Anna Roberts-Gevalt is one-half of the experimental folk duo Anna & Elizabeth (alongside Elizabeth Laprelle).
(Photo Credit: Francie Seidl Chodosh)
Peter Coccoma is a filmmaker and musician; Anna Roberts-Gevalt is one-half of the experimental folk duo Anna & Elizabeth (alongside Elizabeth Laprelle). In 2018, Anna & Elizabeth released a record with Smithsonian Folkways, The Invisible Comes to Us, which reimagines the traditional folk songs found in the recording archive of Helen Hartness Flanders. Over the past five or so years, Peter and Anna have collaborated on a short film inspired by one of the songs —“Jeano,” originally sung in 1941 by then-80-year-old Massachusetts housewife Margaret Shipman. You can watch the film below, and read Anna and Peter’s conversation about the creation of it.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Peter Coccoma: Hi, Anna.
Anna Roberts-Gevalt: Hi, Peter. Here we are, many years later.
Peter: Yeah, I think we started in 2018. Crazy long time.
Anna: You know, as far as the scale of folk music, I think that’s fine.
Peter: I mean, I think for the scale of everything, that’s fine. I think only not in the scale of, like, modern capitalist efficiency does it not feel, quote-unquote, “fine.”
Anna: [Laughs.] Yeah, right.
Peter: But it’s really interesting to reopen this right now. When we were touching base about having this conversation, I was in some ways like, Oh, I know everything about this, it happened a while ago, and here we are now. And then I was like, Wait — I don’t even really know how you first came upon the song. I don’t actually know the full back story. So I’d be curious if you could walk through it, because I know you encountered [the song] at some point, and then it sent off on having many life forms from that point on.
Anna: Well, I think the layered-ness of what you just said was part of the whole impetus for making a film. Because Elizabeth and I worked together almost nine years — we were touring the country and Europe with all these old traditional folk songs that we were finding in archives, or learning from older folks. But the more time we were spending with people who knew about where the songs were coming from, the more we got interested in all of the layers, all the different stories within one old song. And I got really interested in thinking more about ideas of folk and traditional music that were happening in Vermont, where I had grown up. There’s an archive in Middlebury of this woman named Helen Hartness Flanders, who made thousands of recordings in the ‘30s of mostly older people singing songs. So, loggers singing ballads about logging; people from Ireland singing old Irish songs.
Another layer of folk field recording is the beginning of field recording. The technology was portable enough that Helen was bringing these wax cylinder and aluminum cylinder recorders to people’s houses. I spent all this time in the archive and I held the recorder — it’s very invasive. Field recording now, you can just press record on a phone, but this is like a cup you have to put up to your mouth to sing the song. So she would put this little bell in people’s faces with a tube connected to the recorder.
Peter: It’s like those airplane masks that drop down.
Anna: Yeah, or like an old telephone. And I think it’s really important to note that this was happening in many places, but there was a deep undercurrent of racism that was part of many of these efforts, including hers. The group that funded the first year of her research was called the Vermont Commission on Country Life. It was there to — I’m quoting a friend, Robert Sullivan, who wrote about it — “celebrate patriotism and the purity of the Vermont countryside at a time when immigrants and poor workers were polluting the rural landscape.”
Peter: A lot of euphemisms in there.
Anna: Yeah. So part of the impetus [for Flanders] to record these songs — I don’t think it was the only layer, but one layer — was this idea that these quote-unquote “pure rural poor people” were holding these keys to this white lineage, these historic European songs. And by collecting these songs, the white settlers could have this deeper sense of pride of being white and European. So of course, one result is that what is recorded is really a certain type of song.
Anyway, I spent a month in this archive and the songs themselves are all these farmers and loggers — people who didn’t identify as musicians, maybe, but knew a lot of old songs. [It was] at a time where there was this generational cut that was starting to happen, where someone who had learned from their parents — who had learned from their parents, who had learned from their parents — that music was being very quickly replaced by the radio. I was also trying to interview people who were related to the people in the archive, and I remember talking to one man in Milton, and he described how his grandfather was a ballad singer and sang all these old songs — Asa Davis — his family had been from Ireland and had all these old songs. And the grandson was saying, “But, you know, then Hank Williams started coming in our living room and we didn’t need grandpa to sing anymore.” So that’s another layer of this desire to record, where there’s this big shift in culture because of technology.
A lot of the recordings have so much incredible, to me very beautiful, white noise. It’s really hard to listen through this white noise — you’re getting scraps of things. It’s very dizzying because there’s a sense of, Wow, each of these people, what were they like? You don’t know always what they looked like. You just get this sound of their voice singing an old song, and you don’t know anything about what they thought of the song. There’s no room for that sort of…
Peter: That context.
