Experiencing Joy: Joseph Spence, "The Complete Folkways Recordings 1958"

Joseph Spence, The Complete Folkways Recordings 1958 cassette (Smithsonian Folkways, 1992)

Sometimes I think about what it must have been like—what it must have felt like—to have been the first human being to approach Niagara Falls. As you approached through the trees or grassland, whatever foliage was there before much later residents established a built environment, the first thing you’d experience would be the sound of the falls: 5.9 million cubic feet of water every minute. 

Imagine the initially muffled, then ever-growing roar as you approached—before you even saw what was making the sound. That must have been strange, curious, perhaps terrifying—and once you reached a point from which you could see the falls—wonderful. Imagine, though, how it would have felt to wonder what was making that sound, the sound of Niagara Falls, as you approached. What could it possibly be? What wonder or horror lay ahead?

Listening to this 1992 cassette of the 1959 and then 1964 release of the music included on Joseph Spence’s The Complete Folkways Recordings 1958, I also think about how Samuel Charters must have felt as he walked through the Fresh Creek Settlement on Andros, there to collect traditional Bahaman folk music.

“Some men were working on the foundation of a new house, and as we came close to them we could hear guitar music. It was some of the most exuberant, spontaneous, and uninhibited guitar playing we had ever heard, but all we could see was a man in a faded shirt and rumpled khaki trousers sitting on a pile of bricks,” Charters wrote in the liner notes to this tape. “He had a large acoustic guitar in his lap. I was so sure two guitarists were playing that I went along the path to look on the other side of the wall to see where the other musician was sitting. We had just met Joseph Spence.”

All hyperbolic comparison aside, both Niagara Falls and Joseph Spence, who died in 1984, are forces of nature. If you’ve never listened to Spence, you owe yourself the meeting of his music. Similar to how Charters described Spence’s playing, I’ve never heard music so enjoyed by the performer, much less his audience. 

Spence must have been experiencing joy—or close to it—while playing for the visitors and their tape recorder. You can hear it in his energetic improvised lines diverging from the melodies of the mostly traditional songs. (Beetlejuice viewers will get a kick out of his rough-hewn take on “Jump in the Line.”) You can hear it in Spence’s persistent foot tapping, his periodic growls and sotto voce singing, and his occasional laughter as he surprises and delights even himself—or responds to those listening. This is among the most human music I’ve ever heard. It’s also among the most happy.

In a delightful bit of serendipity, these songs were recorded on July 23, 1958. I listened to the tape for the first time in a long time on that date—just yesterday, more than 60 years after it was recorded, to the day. Listening on a portable cassette player with headphones on the couch of my living room, I was right there and then, too, on the porch of Charters’s little rented house as Spence played for the visiting strangers. I can't wait to return.