Kristina's Open Stacks Blog - KRISTINA R. GADDY

William Adams and the Sounds of KenGar

6/16/2020

“‘Getting Up Cows,’ that’s what it’s called, ‘Getting Up Cows,” William Adams said. “An old fella played that. He was a cracker-jack old fiddler, though, I don’t believe he could beat me….”
Mike Seeger hadn’t come to the neighborhood to record Adams initially, but now he wanted to hear any tune the Black fiddler could remember, even if he forgot it halfway through or couldn’t remember the name.
“I forget how that goes, though, I haven’t played that since a long time ago,” the 72 year-old Adams continued before he put the bow on the fiddle’s strings and hesitantly pulled the tune from deep in his memory. In the end, it sounded like he might have just last played it a week or a year ago, not some 20-odd years earlier.

The 19 year-old white Seeger listened intently as a brown strip spun from one reel of his Magencord recorder to the other, putting Adams’s notes indelibly down on tape. This was the first time he’d gone into the field to record a musician, but it wouldn’t be his last. This was probably the first and definitely the last time Adams’s fiddling was recorded.

This field recording wasn’t taken in some rural hamlet or deep holler, it was less than five miles from Seeger’s home in the well-to-do suburb of Chevy Chase outside Washington, D.C. And yet in 1953, when Seeger stepped into Adams’s neighborhood of KenGar, segregation left this community so separate from the white towns and neighborhoods surrounding it, a white person might drive by without even knowing it was there.

Pumpkins & Parties!

10/13/2017

Friday the 13th has enough scary stuff, so here are some cute photos of kids celebrating Halloween festivities!

This whole post was inspired by this one photo, from the Upshur County Historical Society in Buckhannon, West Virginia. In a collection of thousands of glass plate negatives, this gem appeared. The photographer Fred Brooks was a naturalist working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, so many of the photos in the collection are of diseased trees or insects. But since he had the camera, he also took photos of his children (like this one) and the travels he took around the United States. (I'm pretty sure this is his daughter Dorothy and the photo is from 1920-22.)

Rewriting History: The Lee-Jackson Statue in Baltimore

6/5/2017

You never know what you'll find in a box.

Last year, my friend Erik found a recording titled "Dr. Freeman's speech dedicating the Lee-Jackson Monument in Wyman Park" in a friend's record collection. The 33 1/3 LP was homemade, and the fact that it dealt with a seemingly out-of-place confederate statue in a city park about two miles from his house intrigued him.
He shared the recording with me, and I knew the story of the recording had to be told through audio. My radio-producer friend Nadia Ramlagan and I started researching the the speech, the event, the artist, the donation, and produced a radio piece that aired last week on the Marc Steiner Show.
The story explores the history of the statue, and how that history should be a part of the debate about what to do with the confederate monuments in Baltimore today.

1948 cover of Baltimore Magazine, with a feature story on the monument.

Listen to the piece and explore our research.

Across the Atlantic

4/2/2017

Midwife Problems, and Solutions, Part 2

This is part 2 of a series on the history of midwifery in the U.S. and Sweden. Click here to read part 1.

Like Hannah Karlen, Rosa Fineberg was alone when she had arrived in Baltimore in the 1890s. Fineberg had also been a midwife in her previous home, Russia, and planned to continued her work in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Jonestown.
Almost daily, she stepped out of her house carrying a large black leather bag. She walked by kosher meat markets and a butcher (who much to the dismay of the city health officials sometimes kept chickens in the basement), a kosher grocery store that advertised wares in Yiddish, and the Russische Shul where she attended temple. Every week, sometimes twice a week, and sometimes even twice in a single day she was called to deliver a baby. Her patients called her Tante Rosa and trusted her.

Rosa Fineberg around the turn of the 20th century, courtesy Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Kosher butcher in Jonestown, with the basement chickens, from Janet Kemp's Housing Conditions in Baltimore, 1907.

Rosa's daughter Sarah with her husband, Max Siegel in 1899, courtesy Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Fineberg's daughter Sarah thought her mother had a special, healing power, that was at times unexplainable. When Sarah went into labor in 1901, she called her mother to deliver the baby. And if her mother hadn't been a midwife, she probably would have called another midwife and not a doctor. A midwife’s delivery fee was five to ten dollars, much less than a hospital or private doctor would ask for, and in a time before medical schools were regulated, being a doctor didn't necessarily mean anything.

In Baltimore city, over 150 midwives delivered over 4,000 babies a year, and in every city and town in the U.S., you could find a woman delivering a baby, calling herself a midwife. But just like there were no regulations for doctors, there were no regulations for midwives. Why didn't the U.S. regulate the medical profession? And what did that mean for the health and safety of babies and mothers?

Maryland Emancipation Day

11/1/2016

"Mr. President, it is my desire to be free," Ms. Annie Davis wrote to Lincoln on August 25th, 1864.

Although it had been more than a year and a half since President Lincoln's Empancipation Proclamation, the answer to Davis's question was "No." The executive order that more than 3 million enslaved Americans would be freed didn't apply to any border states where slavery was still legal, and even to some areas of the south like New Orleans, the to-be state of West Virginia, and the area around Newport News, Virginia. Davis lived in Bel Air, Maryland, and that physical location meant that in August of 1864, she was not free. She would have to wait until November 1st, 1864 for the decree from the Maryland General Assembly and a new state constitution.

