america adrift

Lately, I have been preoccupied with a new research project that I am trying to work up into a paper for the next Nordic Association of American Studies conference in May 2009.

These days I spend about 10 hours a week commuting, which means that I get to listen to a lot of CDs. One of my recent faves has been The Street Was Always There, a collection of songs by American protest and folk singers from the 60s, all performed by Eric Andersen, who himself was a member of the Greenwich Village scene at the time. The disc contains songs by virtually all the great singer-songwriters of that era – with the notable exception of Bob Dylan. Most of the contributors I was at least vaguely familiar with, but some required intensive Google’ing on my part to get their back-story.

The first thing one notices about the circle of singer/songwriters in question is that almost none of them got out of Greenwich Village alive (and the few that did, did not get away unscathed) - with the notable exception of Dylan, of course: Phil Ochs hanged himself, Paul Clayton took an electric toaster with him in the bathtub, Richard Fariña crashed his motorcycle at 90 mph, David Blue had a fatal heart attack at 42, and Peter LaFarge died of a stroke, possibly induced by a drug overdose, in October 1965. He was 34.

Many of these untimely ends can be traced back to disappointments with the singers’ careers (most realized that Dylan would be the only folkie making a successful transition into superstardom) and disillusionment with the loss of the potential of the counterculture to change the world. Among the luckier ones who didn’t die young, but ‘merely’ went into internal exile were Fred Neil (d. 2001) and Paul Siebel, who both quit the music scene almost entirely as the sixties revolutionary spirit waned into the commercial twilight of the early 70s.

But I was particularly interested in why things went so badly with Peter LaFarge, esp. after I discovered that he had been involved, at the time of his death, with Inger Nilesen, a Danish woman who had come to the US to work as a stewardess in long-distance buses – a job which she had soon quit in order to work as a hostess in a Miami Playboy club, only to follow her love of folk music to Greenwich Village’s bohemian heartland, where she soon hooked up with Peter LaFarge.

In the case of LaFarge some particularly interesting identity issues must have combined to exacerbate his discontent, and yet he seemed to have everything going for him in 1965. His song “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” had been a major country and cross-over hit for Johnny Cash the year before. LaFarge was a bit older and more experienced than most of his peers, and had already been recording folk and sea shanty albums in the late 50s, so he knew the music business quite well. He had recently met Inger Nielsen, whom he publicly expressed deep affection for, she had given birth to their daughter, and had even managed to astound everyone, including LaFarge, by recording and publishing an album of her own on Folkways Records, featuring Danish folk songs. Why, then, did things suddenly go so badly with Peter LaFarge?

To trace this enigma further one has to look at the precarious identity construction at the heart of the story everyone knew to be Peter LaFarge’s: An Indian of Hopi descent, he had been adopted at age nine by his stepfather, Oliver LaFarge – Pulitzer price winning author of the novel Laughing Boy, himself a descendant of the nearly extinct Narragansatt tribe. After educating himself, Peter decided to try his luck as a rodeo rider, which he was nearly great at until suffering an accident that almost cost him a leg – after which he discovered a talent (which was mentored by folk legend Cisco Houston) for singing and song-writing, specializing in bringing the plight of Native Americans to the attention of a wider public  – after which he served in the US Army in the Korean War, before moving to the Village to take part in the growing folk scene there, hanging out with Rambling Jack Elliott and Bob Dylan, whom he took extra pains at keeping out of trouble – ultimately becoming as known for his talent as a painter as for his singing, and, to crown it all, signing a major label record deal with MGM.

Most of this rags-to-riches story, however, hinges on a string of fallacies and inventions (as uncovered by Yuval Taylor in the article linked to above) which LaFarge either actively created and spread, or at best did nothing to dispel. My paper aims to chart these ‘fake’ identity constructions and to read LaFarge’s life as a cultural text illustrating the twin hazards of aiming for cultural authenticity and cosmopolitan sophistication (esp. when one tries to do it together with a Danish-born ‘Playboy bunny turned folk singer’ as Inger Nielsen is often referred to…)

This project is still very much work in progress, and I have not yet had time to track down the recent documentary film on LaFarge which should give some enlightening background on his life. Nor have I yet been able to find out much about the later life of Inger Nielsen, other than discovering that she had at least one other child after LaFarge’s death. I need also to trace whether her record was ever reviewed in Denmark and whether she came back here to perform or to live… Help and info on such matters will of course be greatly appreciated.