Atlanta — Painter and folk musician Art Rosenbaum, acclaimed for his half-century of field recordings of American indigenous music, including ancient fiddle tunes from Appalachia and ritual music imported from Africa by enslaved peoples. died in hospital on September 4. Athens, Georgia, his adopted hometown. he was 83 years old.
His son, Neil Rosenbaum, said the cause was a complication of cancer.
Art Rosenbaum’s broad American musical tradition continues, and his passion for documenting performances in work camps, church gatherings, and country living rooms inspired ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax’s famous field recordings. It even extends to the works. A key inspiration was the famous folk music champion of the 20th century, Pete Seeger. Mr. Rosenbaum writes that Mr. Seeger once told him, “Don’t learn from me, learn from the people I’ve learned from.”
Rosenbaum called it “good advice and the kick to the back that got me going.”
In 2007, Atlanta-based label Dust-to-Digital released the first of two box sets of compilations from Rosenbaum’s treasure trove.Art of Field Recording Volume I: 50 Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum grammy awards Great historical album.
Pop music website Pitchfork called the release “revelatory” and “a vital counterpoint to Harry Smith’s American Folk Music Anthology.”
favorite Mr SmithA freewheeling polymath who compiled The Anthology, Rosenbaum was an accomplished visual artist. As an art teacher, he spent most of his career at the University of Georgia in Athens. There his energetic paintings often depicted the musicians he recorded, and his ideas about the democratization of culture had an impact that resonated far beyond the classroom.
Visual artist and singer of the Athenian rock band REM, Michael Stipe, who was a student of Rosenbaum in the early 1980s, said Rosenbaum’s goal was to “blur the line between outsider and insider, It was about uniting,” he said. Combine this untrained music and art with trained music and art and acknowledge that each has immense power and that they are not far apart. ”
Arthur Spark Rosenbaum was born on December 6, 1938 in Ogdensburg, St. Lawrence County, New York. His mother, Della Spark Rosenbaum, was a medical illustrator who encouraged artistic inclinations in her children. I used to sing street songs sometimes. Arthur later recorded his one of these songs. His father is his version of his 18th century Ribaldo a cappella. nursery rhyme “Our Goodman”, included in the 2007 box set.
The family eventually moved to Indianapolis, where Mr. Rosenbaum, fascinated by traditional music, absorbed Harry Smith anthologies and contemporary folk stars of the time. In high school, he won an art contest at the Indiana State Fair and spent the $25 prize on his five-string banjo.he continued to be outstanding professional Learned to play and tune the traditional banjo and recorded several albums.
In the mid-1950s, Mr. Rosenbaum moved to New York City, the epicenter of the burgeoning folk revival, and earned a BA in Art History and an MA in Fine Arts from Columbia University. During the summer he worked at a resort hotel on Lake Michigan, where he began recording field workers near Mexico and the American South.
In 1958, in Indianapolis, Rosenbaum tracked down and recorded a musician named Scrapper Blackwell, who he described as “one of the best and most influential blues guitarists of the 1920s and ’30s.” As Mr. Rosenbaum liked to recall, back in New York, a fellow roots music enthusiast named Bob Dylan told Mr. Blackwell the details he could glean about his life and playing style. was bothering him about
It was in New York that Mr. Rosenbaum met the artist Margo Newmark. she survives him.
In addition to her and his son Neil, a filmmaker and musician, he is survived by his sister, Jenny Rosenbaum, who is a writer. His younger brother Viktor Rosenbaum is a concert pianist.
After teaching studio art for eight years at the University of Iowa, Rosenbaum took a similar job at the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art in 1976. Based in Athens, he and Newmark fielded his Ms. Rosenbaum to continue his recordings, many of them in and around Georgia, giving musicians they met the opportunity to perform before new audiences. .
Judith McWilly, the university’s professor of arts emeritus, said: different from what he had. This was his 1970s, which was going through some very difficult times in the South. ”
Folk music reveals a shared cultural history, she said.
In 1984, Mr. Rosenbaum recorded an album of the stories and songs of Howard Finster, a self-taught artist, preacher and self-proclaimed “Man of Vision.” A band by REM and Talking Heads.
he also McIntosh County ShoutersAn African-American group from coastal Georgia performing “Ring Shout.” Rosenbaum described it as “a striking fusion of call-and-response singing, polyrhythmic percussion, and expressive and stylized dance-like movements.” The ring shout, he claimed, is “the oldest African-American performing tradition on the North American continent.”
Group member Brenton Jordan said of Rosenbaum:He says the once-endangered Ring Shout has recently been promoted to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Rosenbaums published a book on the ring shout in 1998. Paintings of performers by Rosenbaum and photography by Newmark Rosenbaum depict places and cultures at odds with modern life.
Many of Rosenbaum’s other paintings and drawings are loosely allegorical works in which the old and the new collide and live together, transforming traditional musicians into contemporary hipsters, skateboarders, and documentaries. It shares space on the canvas with the artist (often Rosenbaum himself).
As a painter, he was influenced by Cézanne and the German expressionist Max Beckmann. At times his work is reminiscent of the paintings of the American regionalist Thomas Hart Benton. Among Rosenbaum’s works, there is also a large mural on the theme of history.
Starting in the late 1970s, Athens experienced a surge in forward-thinking rock musicians. Many of them, like Mr. Stipe, were associated with the Georgia School of Art. Mr. Rosenbaum’s passion has always been in traditional music, but he continues to inspire contemporary musicians.
Dust-to-Digital label founder and co-director Lance Ledbetter remembers Vic Chesnut, the brilliant and idiosyncratic Athens-based songwriter who died in 2009, and says of Rosenbaum: I’m talking like this.
“When I heard about this guy who moved to Athens and played the banjo and knew all these songs, I followed him like a puppy. And I’m not the only one who did it.”