Anna: I always think, doing field work, I want to hear about these people’s dreams. Not their aspirations, but literally, what do they dream about? And this is the kind of stuff that Elizabeth and I were talking about a lot: getting more psychedelic, or just this desire to understand what this time spent with all these recordings meant. “Jeano” was one of those songs where, one day in the archives — if you can picture listening to, like, five hours of field recordings every day for a month and [everything] starts to blur — this was one where it was just an immediate connection. This singer, Margaret Shipman, there’s only two recordings of her singing. “Jeano” really struck me. Her singing’s very simple and beautiful. It was immediately like, Yes, this song.
Peter: Was it something about the lyrics or the tonality? Or was it sort of an unspeakable thing?
Anna: There was something that felt very unadorned about her singing. We ended up putting her voice on the record — her singing this song, as well as us singing this song — because something about her singing cut through time in a certain way. If you listen, it’s not necessarily even that emotionally delivered — it’s not melodramatic. But the lyrics, in a way, are so direct. It tells a very simple story: I’m missing this person, I wish there was no war, I wish I had power for that to happen. And there was something about the way that she delivered it so plainly and to the point that I really connected with.
It’s the archive of Middlebury [College] — a basic library situation with basic chair. It’s a very non-romantic situation to be in an archive like that; it’s fluorescent lights. I definitely during that period was always thinking about, What if an archive was a more spiritual place in its architecture?
Peter: Totally. It’s like you’re saying: there’s literally someone speaking to you across time and space. The little bit I’ve ever been an archive, it was a very mundane, sterile space. Here you are, sitting in whatever basic, simple chair, and there’s some person speaking to you her dreams, wishes, whatever. I think that’s a very interesting idea, if archives were a more architecturally welcoming [space] for whatever emotions or feelings are going to come up in engaging with this material that is kind of otherworldly.
Anna: I think it felt like there was something in the song that felt parallel to being in an archive like that. If she was “the king of France” or “the Pope,” we would also know what her thoughts maybe were — we would have more evidence of her life. There was something about how the song itself is from the perspective of this rural working class person who might not enter the annals of history, having this wish that once you hear it, you’re like, Well, of course. How many people have had this wish since the beginning of time? This thought, too, is what attracted me to spending time in the archive in the first place. It was an interest in thinking about music beyond the people who would have always been in the record books.
This song was probably composed by someone — she didn’t write the song — but that also feels like a big part of folk music history. You find a song that you relate to, or there’s a deep seed in the song that you really resonate with, and part of it is that you know that other people had sung it before so you’re kind of joining this place of resonance. It’s funny, I just watched a documentary about Kronos Quartet, and Philip Glass was talking about how, “music is a place.” And I think that’s part of how this film came together, thinking about how when you enter a song like this, and the wish that’s in a song like this, you’re entering this shared place that’s occupied by people from many different realms; the living and the dead and the future.
I found out Margaret’s from a little town called Lee in the Berkshires in Western Mass — I went to the town clerk and figured out where Margaret had lived and visited the house. Someone was home, and we played the song in the living room that it was probably recorded in. That was cool, but also so mundane. It’s about that place, that town, but also — and especially because we are talking about people who came from Europe who settled in this place — I think it’s more relating to these old songs as a metaphysical place. Like, the song is a place that we can visit communally over time.
Peter: It’s so interesting, because when we first started talking about making a film about this, it was very much in this idea of a music video. And I think we were at this point in our lives and our artistic careers where I was like, “Hey, what if we don’t make a music video and we just make a film?” And you immediately were like, “Yes.”
Anna: Yeah.
Peter: That, I think, was the beginning of me being really interested in the project. I didn’t know the full extent of the story of you finding it, but a lot of the stuff that you talked about, [like the idea of] music being a physical space — I don’t know if that was something that we said at the time, but when I think about the film and how we were approaching it, there are these three spaces in the film in sort of these three chapters. That came very intuitively. At least from my perspective, I was trying to think about, What is the essence, what is the heart, what is the wish at the center of this song, and how can that be interpreted into this new medium?
So I think in opening up the box on it and being like, “OK, this isn’t just a music video where we’re going to take the song and put it over some images; we’re going to allow ourselves to deconstruct the song itself…” We actually went into the stems of the recording you did with Elizabeth and broke it apart, and “let’s just solo the voice here, let’s take the backing trumpet Space Echo track on this, and that’ll be it.” I think seeing it now, I feel proud that we did that for Margaret — for the song, for wherever it came from, whoever made this. Because these things that we’re taking in [in an archive] are very flattened; on the same phone, I’m going to scroll through the news and I’m going to listen to this person singing from 100 years ago or whatever. Thinking about the first time you heard [the song] and this idea of it translating across time and space, I feel watching the film like we did a pretty good job of that.
Anna: Yeah. I think part of what I related to was how hopeless the song feels in many ways. The narrator of the song is feeling hopeless in the face of the mechanics of war, in the face of the loneliness of someone you love being a part of a war machine. I definitely didn’t relate to that specifically, about the military part, but I think there was just this feeling of, What do you do when you’re feeling hopeless or depressed? How do you spend your day? This idea of these daily tasks, like imagining Elizabeth’s character doing laundry by the tree — there’s almost this sort of Sisyphean thing.
