ABSTRACT
In May 2006, I decided to see whether anything more could be known about Frank Cloutier, the Victoria Café Orchestra, and “Moonshiner’s Dance-Part I.” I’d been out of graduate school for a dozen years, years in which I felt free to research anything I happened to love, usually old, good, Amer ican music. Now, after all the books, boxed sets, banjo lessons, research travel, I was answering questions that apparently hadn’t been asked before. It was time to give “Moonshiner’s Dance” a try, however unlikely success seemed to be. I knew the recording from the 1997 CD reissue of Harry Smith’s Anthology of Amer ican Folk Music, where Smithsonian-Folkways’ expanded liner notes said the Victoria Café Orchestra was “assumed to have been from the Minnesota area.”1 I’d wondered about this phrase for almost nine years. Minnesota occupies an area slightly larger than Great Britain, and to Upper Midwesterners, “the Minnesota area” is known as The Upper Midwest. The notes also claimed that “Moonshiner’s DancePart I” is better known as another tune, “Over The Waves,” which I knew to be one of the most familiar tunes in the Western world but I simply could not hear it in “Moonshiner’s Dance-Part I.” Besides, in his original 1952 booklet, Harry Smith identified two of the tunes in the recording, treating it not as one melody, but as a medley. In retrospect, SmithsonianFolkways can be forgiven as it had no previous research to rely on. Elsewhere in the 1997 liner notes, Peter Stampfel calls the recording “seriously strange” and John Fahey calls it “eerie” and the “best piece on The Anthology,” but scholars and musicians seem to have otherwise entirely ignored “Moonshiner.”2
