Jeff Miller/UW Madison
When folklorist Jim Leary was growing up in Rice Lake, Wis., in the 1950s and ’60s, old-time ethnic music was everywhere. You could dial up the local radio station, WJMC, and hear live broadcasts of Scandinavian music by the Eric Berg Band. The nearby ski lodge was a venue for Slovenian accordion music. Polka star Whoopee John was a frequent visitor from his home base a few hours away in New Ulm, Minn.
Leary — who retired last month from his faculty posts in UW’s Scandinavian Studies and Comparative Literature and Folklore Studies departments — has been studying the rich ethnic musical heritage of the Upper Midwest since the 1970s. Up until then, what most folklorists thought of as folk music was pretty limited. “It was basically Anglo-American and African American, and maybe some discrete ethnic groups in their own little sealed-off ethnic ghetto,” Leary says. “But I had grown up where there were all kinds of wild combinations of things, and there was pluralism where you could distinguish a Bohemian band from a Scandinavian band, but there was a lot of exchange, involving country and rock as well.”
Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946, Leary’s groundbreaking project co-published last year by UW Press and Dust-to-Digital (a record label that specializes in preserving and re-releasing old music of cultural interest), represents the culmination of that work. Folksongs of Another America includes five CDs of restored and digitized field recordings of songs by 200 performers in 25 different languages; a DVD documentary, Alan Lomax Goes North; and a 430-page hardcover book, for which Leary has been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Album Notes category. Grammy winners will be announced Feb. 15.
Leary discovered folklore as a field of study while an undergraduate at Notre Dame, and went on to get his master’s at University of North Carolina. He started delving into the traditional music of the Upper Midwest region in a serious way when he taught a course at UW’s Barron County campus while working toward his Ph.D. in folklore at Indiana University.
After receiving his doctorate in 1977, Leary got a job at the University of Kentucky, but that gig ended after about six years when he didn’t get tenure. “If I had been studying Appalachian old-time music and Jack tales [as in “Jack and the Beanstalk and “Jack the Giant Killer”], I think I would have been okay. But I was looking at polka music and Ole and Lena jokes,” Leary says.
His fortunes changed in the early 1980s when Northland College in Ashland, Wis., used an NEA grant to hire him to document the life, history and music of people of various ethnic and indigenous backgrounds in the Lake Superior region. “That’s where I really got immersed in doing fieldwork with musicians, and got more and more excited about their connections with historic sound recordings and earlier generations of musicians in the region,” Leary says. He also began to meet people who had been recorded back in the 1930s and 1940s by pioneering folk music field collectors Sidney Robertson, Helene Stratman-Thomas and Alan Lomax, whose work makes up the backbone of Folksongs of Another America. Working under the auspices of the Library of Congress and the New Deal-spawned Works Progress Administration and Resettlement Administration, that trio of song-catchers spent years making field recordings of the region’s traditional tunes.
Leary has spent the last 10 years poring over their papers, field notes, diaries and correspondence. He enlisted the help of language-savvy colleagues to get the lyrics right and translate them into English from their 25 different original languages. He did genealogical research to learn more about the folks whose voices had been captured 75 years ago. And he worked with audio engineers to restore, spruce up and digitize the music. It was an enormous, Grammy-worthy undertaking.
Of course, Leary has been working on other projects along the way as well. After the Kentucky gig, he spent the next several years doing part-time and contract work, often for UW, often in collaboration with his wife, fellow folklorist Janet Gilmore. Leary has been a full-blown member of the UW faculty since 1999. He’s written books on folk music (Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music, Oxford University Press, 2006) and humor (So Ole Says to Lena: Folk Humor of the Upper Midwest, UW Press, 2001). He has published numerous journal articles and chapters of other books, and collaborated with Richard March to produce 150 half-hour documentaries about traditional and ethnic music of Wisconsin and the Upper Midwest for Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Down Home Dairyland” series. When he’s not working, he manages to enjoy music in a nonscholarly way; he’s been a fan of rock, honky-tonk, country, polka and other genres since childhood.
Now that he’s retired, Leary hopes to spend more time at his Mount Horeb home engaging in his quintessentially Wisconsin hobbies: beer drinking, cross-country skiing and hardcore Packers, Brewers and Badgers fandom.
But retirement doesn’t mean he is going to stop working. Leary has several projects in the hopper, including a book about Franz Rickaby, who in the 1920s published a book called Ballads and Songs of the Shanty-Boy. He’s also collaborating with Henry Sapoznik and Scott Carter of UW’s Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture on a project involving old home recordings held by UW’s Mills Music Library. Retiring will mainly mean he won’t be teaching, attending departmental meetings or serving on a million committees.
“It’ll be kind of like back in the day when I was working part-time and doing contract work,” Leary says. “We didn’t get paid very much, but everything we did was meaningful.”
Ole and Lena
Grammy nominee Jim Leary also happens to an expert on that the Midwestern tradition known as Ole and Lena jokes. He is the author of So Ole Says to Lena: Folk Humor of the Upper Midwest (UW Press, 2001).
He submits this as his favorite:
Ole died, and after mourning for a while, Lena decided to get on with her life. She met a charming Palestinian immigrant, and before too long she got pregnant. Because she wasn’t young anymore, she had an ultrasound and learned that she’d have a boy. She wanted a good Norwegian name and the father wanted a good Palestinian name. In the end they compromised and called their son Yasser You Betcha.
And here’s a variation on a well-worn Ole and Lena joke I penned especially for Leary:
Ole asked Lena to read his 30-page book about folk songs in the Upper Midwest. While she was reading, Ole puts his hand on her knee. Lena says, “Ole, you can go a little farther than that.” So he writes another 400 pages.