Listening to the Lomax Archive

Front matter

LISTIEN ING to the LOMAX ARCHIVE

The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s

Jonathan W. Stone

Contents

Acknowledgments For Pete’s Sake: Audio Preface

INTRODUCTION: Finding Folkness in the Rhetorical Tradition (Turn, Turn, Turn)

Interlude I: Resimplifications

Introduction

Finding Folkness in the Rhetorical Tradition (Turn, Turn, Turn)

A beautiful melody will leap language barriers or religious barriers or political barriers. Yes, a beautiful melody will help tie this world together and sometimes extraordinary words will. I didn’t realize when I improvised a melody to a short poem in the Old Testament that these few words would be some of the most important words I ever would latch onto.

—Pete Seeger Discusses “Turn! Turn! Turn!” with Smithsonian Folkways

If you could strip from all poetry its music, rhythm, and meter, the residue would be nothing else but rhetoric.

—Plato, Gorgias 502c!

Forgetting History: Folk Symbols, Folk Seasons, and Root Systems

When compared with the many songs that come to be called “traditional,” it is remarkable that the folksong “Home on the Range” (mentioned in the preface to this book) has a recorded author or origin at all. As a byline, “traditional” usually designates authorial indeterminacy, and the mystery and the myth such forgetting enables is an important component of folk ethos. Stephen Wade, a contemporary folk historian, musician, and author of The Beautiful Music All Around Us (2012), taught about the excitement but rarity of discovering folksong origins—a kind of holy grail for many folklorists.7 Wade’s own discovery came during research for the song “Rock Island Line,” a popular regional song in the South that was also “discovered” by John A. Lomax and a travel companion, Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, in an Arkansas African American penitentiary in 1934 (Wade 56). The disembodied voice of Kelly Pace leading seven other incarcerated men in the song is retained on acetate in the archives of the Library of Congress.

J KELLY Pace: I said the Rock Island Line is

CHORUS OF MEN: a mighty good road

MEN: is the road to ride

MEN: is a mighty good road

ALL: If you want to ride, you got to ride it like you find Buy your ticket at the station on the Rock Island Line (whistle blows)

PACE: Well, Jesus died to save me f’m all of my sins

ALL: A-well-a glory to God we’re going to meet him again

MEN: is a mighty good road

MEN: is the road to ride

MEN: is a mighty good road

ALL: If you want to ride, you got to ride it like you find Buy your ticket at the station on the Rock Island Line (whistle blows, recording fades)

In careful analysis of thatand other recordings, Wade deduced that “Rock Island Line” was originally arranged as “a quartet song—unaccompanied, social, church based, arranged for singing, and staged for listening” (48) and that Pace’s rendering maintains that form, despite Lomax’s tendency to associate the song with the various labors of outdoor work (Wade 47). The transformation from a staged quartet arrangement to a work song may have occurred at the hand of Lead Belly, who brought the sonic imagery of ax chopping into his recorded renditions of the tune three years later (Wade 63). From those insights and with a couple of lucky leads, Wade was able to trace the song back to a booster campaign initiated to draw attention to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, which was, in the years preceding the Great Depression, experiencing declining patronage.

Among the campaign documents, Wade found the lyrics to a booster song titled “Buy Your Ticket Over Rock Island Lines,” composed by Clarence Wilson for his vocal quartet and published in the internal railroad union newsletter Rock Island Magazine. The lyrics printed in tiny letters in the railroad magazine differ in some ways from the idiomatic “Rock Island Line,” but there were enough similarities between them that Wade knew he had found the source (47). In a strange but satisfying flip of the typical folksong narrative, “Rock Island Line” began as a commercial entity, rather than ending up there. Those details, however obscure, contribute to a small corner of the history of the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, which was in operation for over 100 years (1852-1970). Wade’s discovery of Wilson’s composition, a discovery made some 50 years after the song’s heyday, is remarkable but perhaps inconsequential. The song did just fine without widespread knowledge of its origin. The memory of the Rock Island line resonates the longest and with the widest audience, perhaps, when the historical details are obscured or even forgotten. Like other railway songs, such as “Midnight Special” or “Wabash Cannonball,” “Rock Island Line” best memorializes a bygone epoch of North American commerce, the ideals of the Progressive Era, and their relationship to African American identity through folk mythos. In other words, a song like “Rock Island Line” best circulates and informs as folklore, not as history (in the formal sense). For “Rock Island Line” to become culturally useful—for it to become a powerful sonic rhetoric—its origin had to be forgotten and replaced by something more mythic.

