John Jacob Niles – The Boone-Tolliver Recordings (LM Dupli-Cation Records)
“Over coffee and liqeurs we would sometimes listen to John Jacob Niles' recordings... There was something of the Druid in him. Like a psalmodist, he intoned his verses in an ethereal chant which the angels carried forth to the Glory Seat.”
--Henry Miller, Plexus
A perception of folk music's more traditional strands that's as pernicious as it is persistent lies in the idea that it's a benign, toothless endeavor, some idle strumming and campfire singalongs that lack any real relevance or ability to deal with. And if one counterpoint to that argument had to be offered, the work of John Jacob Niles would fit nicely. Something of an ethnomusicologist (decades before the term was coined), Niles travelled extensively in the earliest decades of the twentieth century, working outwards from his Kentucky hometown, and documenting the sort of Appalachian song forms which had survived for centuries with only the slight alterations inherent to the oral tradition in their journeys from the British Isles across the Atlantic. Accompanying himself on oversized dulcimers that he built by hand, and singing in a haunting and dramatic soprano, Niles acted as a sort of conduit, carrying these traditional songs (as well as a handful of his own), some dating back nearly a millenium, into the age of recording, and in doing so created a body of work that's terrifying in its intensity and unlike anything heard before or since.
The recently-unearthed Boone-Tolliver Recordings, recorded in 1952 on the stage he had built in the living room of his rural farmhouse, provide as good an overview of Niles' approach as any available, but this isn't to say that it's at all an easy listen. His voice, swooping around the registers to grasp at each warbling and carefully enunciated syllable, might charitably be described as an acquired taste; sometimes as ethereal as the wind, sometimes as visceral as a jab to the sternum. Constrasting this, the recklessly-thumbed dulcimer strumming almost seems like an afterthought, a gnarled tangle of notes that underpins the vocal acrobatics, providing some tonal anchor without making it sound any less unhinged. Some of his best material came from the Child ballads, named for Francis Child, a Harvard professor who compiled a lengthy volume of English and Scottish folk songs during the 1880s. Niles seems to take special relish in these, his voice assuming an almost possessed quality as he takes on various characters in these narrative songs - as if the vehemence of his performances would imbue the material with a concomitant level of life-force, as if every half-strangulated warble would place one more year between each song and obscurity. While he had recorded a substantial number of Child ballads, the selections present on The Boone-Tolliver Recordings tend not to be as morose as some he had committed to tape, with only “Little Mattie Groves” (later made better-known by Fairport Convention) containing the sort of murder and mayhem that seemed to find its way into much of Niles' most compelling material.
Niles' original songs tend to be somewhat more familiar to the modern listener, if only due to later cover versions. It is, however, debatable the degree to which any of them can be said to be original, per se – even the ones for which he claimed authorship were often re-constructions and extrapolations of songs or song fragments he had heard over the years. “Black Is The Color Of My True Love's Hair,” for instance - probably best known for Nina Simone's version - dates back several centuries to Scotland, but was re-written by Niles, owing to his father's belief that the original melody was “downright terrible.” Similarly, “Go 'way From My Window” - possibly Niles' best known song, the one from which Bob Dylan borrowed for “It Ain't Me Babe” - was based upon a single repeating line in a work song he heard as a child, upon which he added verses and choruses.
“A Mephistophelean character out of North Carolina,” Dylan himself said, describing Niles, “he hammered away at some harplike instrument and sang in a bone chilling soprano voice. Niles was eerie and illogical, terrifically intense and gave you goosebumps. Definitely a switched-on character, almost like a sorcerer. Niles was otherworldly and his voice raged with strange incantations.” And while there is some truth to that assessment, the first sentence is problematic (and not just because Niles heralded from Kentucky rather than North Carolina). Niles wasn't Mephistophelean so much as he was Promethean, a messenger from a bygone age whose expansive purview and discomfiting aesthetic helped to educate America about its own cultural history. He transcended specifics of geography and time, and held up a funhouse mirror in which the songs' grotesquery and tenderness - rarely mutually exclusive in the lens through which Niles framed his art – reflected back upon listeners with the sort of unwavering ferocity that had propelled the material through the centuries.