Nathan Gibson
UW-Madison folklorist Jim Leary spent countless hours in the Mills Music Library on campus, listening to 78s released on the Helvetia record label.
The first time Jim Leary was nominated for a Grammy, it went to Joni Mitchell. This time around, Joni isn’t part of the competition, though an homage to Bob Dylan is probably a crowd-pleasing favorite. Even so, who says there isn’t time to throw some Grammy love at yodelers? That’s the hope of Leary, a folklorist who is up for his second Grammy Award nomination for Best Album Notes for a release of archival music with a Wisconsin connection.
Leary, a professor emeritus at UW-Madison and Mount Horeb resident, researched and wrote the 60-page booklet that accompanies Alpine Dreaming: The Helvetia Records Story, 1920-24.
The two-disc set includes all 36 known sides from a little-known label based in Monroe that recorded songs of Swiss immigrants. Not all were from Wisconsin. Singer Charles Schoenenberger, who appears on 22 tracks, was a New Jersey garment worker.
“He worked long days in a windowless damp factory, then on the weekends he’d go to a Swiss hall and stand in front of a painted backdrop and sing about frolicking in mountain pastures,” Leary says.
The performers’ work was collected by an entrepreneur named Ferdinand Ingold, who came to Monroe in 1892 and drove a float in the first Cheese Days parade in 1916. He was an artist and a shopkeeper but ran the record label, too. Recordings were likely made in New York and pressed in Connecticut, but the business was run out of Monroe. The label took its name (pronounced hell-VEETS-ee-ah) from the Roman name for Switzerland.
Leary first learned of Helvetia Records while researching Swissconsin, My Homeland, a 1988 recording from the Wisconsin Folklife Center. At a conference a few years ago he gave a talk on Helvetia Records. In attendance was a representative of Archeophone Records, a Grammy-winning label that specializes in music of the acoustic (or acoustical) era of recording — before microphones and amplification.
Once on board with Archeophone, Leary played detective to track down the 36 sides (on 18 78-rpm records) recorded in Helvetia’s brief life. Ten records were in the Mills Music Library on the UW-Madison campus. Leary and Archeophone tapped into their collector network to score the rest.
Engineers cleaned up the sound, Leary researched the performers and a network of translators dived in to provide original lyrics in English and various Germanic languages and dialects. The tunes themselves aren’t all that different from what singing clubs in Green County perform today, Leary says.
“What’s unusual is the yodelers on the record are accompanied by a piano and not an accordion, probably because the piano recorded well during that acoustic era,” Leary says.
Along with the other Archeophone releases, Leary’s Grammy competition includes jazz, blues and a new Bob Dylan release, Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13/1979-81. In 2015, Leary was nominated for Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937-1946, but the award went to Joni Mitchell, who wrote the notes for her own four-disc release.
Leary attended the awards ceremony and sat behind Jason Isbell as he swept the Americana categories in the early event and then sat up high in the auditorium for the big show. That’s what he’ll do again on Feb. 10, proudly so, but with his own twist.
“It says black tie, so I have a bolo,” Leary says. “I have my Red Wing boots, but I’ll oil ’em up. I’m a jackpine savage, and this is rock and roll.”
Jim Leary will discuss Alpine Dreaming on Feb. 28 at the Mount Horeb Public Library and on April 9 at Turner Hall in Monroe. Both appearances feature yodeling and alphorn performances. Leary will discuss both his Grammy-nominated projects on March 21 at the Middleton Public Library.