As a historian of folksong, Wade understands that necessity.

[T]he song, like a trunk line whose branches radiate across the countryside, soon moved beyond this work site making new stops, shifting its contents, and streamlining its load. It migrated from a gospel quartet that the Arkansas prisoners performed to a rhythmic fable that Huddie Ledbetter created as he traveled with John Lomax as chauffer, auto mechanic, and musical demonstrator. Eventually, the song reached an incalculable number of players, singers, and listeners via skiffle, rock and roll, country, pop, and the folksong revival. Yet for all these crossings and couplings, “Rock Island Line” hung onto its proud message, emblazoned in boxcar letters of a train fleeting past, to become the poetry by which a proud railroad is still remembered. (48)

Forgetting, it would seem, is as important to the folk process as remembering. Indeed, a strategic kind of “turning,” forgetting history is a condition of possibility for folk processes. In this case, history forgotten turns into useful lore. Wade’s arresting passage above draws on an elaborate metaphor of forgetting embedded within natural phenomenon: the trunk lines, roots, and branches of a tree with sapling days too far gone to remember. The material reality of the complex root and branch systems of aged trees stand in as symbols of memory, forgetting, and the passage of time— symbols to aid our understanding of how traditions through music “radiate across the countryside.” These natural metaphors also evoke a kind of seasonal, revolving temporality in the circulation of public memory (and public forgetting) in and through musical material culture—memories with bright and pungent springtime blooms and cross-pollinations, summer abundance and fruit, autumn migrations and golden decay, all punctuated by periods of desolate winter. This dynamic ecology—reliant, for the survival of its root system, on a continuum of blossom and decline, remembering and forgetting, progression and regression—sets a framework for understanding and articulating the natural drama of folk musical traditions as sonic rhetorical culture and evokes Pete Seeger’s ecclesiastical refrain “turn, turn, turn.”

Overture

Listening to the Lomax Archive: The Sonic Rhetorics of African American Folksong in the 1930s is a work of sonic rhetorical history centered on the careers and field recordings of folklorists John A. Lomax and his son, Alan Lomax. It is an examination of the ways that the Lomax archive contributed to the United States’ understanding of itself and of its history during the interwar period of the 1930s. As such, it is an investigation of sound’s and music’s rhetorical role in building and maintaining personal, cultural, and political myth and, in turn, of the relationship of mythos to history-making. The book investigates the various sonic rhetorics of folksong—from the music itself to the ways it was recorded and distributed—and how folksong was constitutive of national identity, history, and race during that era. Listening to the Lomax Archive brings to rhetoric a study of sound and music that amplifies what is known about rhythmic practice in the rhetorical tradition.

In my analysis of the Lomaxes’ work during the uncertain and economically depressed 1930s (and early ’4os), I argue that music was a powerful, if ambiguous, rhetoric that, depending on the situation, could render traditional and progressive values, often both at the same time. “If it was never new and never gets old, it’s a folksong,” quips the title character from the

Coen brothers’ 2012 film Inside Llewyn Davis. A composite of journeyman folksingers in 1960s Greenwich Village, Davis sums up the appeal of folk music: it is both old and new simultaneously. Folk music had utility in the 1960s for the same reason that it did during the ’30s. It could be a container of expression for current and emergent ideologies, packaged within the ethos of “tradition.” The impact of such rhetoric is profound. As evidenced by the imagery of “Rock Island Line” and the railroad, folk ideals do not just hitch a ride on the historical locomotive but can be so influential as to determine the historical routes, junctures, and way stations on which we have come to rely.

Vernacular music traditions provide a kind of rail or road map for genealogical and ideological exploration or, to mix a different set of metaphors, a sonic keyhole to the past that can be traced and even incorporated as old folk traditions are adopted to meet contemporary exigencies. Recall, for example, Kurt Cobain’s deft appropriation of Lead Belly’s song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” for Nirvana’s 1994 live album MTV Unplugged in New York. Cobain was a fan of Lead Belly, and Cobain’s cover of the folksong is a reminder of the deep connectivity between succeeding generations of “alternative” music—in this case, between Depression-era folk blues and 1990s grunge, both of which were (and continue to be) associated with a sense of raw primitivism and authenticity.

