of the reasons that I have felt drawn to it. Political folk songs appeared able to move mountains, or vanquish armies, or change everybody’s mind. This utopian potential is charted in Pete Seeger’s compact and catchy “If I Had a Hammer,” a song about translation and action. Given the subject matter, I think Seeger would like that I’m sharing, not his version, but this fun pop interpretation.
Something on Your Mind, Karen Dalton
In my book, Staunton R. Livingston seems to have become obsessed with the oppressive limits of writing and print. (FYI, Livingston had been a student of Marshall McLuhan’s in the fifties—or was it rather McLuhan who had been a student of him?) Livingston endeavored only to record and not to write, a preference which he believed would have revolutionary consequences. Perhaps he was inspired by voices like Karen Dalton’s, who indeed makes the prospect of capturing a song with either musical notation or alphabet appear utterly insane. You can’t write her voice. Vinyl and digital containers can barely hold it!
One Night Stand, Lucinda Williams
I love Lucinda Williams’s drawl and her songwriting. She’s always connecting her listeners to real places in space and time, and her characters are always complex, often pulled in multiple directions by their appetites and obligations. Although I like many of her records, I have never tired of her early Happy Woman Blues. It is almost always in my car. I especially listened to it a lot when I was living in Jackson, Mississippi, where I began to work on the novel.
I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground, Bascom Lamar Lunsford
Legendary subcultural weirdo Harry E. Smith is surely the guiding light for all song collectors aspiring to make art—and not merely content for bureaucratic national archives. He was one of the models for Livingston, and Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music is something I returned to often while writing and planning. Of all the marvelous material Smith snatched from the dusty clutches of entropy, Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s surrealist song of longing is my favorite.
Darkness and Cold, Purple Mountains
Somewhere around drafts three or four, the great David Berman died. For most songwriters I know he remains the gold standard, up there with Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell and anyone else you’d want to add to such a list. News of his passing sent me into a loop of listening to The Silver Jews and to his new project, Purple Mountains, which I was ashamed to realize that I had missed completely upon initial release. “The light of my life is going out tonight, without a flicker of regret,” Berman sings. His songs are like novellas, but his lines are like smooth little sculptures, that punch you.
(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay, Otis Redding
Another album that backgrounded my life in Jackson was a compilation of Atlantic soul cuts, from “Green Onions” to “Poison Ivy” and more. “Grain” is an important concept in theories of the voice—it’s Roland Barthes’s idea that there is something corporeal in singing that reaches beyond the notes—and the hunt for grain unites fans of almost all genres. “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” is one of those songs from the '60s that you can hear everywhere, in grocery stores and such, but I never grow tired of the vivid scene setting, or of Redding’s rich, resonant pipes. And the superimposed field recording of the rolling ocean waves is a nice touch.
We All Gotta Be a Prostitute Sometimes, Geoff Berner
It’s not easy to get in front of a crowd with only a voice and instrument—such as an autoharp—and then command attention. The idyllic, encouraging setting of the Greenwich Village basket house is long gone; now there’s TV screens and smart phones to combat, in addition to pervasive anti-sincerity sentiment. If there were a Masterclass on Getting People to Pay Attention Through Folk Music, however, Geoff Berner would be the ideal instructor. The klezmer accordionist and political humorist (and novelist) has dozens of musical and poetical gears within reach now, but his early “We All Gotta Be a Prostitute Sometimes” is a song that I have always found particularly provocative and furious, though I’m not sure it is still in his set list.
Fuck the Government, I Love You, The Burning Hell
The folklorist Henry Adam Svec eventually finds himself in Dawson City, Yukon. He collaborates there with a Czech programmer by building “an artificially intelligent, digital organism capable of accessing the totality of the history of Canadian folk music (among other corpuses) and generating new yet hyper-authentic Canadian folk objects.” I wrote the first batch of songs by LIVINGSTON™, which have made it into the novel, but I called upon Mathias Kom of The Burning Hell to write the volume 2.0 batch, which I had to leave out of the book only because the emerging narrative demanded it. Songwriters that can lightly move from sweetness to pain to politics to comedy are the kind that I tend to like, and Mathias is a master.
Gone So Far, Jenny Omnichord
It helped to listen to songwriters that I had played with while I was touring around with my fakelore projects—a means of casting myself back to those experiences of scene and community and musical fellowship. These included Laura Barrett, Ron Leary, Jon McKiel, Sunparlour Players, and Jenny Mitchell (aka Jenny Omnichord, aka Bird City). Jenny’s low-fi aesthetic belies impeccable musicianship and songwriting craft, which you can hear on any of her recordings. With Bird City, she has moved on from the omnichord for now, but I wanted to mix it up in this admittedly guitar-heavy playlist, so I’ve reached back for an older classic.
