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By JERRY TALLMER The equipment, all told — a huge old Presto K recorder, plus the aluminum- or steel-based acetate discs to record on, plus the power supply to run the whole shebang — must have weighed 200 or 300 pounds. We don’t know what the mule weighed. Henrietta Yurchenco weighed, oh, 85 pounds ringing wet. “I was a sexy little dame, I want you to know,” she says. “I was 25 then, but I grew up. All that’s past. Nowadays all I do is encourage other people.”
“The first time I went into those mountains,” she says, “was 1941, and to power the recorder I took two big car batteries and an accumulator to change DC to AC. It worked all right except when it rained, then the power did this” — her hand droopy-poops — “and here I was way out in the most remote place in the world, the mountains of Mexico, where you can go for days and days and days without seeing another human being.” So in 1942 she went back, in fact went back four times in all during the years 1942-1946, this time with an automobile engine and gasoline strapped to the mule in place of those batteries — “went into the mountains with a great photographer, Augustin Maya, and what I found were tribes who were isolated for maybe thousands of years. “There were no roads, no paths, only scorpions. Never get friendly with a yellow or green scorpion, let me tell you. I saw ceremonies, sacrifices of animals, curing ceremonies, pagan ceremonies crossed with Christian ceremonies.” And with the Presto K she took down, preserved and brought back on those discs the songs and sounds of 14 all-but-unknown Mexican and Guatemalan Indian tribes; a collection of 2,000 items housed then and now in the Library of Congress. That was the beginning. In the decades that followed, “Henriettisisima,” as she’s known in Mexico, would further her research into folk music (and blues) not only throughout the Spanish-speaking world (including Spain itself), but Morocco, Ireland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany and elsewhere around the map, as well as her own country’s Appalachia and John’s Island, South Carolina. The term for her vocation is ethnomusicologist. But to tab Henrietta Yurchenco an ethnomusicologist is to omit all the rest of it: author, lecturer, critic, producer, broadcaster, teacher, political buzz saw, wife (twice), mother (once) and even unto her 87th year, social activist. She has poured as much as she could of that story into the work that came out this past January, “Around the World in 80 Years: A Memoir — A Musical Odyssey” (MRI Press). On March 22 of this very year, she went with her friend Joe DeRupo, who is something less than half her age, to an antiwar rally in Washington Square. Somebody told Dominic Carter of NY1 that one of the protestors was a woman celebrating her 87th birthday. “Bring her right here!” said Carter, and put her on camera to speak her mind about her preference for songs over bombs. George W. Bush’s bombs, the way she sees it. “Margaret Mead?” she says of another pioneer who had much to do with primitive peoples. “Sure I knew Margaret Mead — certainly did. She was a very curious lady, very unsettled in her political opinions. In the ’30s, you know, everybody was on the left — painters, musicians, writers, everybody. “Margaret stayed on the fence, but I was never on the fence. I was never in the Party, but I was on the left, but later I had no sympathy for the Communist Party at all. “You know what decided me? I was in Mexico, and while I was in Mexico I read in some newspaper that ‘the Soviet Union has just criticized Prokofiev and Shostakovich for composing capitalist-imperialist music.’ ” Without stopping for breath, and without really shifting gears, that declaration runs on into: “Not only did I do research in many, many parts of the Spanish-speaking world, but also North Africa, particularly among the Sephardic Jews of Morocco, and Asia, the Orient and Europe, and spent an awful lot of time in Eastern Europe in the ’60s when it was under the Soviet thumb — Romania, Czechoslovakia, East Germany — where there was anti-Semitic repression of all kinds and neglect that you never saw in any other civilized country. “In those places you never got to talk with anyone at all without a government officer forever at your side saying [she does it in Hollywoodesque KGB accent]: ‘We will help you.’ “There was one particularly awful anti-Semitic experience. This was 1959, I was at an International Folk Music conference with [Yiddish-music researcher/preserver] Ruth Rubin, and before leaving Romania we went to meet the one folklorist who had survived the Holocaust. “He and Ruth greeted each other in Yiddish, and then this incredible guy [a C.P. aparatchik] stepped in and said: ‘Mrs. Rubin, you will speak in English and we will translate, and he will speak in Romanian and we will translate.’ “Oh,” says Henrietta Yurchenco, morphing right into the next thought, “there are a lot of things that never got into the papers. Like censorship, right in our own country. I told this story a couple of weeks ago at an Alan Lomax memorial. It’s been on my mind. “In the ’30s [when she began broadcasting unknowns like Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger on WNYC, this city’s municipal radio station], there were certain things that you could not talk about on the air. Political things. In the ’40s you could not talk about labor unions. In the ’60s you could talk about feminism and civil rights, but not about the war in Vietnam. “Well, all through the ’60s I had a series, ‘Adventures in Folk Music,’ and one day I wanted to do a program honoring Leadbelly, whom I had debuted on the air in the ’40s. Now, years later, Leadbelly” — the extraordinary black street musician — “was dead, and I wanted to honor him. “So I called up Alan Lomax and asked him: ‘How about doing an introduction to the program?’ Alan came down to the studio [on the top floor of the Municipal Building], and in 20 minutes recorded the most absolutely beautiful tribute to Leadbelly. “I went to the station’s publicity people and said Alan Lomax has done this great tribute, would you please put out a release on it? And nothing happened. So a few weeks went by, and I asked what had happened, and was told: ‘Seymour Siegel says we can’t send it out.’ ” There in her chair in her Chelsea apartment her eyes flash, and she says: “Seymour Siegel! The head of the station — a right-wing Republican! I wanted to scream, and then I bumped into him in a corridor, and Siegel said: ‘You know why.’ That was all he said, but what he meant is that they [right-wing villainous “theys”] had been after Lomax in the [McCarthyite] ’50s, but couldn’t get at him because Alan had been away in Europe. “So I’ll tell you what I did. I divided Lomax’s remarks about Leadbelly into two parts, and did two radio programs! I was not afraid of Seymour Siegel.” Or of much else. “Later we never could find the tapes of those two shows. They just mysteriously disappeared.” Woody Guthrie she has written about in the 1970 “A Mighty Hard Road,” a book she’d love to see somebody republish today. Leadbelly? “Ahhh, Leadbelly was everybody’s teacher. This guy who came out of prison — such a beautiful human being. I can just see him, in his double-breasted gray suit, his creased trousers, his little black bow tie — and his 12-string guitar. “My office in the station [WNYC] was a little hole in the wall, except that it was the only one that was air-conditioned. Leadbelly used to come there and write his scripts. “I’m a party-giver. At one party at my apartment on St. Mark’s Place — a whole floor-through — the Almanac Singers, who later became The Weavers, wrote ‘Kisses Sweeter Than Wine’ in my bathroom. Everybody came to my parties: Pete Seeger, Burl Ives, [painter] Ruffino Tamayo, [folksinger] Lee Hayes, Leadbelly. “At one party Leadbelly had a bit too much wine. He went over to Ruffino and said: ‘Mr. Tamayo, you’re a Mexican, aren’t you? Would you please sing me a Mexican blues?’ Tamayo said: ‘We don’t have any blues in Mexico.’ Leadbelly handed him his guitar, and Tamayo played and sang ‘The Weeping Woman,’ a Mexican lament. “At the end there was silence. Then Leadbelly went over, tapped Tamayo on the shoulder, and said: ‘You see, Mr. Tamayo, everybody got the blues.’ ” Frida Kahlo? Oh yes, of course Henrietta Yurchenco knew Frida Kahlo. “I used to see Frida at exhibitions. There, at that time, she was ‘Diego’s wife, who also painted.’ ” There are those of us who feel that Frida Kahlo was a far greater painter than Diego Rivera, a point made by simple evidence in Julie Taymor’s stunning movie, “Frida.” As it happens, Ms. Yurchenco didn’t much like that movie. “I got tired of Frida [Salma Hayek] and Diego [Alfred Molina] smooching.” Henrietta Weiss Yurchenco, the daughter of Rebecca and Edward (“or Yitzak”) Weiss who’d come here from Russia, was born March 22, 1916, in New Haven, Connecticut. Her father was “a dreamer who started out in business and failed miserably.” Her mother was her mother. “What I did get from my parents was a love of music. My mother and father were both singers, and my father played the mandolin. From them I also got the will to say ‘No,’ the impulse to question and to doubt — and I’m still doing it. “I studied the piano for 10 years, and gave it up. Why? Because I was terrified — the only thing I’ve ever been terrified of in my life. I mean, I traveled and did research alone, and when you’re a woman alone and you arrive in a place like Morocco, you’re either [to all of the male Middle East] coming to visit family, or you’re a whore. “I arrived there just as the Jews, after the establishment of the state of Israel, were poised to leave. I did some of the most important work of my life there, recording among the Sephardic Jews of Morocco, who were still singing their versions of the Spanish songs they remembered from 1492, when they were expelled from Spain. “They’ve been singing these songs for 500 years, a history I write about in ‘In Their Own Voices,’ to be published soon by Wayne State Press. A CD will be included in the book. Women have preserved these songs over the centuries, and I wondered why, because these are bloody songs, full of rape and murder. But also of great stories. I mean, how many times can you sing about Cinderella?” In New Haven she’d gone to the Yale School of Music, and in 1936 came to New York to marry the Argentine-born painter Basil Yurchenco. “I met him because we were both members of the John Reed Club of New Haven. I learned to do the tango at age 16 from a Chilean at Yale. “Yale is also where I attended the first of many protests. Would you like to hear about my first arrest? It was in 1935 or maybe 1936, when Mussolini had sent a brass band to New Haven, where there were many Italian-Americans. The band paraded on the New Haven Green, and my uncle, a lawyer, got me out of jail. Nolo contendre.” Basil Yurchenco, her first husband, is the father of his and her son, Peter. Her second husband — “well, we were never married, but he and I lived together 19 unhappy years” — was architect Irving Levine. Peter Yurchenco, now 55 — “ah, my son, a doctor and biologist” — lives in Princeton, N.J., and is married “to Ingrid, a lawyer. Their children, my grandchildren, are Helen, a terrific singer, and Nicholas, a sophomore at Wesleyan in Paris. Nicholas is a gifted pianist and a writer and a very adventurous soul. I don’t know where he gets it from,” she says mock innocently. But perhaps we do. |
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