Jd LEAD BELLY: Black girl, black girl, don’t lie to me Tell me where did you sleep last night?

In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shine I shivered the whole night through.

Black girl, black girl, where will you go?

I’m going where the cold wind blows In the pines, in the pines, where the sun never shine I will shiver the whole night through.

The tune became Kurt Cobain’s swan song—a final musical artifact before his suicide just five months after taping the Unplugged session. With that infamous series of events, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night,” whose original author is unknown, took on new layers of signification. The song’s roots stretch backward and forward, surfacing dramatically in the 1940s with Lead Belly’s brilliant rendering and again in the ’gos through the tortured genius of Cobain. That cycle will continue. “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” is a song that was never new and never gets old.

In what follows, I argue for the possibilities of folklore in rhetorical studies. Folklore is rendered in any number of modes: spoken, sung, written, painted, carved, crafted, and cooked, to name just a few.’ My concern here oscillates between folklore as a broader category and folksong as a sonic phenomenon within it. Such a move is not meant to be exclusionary. I invite others with diverse folk interests to bring them to the table I set or to set new tables altogether. A study of folksong is one interesting way to interrogate sound’s relationship to rhetorical history, and sonic archives are a compelling space for theorizing new methods of history-making, itself a rhetorical practice. Ironically, perhaps, folklore challenges traditional notions of rhetorical analysis, public memory, and rhetorical historiography. Folklore is deconstructive of each. Folklore’s multivalence makes it a slippery subject for analysis, and its apparent timelessness within public memory is a result of forgetting as much as remembering. Folklore provides an opportunity to re-sound history—to parse various historiographical hegemonies, to interrogate and utilize memory and/as forgetting, and to intone history in a more multivalent key, one more inclusive, intersectional, and adept at representing history’s many contradictory narratives.

Re-sound is a verb rendered not only as a sonic equivalent of revise (or re-vision) but also in the reverberant spirit of resound’s typical definition, “to fill a place with sound.” Using distinctions offered by Byron Hawk (2018), “re-sounding” evokes this corrective or (better) transformative spirit and also resounds the unique temporal turning I describe above. For Hawk, re-sounding is a reorientation back to sound “after a long detour through print culture” and “forces a more substantial rethinking of our object of study—considering how sound work forces us to reconsider what composition proper might be” (5). In this sense, re-sounding is profoundly historiographical and also a broadening of the compositional wavelength and parameters in which “historiography” typically operates.

I re-sound folklore as a viable historiographical object, and I forward folkness as a term to describe its return. Folklore amplifies the paradoxes and tensions between history and memory and reintroduces mythos as an essential rhetoric of historiography, showing both its productive possibilities and its hazards. In short, folkness is a rhetorical oscillation—a turning from history and toward mythos (and then back)—that embodies and enacts the paradox of remembering an unrecoverable past. Folkness is both timeless and bound to time, as it turns on the present, especially when its vehicle is music. As a subgenre of folklore, folksong only intensifies these attributes, adding melody, rhythm, and pointed brevity to the discourse it names. The Lomaxes’ archive of folksongs, then, is a rich resource for detailing how such rhetorics of folkness work.

Listening to the Lomax Archive’s historical narrative begins in 1932, at the height of one of the United States’ deepest crises, the Great Depression. In the wake of that crisis, folklorists John A. Lomax and his son, Alan, set out as emissaries for the Library of Congress to record the folksong of the “American Negro” in several Southern African American prisons. ‘The music the Lomaxes recorded for the library’s Archive of American Folk Song, during their initial trip and dozens more following, contributed to the assemblage of a new American mythology, collected in response to and for the potential succor of a people in financial, social, and identity crisis.* Photographers such as Dorothea Lange were engaged in similar work. Her 1936 portrait Migrant Mother is, perhaps, the most iconic image of the Great Depression era. The Lomaxes’ efforts can be thought of in similar terms, except that they were interested in sound instead of image. During the 1930s, their iconographic, mythologizing efforts had the paradoxical effects I have mentioned: even as the songs could reify long-held conservative orthodoxies or petty prejudices, they also performed as agents for social change through the reconstitution of new histories, new traditions, and even new educational methodologies.