Saskatchewan in 1881, Colter Wall
It is easy to make fun of the folknik’s questing after authenticity. However, just because something is inauthentic (or impossible) does not mean that it’s not also awesome—or true. Colter Wall might actually be from Saskatchewan; I have no idea. He can’t be from 1881, despite his hat and boots and timeless voice, and I could not care less. Wall’s perfect performance of this perfect song, frothing over with bravado and gravitas, brings new chronologies into being, in under three minutes. His music was a happy discovery for me at the final revisions stage.
Memphis Flu, Elder Curry
The label Dust-to-Digital has also been keeping the song collecting project alive, having released several anthologies inventively packaged and framed, painstakingly selected. For example, the epic Goodbye, Babylon comes in a wooden box with tiny pieces of cotton placed around the disks. There are six records in all, full of hellfire and brimstone sermons, solemn hymns and rowdy congregation hollers. I actually got a speeding ticket once while listening to this album, and I believe it was this song in particular propelling me forward. I had tried to explain to the officer that my foot had become possessed by the holy spirit of sound archivists, but to no avail.
Fall Away, Sugluk
I had to add another cut from the Native North America, Vol. 1 album, because I listened to it so much while drafting. Amidst the lovely folk ballads there are several raucous garage-rock numbers that variously exude the joy of playing with others, something any twenty-first-century folklorist worth their salt will want to theorize beyond recognition. But let’s simply enjoy the sound of Northern Quebec’s Sugluk, who light the room ablaze with this slapping, self-referential rock ‘n’ roll masterpiece.
The Murder of Maggie Howie, Geraldine Sullivan
I ended up doing as much reading about music as listening to it, for my research. The printed anthologies of Alan Lomax and Edith Fulton Fowke were especially helpful in my attempts to find the right voice for the narrator, which needed to be both enthusiastic and scholarly, populist and dry. Edith Fowke made radio shows, published books, and edited albums, including The Folk Songs of Ontario for Folkways Records. As far as I can tell, she could have been a character in A Mighty Wind, but I admire and cherish her prodigious output. And who doesn’t love a good murder ballad?
Interview #1, Muddy Waters and Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax discovered Leadbelly with his father on a trip through the South, he produced countless folk collections in various media, he even started to experiment with digital interfaces towards the end of his career—a logical continuation of his lifelong mission to keep folk music accessible and relevant. The figure of the avaricious song collector has been justly criticized, but the fact remains that so many songs and performers might never have lasted without their efforts. I like Lomax’s particular blend of naivety, ambition, and pragmatism, some of which we can hear on this Library of Congress interview with Muddy Waters conducted near Clarksdale, Mississippi.
I Be’s Troubled, Muddy Waters
Of course, there is the risk that the biases of the collector can get in the way of their work of faithful documentation. Henry struggles with this phenomenon as he moves into the field with his microphone and Canadian government–funded art grant. The folklorist has their agenda, their ideas and plans for “the folk,” but the musicians have their own agenda as well, which presumably includes simply getting their great tunes and chops down onto a recording. I love this Lomax–Waters Library of Congress session because the latent power struggle at play practically leaps off the discs. And Muddy Waters, who soon would head to Chicago to pursue his legendary career as an electric blues artist, always wins.
Do Whatever the Heck You Want, Rae Spoon
When I first heard non-binary writer and musician Rae Spoon, their work was in the vicinity of the folk-country genre. Since then Rae has tangled with electronica and dance beats and textures, with a massive and impressive oeuvre already behind them. I regularly come back to the 2008 album Superioryouareinferior, maybe because I love acoustic instruments, maybe because I love the Great Lakes region. However, I have also been very much into this more recent “Do Whatever the Heck You Want,” a good reminder of the ways in which the political folk song movement and the singer-songwriter turn can continue to permutate and evolve in interesting ways together.
Take It Easy, Jackson Browne
Towards the end of Life Is Like Canadian Football and Other Authentic Folk Songs, when Henry and his new Czech programmer buddy are in the Yukon, working on their artificially intelligent music machine, they encounter a range of technical and interpersonal problems. One of which is that they need to teach LIVINGSTON™ the differences between authentic and inauthentic Canadian folk music, despite the arbitrariness of such distinctions. I don’t want to spoil anything, but one of the consequences is the authoring of the most authentic Canadian folk song of all time, Henry believes, which turns out to be identical also to a notorious hit cowritten by The Eagles and Jackson Browne. Henry is not able to share the complete text in his anthology, due to capitalist copyright laws, but he does include a paraphrased version. Luckily, we can enjoy the equally authentic “original,” in all its fidelity, here on Spotify™.
Henry Adam Svec is the author of American Folk Music as Tactical Media. His writing has appeared in Noisey, The New Quarterly, C Magazine, MOTHERBOARD, and elsewhere, and his musical performances have been presented in galleries and festivals including 7a*11d, FADO, and Sappyfest. He is also co-creator of Donair Academy, a digital role-playing game exploring Atlantic Canadian cuisine. He was raised on a cherry farm in Southwestern Ontario, and has lived in New Brunswick and Mississippi. He currently teaches at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
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