Yesterday we were honored to be visited by an immensely knowledgeable and truly dedicated music historian, Val Pisigin, who alongside his lovely wife Svetlana, have travelled the world extensively to research and uncover the secrets of folk, roots, blues, and traditional music and the musicians who created it. He documents their travels on the website pisigin.ru, which is quite obviously an intense labor of love, with a kicker… Val and Svetlana are from Russia, and the website is in Russian!
To make a long story short, I learned more from these two wonderful people in an hour, with Val talking excitedly in Russian and Svetlana trying hard to keep up with a very passionate translation, than I have learned from all the books, blogs, and record jackets I have read in years. No offense to the American blues community, but you can only hear about the God Damned “Crossroads” so many times without offering up your own soul to never hear it again.
So, to share with you quickly what he shared with me, look up the names H.C. Speir, Blind Joe Reynolds, and Jackson C. Frank… then hit Val’s site up (PISIGIN.RU) and click around for a while… There is one page in english (http://pisigin.ru./photostories-eng/), and they have plans to translate newer posts, but you can tell the site is absolutely amazing, and their commitment to musicology is immense.
One more interesting thing I’d like to say… Jackson C. Frank, the folk artist he is currently researching, grew up in Cheektowaga, New York, now suburban Buffalo, where he was badly burned in a furnace explosion at his school in the early 1950’s. My family immigrated to the upstate New York area from the Ukraine in the early 1900’s, and settled in a small town, you guessed it, Cheektowaga. In fact, my Great Uncle Bill, who sadly just passed away last year at the tender age of 103, had lived in Cheektowaga most of his life, and was an avid photographer through the 1950s, even having a day in his honor from the Mayor’s office for his contributions of photographs to the local historical society. Now, I need to do some research of my own, and see what my family knows of the tragic event. More interesting still, Vla and Svetlana, who I said previously are Russian, are of Ukrainian descent, and could very well be long lost relatives! What a wonderful family re-union!