The recordings the Lomaxes made in the prisons were produced under the coercive auspices of white privilege yet also provided incarcerated African American men rhetorical agency they may not have had otherwise. For example, “Grey Goose,” a work song sung by James “Iron Head” Baker and recorded in 1933, carried with it the tradition of both slave labor and slave resilience and escape—thinly veiled in the visage of a wily goose.

Jd BAKER: Well las’ Monday morning GROUP OF MEN: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd BAKER: Well las’ Monday morning GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd BAKER: My Daddy went a hunting GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd BAKER: My Daddy went a hunting GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd BAKER: Well he carried along his zooloo GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd BAKER: Well he carried along his zooloo GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well along come a grey goose GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well along come a grey goose GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well he throwed it to his shoulder GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well he throwed it to his shoulder GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well he ride his hammer way back GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well he ride his hammer way back GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well he pulled on his trigger GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well he pulled on his trigger GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well a down he come winding GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: Well a down he come winding GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: He was six weeks a-fallin’

GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: He was six weeks a-fallin’

GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: We was six weeks a-findin’

GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

BAKER: We was six weeks a-findin’

GROUP: Lawd, Lawd, Lawd

Baker and other incarcerated men sung the song to pass the long hours of prison work, likely relishing its audacious humor and wordplay. When it was sung by Baker for the Lomaxes and recorded for the Library of Congress’s archive, however, the rhetorical situation shifted dramatically, and the song took on a number of new potential meanings and uses. In the moment, Baker’s willingness to sing several songs for the Lomaxes’ bulky recorder got him out of a few hours of work, but he also seemed to sense the potentials of the amplification taking place. Indeed, the recording gave James Baker a national audience.

Music like Baker’s would have a profound impact on the Lomaxes— one that they would communicate to the nation, with assistance from the Library of Congress, in both published and sonic material, books, radio, and LPs. For readers and especially listeners of the Lomax archival material, the preservation of an antebellum slave song such as “Grey Goose” in an African American work prison nearly 60 years after the Civil War carried an ethos of authenticity, a somber reminder of that conflict’s lasting impact and tragedy. But Baker’s resilience and tongue-in-cheek sophistication in the face of such dire and violent circumstances may have also been a boon to listeners when “Grey Goose” appeared on the radio in the early 1940s. In the twilight of the Great Depression, many listeners might have been all too aware of the pains of suffering under hopeless and desperate conditions. In ways both auspicious and perverse, “Grey Goose”—a slave song—became a song of hope.

Throughout this book, I argue that, for better and worse, John and Alan Lomax intuited the paradoxical power of the folksongs they collected and used it to advance national understanding of and agency for the subjects of their recordings, even as those same recordings advanced their own careers. Each chapter explores the implications of these paradoxes by re-sounding episodes from the Lomax archive, its stories and sources, and especially the Lomaxes work with African American musicians. The sounds of each archival holding—each song, oral history, and radio performance—can only be described as both wonderful and terrible. They insinuate national ideals and values, both condemning and expansive, and reverberate histories in conflict with each other. In each chapter, I argue how these seemingly contradictory dualities are crucial to understanding the rhetorical and historical impact of the sonic archive and, by extension, the ways that we now remember and write about the subjects of the Lomax archive and other repositories of historicized sound. While chapter 1 takes up the subject of historiography and the archive in detail, a through line of the book is that sound in general and folksongs in particular have a powerful historiographical multitonality that communicates complex historical experience in a seemingly simple package. Folksongs model a method for sonic rhetorical historiography, a way of hearing and then writing into our histories a dissonance that more accurately represents the various contradictions of everyday experience. My work here thus responds to rhetorical historians’ recent urging away from an ideal of “completeness” or a sense of historical certainty and toward “theories [that] slip” and “conceptual frames that call tensions to the foreground” (Olson, “Places to Stand” 96).

There is precedent for this more fragmented approach to history in

IO * LISTENING TO THE LOMAX ARCHIVE both ancient and contemporary rhetorical studies, and this book remixes earlier approaches with concepts and theories from a variety of disciplines: among them folklore, music, history, and critical race studies. Listening to the Lomax Archive also puts rhetoric in conversation with sound studies scholarship where interdisciplinarity is a given. Sound studies “reaches across registers, moments, and spaces, and it thinks across disciplines and traditions,” amplifying work on sound within the disciplines where it has already flourished, but also bringing sound to disciplines where it has been conspicuously absent (Sterne, Sound Studies Reader 2). As a field interwoven with both communication and writing studies, rhetoric has, at various times, been used to investigate speaking and listening practices, historical and technological sound, and radio studies. Listening to the Lomax Archive expands on each investigation.