Belair Aug 25th 1864
Mr President
It is my Desire to be free, to go to see my people on the eastern shore my mistress wont let me you will please let me know if we are free and what i can do. I write to you for advice please send me word this week or as soon as possible and oblidge.
Annie Davis
Belair Harford County, MD.
Belair Harford

Today, Maryland is thought of as the Mid-Atlantic, with barely any relationship to the south. But the fact is that the state is south of the Mason-Dixon line, and before Washington, D.C. brought transplants from all over the United States, I've seen references to suburbs like Kensington and Silver Spring as being "sleepy southern towns." More importantly in the context of today, Maryland Emancipation Day, this was a slave-holding state, a fact that many people seem to forget when talking about Frederick Douglass, a fierce abolitionist who was enslaved and worked in the Inner Harbor of Baltimore City, or Harriet Tubman, a heroic Underground Railroad worker born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. During the Civil War, the state also had
many southern sympathizers, including the man who shot Lincoln, John Wilkes Booth (like Annie Davis, a resident of Bel Air, Maryland).

"Slave Statistics," a record of the enslaved people in Maryland and their owners at the time of emancipation exists for some counties in Maryland, but not for Harford. I haven't been able to find anything else about Annie Davis in a brief search. I want to thank Mr. C.R. Gibbs and the Reginald F. Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture for the Maryland Emancipation Day Lecture, where Mr. Gibbs shared this powerful letter.

Votes for Women!

8/23/2016

Friday is Women's Equality Day, and given Hillary's nomination, now seems about as good a time as any to see some images from the women's suffrage movement.

"The greatest thrills of the campaign came with the street parades.... I marched in one in Baltimore and in the famous one staged in Washington the day before the first inauguration of President Wilson.... The professional women in cap and gown, lawyers, doctors, teachers and students formed a conspicous section of the parade." - Dr. Lillian Welsh, Reminiscences of Thirty Years in Baltimore

Photograph courtesy of the Goucher College Special Collections.

Photograph courtesy of the Maryland Historical Society

Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The Crab Derby in Crisfield

6/24/2016

Everyone is in place, waiting. Money and honor are on the line. The gate comes up. Bang! They're off!

They are crabs; Chesapeake blue crabs to be specific. A crab race? Really? Yes.
In 1947, the town of Crisfield decided to host a hard crab race outside of their post office as part of a summer Fishing Fair, highlighting their seafood bounty. In Maryland, summer is synonymous with eating blue crabs out on a deck by the water, and Crisfield, located on Eastern Shore between the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean, is a town that revolves around watermen and fishing culture.
I came across these great clips from WMAR-TV's coverage of the 6th annual crab race via the University of Baltimore's archives, which got me to look into the history of the event a little more.

Daniel Berrigan & The Catonsville Nine

5/7/2016

Peace activist and priest Daniel Berrigan passed away this past week at the age of 94.

"Demonstrators and counter-demonstrators during the trial of the Catonsville Nine, Oct. 5-9, 1968. Photo by William Morgenstern/ UMBC AOK Library."

He came into my consciousness as a member of the Catonsville Nine, burning draft cards with homemade Napalm in Catonsville, Maryland in 1968. I wrote a piece for UMBC Magazine on the documentary Hit & Stay by Joe Tropea and Skizz Cyzyk in 2013 (Joe and I are both UMBC grads, and UMBC is in Catonsville) -- check them both out.

Levi Brown, banjo maker, player, and bon-vivant

11/5/2015

At this year's 19th Century Banjo Gathering (Banjo Collector's Gathering), Pete Ross and I presented on Levi Brown.

This banjo is owned by banjo researcher and historian Bob Winans. For many years, he knew that it was an antique, Minstrel-Era banjo from around the same time as the famous Boucher banjos. But there was no maker's mark or indication of where it came from. Until this showed up:

This tailpiece showed up on a banjo that had a nearly identical silhouette to Winans's banjo and had that mark: Levi Brown, Balto. Winans's research of banjo dealers and makers turned up the crucial information that Brown called himself a maker in advertisements and city directories.

Our research uncovered that there was much more to Brown's life than just making banjos, which make sense when you know a little bit about existing Minstrel-Era banjos.

The Man Behind Ford's Theater

8/13/2015

If you know the name John T. Ford at all, it's probably because he was the owner of Ford's New Theater, "which acquired such unenviable notoriety as the scene of the assassination of President Lincoln," as one of his obituaries pointed out.

John Ford's life was much bigger than that one night in April 150 years ago.

John T. Ford and his son, Charles, 1853, courtesy Library of Congress

Two years before the photo on the left was taken, John Thompson Ford was already on his way to becoming the proprietor of a theater that the President of the United States would visit.
Ford was born in Baltimore on April 26, 1829, and at the age of 22, he began managing a Black-Face Minstrel troupe called Kunkel's Ethiopian Nightingale Serenaders (alternatively Opera Troupe). When George W. Harvey had previously managed the group, an advertisement in the Baltimore Sun read: "[they] have been pronounced the very best company... the truest delineators of Ethiopian characters." They were not actually impersonating "Ethiopian characters," but rather making crude caricatures of what they thought black people talked and acted like.

A. Hoen & Co Lithograph c. 1873, courtesy Library of Congress.