Finding Folkness

Beyond analysis and as a work of rhetorical criticism, this book brings a concern about language to other areas of inquiry and works to theorize several cross-disciplinary concepts for use in rhetorical studies more broadly. For example, from its inception as folk in Old English, the word folk has meant (more or less) “the common people.” Yet, depending on the era and context, that somewhat innocuous descriptor has been taken up to describe those people through the perspectives of vastly different philosophies, from the working-class proletariat of Marxist political theory to the volksgemeinschaft, or “people’s community,” of fascist Nazi Germany. The designation “folk” and the phenomenology of “folkness” are malleable and can be politicized at either end of the political spectrum, a mutability that speaks to the conceptual and methodological power of folkness for rhetoric. Folkness is a term coined by Pete Seeger’s father, Charles Seeger, a scholar who worked at the intersection of ethnomusicology and folklore studies for several decades in the early and middle parts of the 2oth century, just as the Lomaxes’ work with folk music was beginning to have a national impact. The elder Seeger describes folkness as a funded treasury of attitudes, beliefs, and feelings toward life and death, work and play, love, courtship and marriage, health and hearth, children and animals, prosperity and adversity—a veritable code of individual and collective behavior belonging to the people as a whole. (3)

In comparison, Jeffery Walker, scholar of ancient rhetoric, defines the Aristotelian notion of epideictic rhetoric as “that which shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives” (9). The term epideictic rhetoric, Walker argues, names a diverse array of rhetorical activity but especially rhetoric abounding in the ceremonial, rhythmic, and musical discourse of everyday life. In ways that defy simple conceptualization, the term epideictic describes affective, constitutive, and nonrational modes of rhetoric—the cultural fluency of the people. Here, “cultural fluency” is meant as a general descriptor for participation in the everyday discursive and nondiscursive activities of both public and private life. As I expand on below, epideictic is just one ancient civilization’s name for knowing the songs, getting the jokes, and being susceptible to the particular ignominies of a given group of people. In Charles Seeger’s rendering, folkness names the same, only in a different register and in language fashioned for a different era.’

The multidisciplinary, century-spanning definitional overlap in the terms folkness and epideictic is not coincidental. It indicates a kind of ahistorical commonplace found in any number of disciplines, where different names and epochs point to more or less the same thing: embedded (and often embodied) cultural fluency. Understood as a part of that broader family of signifiers, all discourse that works in and through the circulation of human traditions might be said to contain folkness; wherever you look and listen for tradition, folkness can be found and complicated. Listening to the Lomax Archive brings this theory of folkness, as well as several others with similar interdisciplinarity potential, to conversations about US musical traditions in the third decade of the 2oth century. Folkness can be transformed into rhetorics that reinforce and reimagine traditional notions of race, nationalism, and even political, religious, or economic ideologies.

The balance of this introduction plays out in four brief sections that trace the parameters for such a study and parse a few of its complicating disciplinary factors. I call the sections “movements” to evoke the diverse, but coherent, parts of a symphony or concerto, which often feature a variation on a theme or (not incidentally) a folk melody. Here, the folk melody is rhetoric. The movements touch on the melody’s origins, its underlying harmonic structures, and its potential relationships with other melodies, then work to deconstruct and recast the melody in a different key and voicing.

In the first movement, I describe the emerging field of sonic rhetorics, including its history and relationship to earlier movements and genres within rhetoric (visual studies, in particular) as well as its part in a larger expanding view of multimediated and sensory rhetorics. The second movement discusses some of the implications of this expanding view of rhetoric and parses the usefulness and shortcomings of both disciplinarity and multidisciplinarity in rhetorical studies. The third movement describes how disciplinary histories and terminology are important to sonic rhetorical projects, and the fourth demonstrates the need for new extradisciplinary terminology if rhetoric hopes to make a wider impact both in the academy and beyond.

Movement I: Sonic Rhetorics—Singing a Newer Song

Above, I introduced the notion of folkness as epideictic rhetoric and, as such, a marker of cultural fluency of the rhythms and traditions of everyday life. As I argue elsewhere, “Neither epideictic nor folkness is inherently sonic, but both have a close historical relationship with sounded and rhythmic expression which can also be found commonly at the vernacular level, particularly when paired with rhetorics of remembering” (Stone, “Rhetorical Folkness” 69). The connection between sound and how we remember the past (and, in turn, experience the present and imagine the future) is at the heart of my arguments about traditional music’s various capacities as sonic rhetoric. But what exactly is “sonic rhetoric”? That designation has emerged in scholarship in recent years to describe rhetoric composed for the ear. Designating some rhetorics as sonic might seem strange given rhetoric’s origin as speech, an indisputably (if not completely) aural mode, but doing so responds to several notable movements within a more contemporary scholarly landscape that has been attentive to various multimediated discourses.’

An interest in sonic rhetorics can be understood, at least in part, as a response to the rise and prominence of visual rhetoric in rhetorical studies over the last several decades.* That movement is part of a much larger intellectual shift toward what some refer to as “ocularcentrism,” which has prevailed since the rise of reproducible print in the rgth century and its continuance up to and including our contemporary electronic culture (Gunn et al. 486). Beginning in the mid-2oth century and with help from such scholars as Marshall McLuhan and Walter J. Ong, a response to visuality’s prominence began to gain intellectual steam. Noticing how the prominence of visual culture in scholarship contributed to a seeming neglect of theorizing oral and aural modes of communication, those media theorists worked to address that disparity. Regrettably, they also frequently perpetuated the same problematic binaries, associating sight with externality and scientific knowledge and associating sound with a more metaphysical truth. Such an approach idealized aurality “as manifesting a kind of pure interiority,” elevating it above visuality, which is both defined and limited by its ability to “bathe us in the clear light of reason” (Sterne, Audible Past 15). That pitting of sound studies against visual studies is partly the stuff of disciplinary politics, but I mention it here because rhetorical historians have been among those to perpetuate sound’s preeminence, sometimes with reprehensible implications about Western intellectual superiority.’

My use of the term sonic rhetorics acknowledges the ways that visuality has been understood as dominant (and occasionally oppressive). But it also works to complicate the binaries noted above, by forwarding a theoretical framework that takes advantage of developments in multimodal theory, which recognizes that neither experience nor material discourse occur in a single-sensory vacuum. My work is particularly indebted to Steph Ceraso and her notion of “multimodal listening,” which builds on (among other precursors) Jodi Shipka’s work on “multimodal soundness” (2006) and Cynthia Selfe’s classic essay “The Movement of Air, the Breath of Meaning: Aurality and Multimodal Composing” (2009). Ceraso forwards multimodal listening as “the practice of attending to the sensory, contextual, and material aspects of a sonic event. Multimodal listening moves away from ear-centric approaches to sonic engagement and, instead, treats sonic experience as holistic and immersive” (6).'° Ceraso’s work explores that notion within writing studies pedagogy, but it also inspires a consideration of the ways that sound and listening offer opportunities for multisensory and, by extension, multivalent thinking that leads to similarly complex rhetorics and a more nuanced understanding of meaning-making. “What is compelling about sound,” Byron Hawk argues in Resounding the Rhetorical (2018), “is the potential to develop newer rhetorical concepts and theoretical models grounded in affect, material engagement, and emergent methods” (2). A material engagement with sonic phenomena is, by necessity, a multimodal and therefore multisensory experience, but Hawk takes us even further: “Resounding suggests that the materiality of past conditions, embodiment in present listening practices, and the future impact on other bodies and ecologies is all a part of the same process” (15). In other words, sonic practices and phenomena resound and thus are born of and through a multivalent material world—one layered with and reverberant through everchanging objects and circumstances.'! Attending to the sound of things, then, is bound to lead to multivalent ways of knowing and being.

In related research, Jonathan Alexander’s 2015 article “Glenn Gould and the Rhetorics of Sound” draws out the multivocal or polyphonic potentials of sound (more ways of naming “multivalence”) and the ways in which sound’s materiality “should bring to mind the multiplicity of realities we experience, understand, and articulate, and hear” (88). Gould (1932- 1982) was a well-known pianist and composer who turned to experimental studio recording and mixing that included a practice he called “contrapuntal radio,” where disparate radio voices were mixed overlapping each other “to create a ‘fugal’ set of voices that simultaneously resonated with and at times contradicted one another” (Alexander 83). In a fascinating analysis of Gould, Alexander explores polyphony and contrapuntality as material realities for sound and also as possibilities for listening.