Something about the song is, to me, related to feelings I have about the moments in a really difficult situations, both personally but then also in the world, where you’re like, I have no power. What the fuck can I do? I’ve lost all my hope, I don’t have any energy left. And I think in many cases of voicing that thought, very quickly I can hear my own brain trying to solve it by saying, Oh, but collective action! We do have power and we must not give up hope, we have to keep going! Especially with the last four years of, you know, the genocide in Gaza and the pandemic, and these huge global, fascist, fucked up things that are happening. So I feel like if I notice myself feeling hopeless, I then also notice myself trying to be like, “Don’t give up hope!” But I think there’s something about this song and the film that is like: “can we spend time with that feeling?” This song is, to me, about spending time with the hopelessness. This is not a song that’s about the moment after where you’re like, “Alright, what can we do to try to change the world?” I think this is the moment before that. That’s what I was thinking rewatching the film.
Peter: Yeah. There is this passivity we’ve talked about in a wish — or a prayer, or whatever you call it — the way that we have these internal things we’re putting out into the world, maybe said with words and maybe unsaid. I totally agree that face up against these huge, seemingly insurmountable things like fascism, there is a part of me that feels like, Well, what is the worth in this? I think, though, rewatching this film and thinking about what the power was in someone who was in this place, dealing with war, to actually wish or pray or sing this feeling. And the song is funny, because it does have this sort of passivity when we look at it now with a real critical lens.
Anna: Yeah.
Peter: But there’s also this utopianism in it, of wishing for this better world. Sometimes when I listen to the song, it would feel really cheesy to me. And at other times, I’d be like, Wow, this feels really earnest and genuine. I think I’m judging it from whatever place I’m in right now. In watching the film, it’s interesting how we tried to track all those things. There is this first section where it’s the mundane, daily repetitive ritual, and the text on screen, you’re kind of unsure, Is this the internal voice of this character? Is this one character, is this many? Is this representational of something else? And then this middle section — the Sisyphus thing came back to me when I was watching it. I was like, Is this character just always doing these tasks? Do they ever finish it? And thinking about this idea of, where do the wishes go? Where do the prayers, our hopes and dreams and thoughts, go? And who’s receiving all of this? In this case, we were thinking of a physical island. Then there’s this final chapter that is this much more abstract place. That, at least for me, was the best way that I could interpret such a big utopian idea of, what if there was a place where there was no war?
It felt to me like a challenging my own self of, do I really believe in this? Or do I think that this isn’t the real work to be done? I think the reality is, this is one piece of all of it. Yes, there’s collective action. Yes, there’s all these different pieces of it. But one of them is actually whatever words you want to put into it, a spiritual or just resonant quality of wanting there to be a better world. I think that it’s really interesting to go from, the way you said of being in Margaret’s house and her singing this song in her kitchen in a very unadorned, simple way. But yet I’m rewatching the film and saying, Wow, this is this trippy, very transcendental cinematic experience that came from her words getting passed to you, going into your recording, coming into the song. There is power in that. Like, how did that get through, across space and time, to be us sitting here now thinking about this thing? There’s something in that.
Anna: Yeah. A thought I keep returning to is, what if a folk song lasted longer? Because this song is maybe a minute-and-a-half, her recording of it. And especially with a lot of this folk singing, stylistically there’s this sort of flatness, or a reserve. It’s so different than the blues, or other songs that are about kind of opening and letting a shriek out. There’s something that is understated about so much of this music. And picturing an elderly woman sitting in her house saying, “If I was king of France or, better, Pope of Rome, I’d have no fighting men abroad or weeping maids at home” — there’s a conversational element to it. I think about this as sort of like a dream version.
I think at the time, I was really frustrated with folk music, because I was having all these feelings and delivering in that certain way, I was feeling like there was more mushy stuff that I wanted to bring out to the surface. There’s this amazing song by Sarah Ogan Gunning, a Kentucky singer, and the words are, “I hate the capitalist system, I’ll tell you the reason why; it caused me so much suffering and my dearest friends to die.” And she just delivers it, like, rocking in a rocking chair. That juxtaposition is so powerful and simple, and so different than if Janis Joplin sang that. And I think for me, it was this desire to get more messy. Like, what would it be like to explore these same themes, but not with that reserve? That, I do think, is part of why folk singing is so powerful. It’s because of that, “I’m not going to show you all the emotion, but I’m going to just say these very cutting things that need to be said.” I think that’s so powerful, but I was thinking of almost an inverse, where the words of the song are missing or not central, but we are just looking at the gooey interior.
Peter: I love a gooey center. I’m here for all gooey centers. I’m not a film historian and don’t know much, but I was thinking about this reserved nature rewatching the film, and how there’s this certain side of my inspiration in filmmakers like Chantal Akerman or Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Abbas Kiarostami — who are sort of in this slow cinema, transcendental cinema thing. Chantal Akerman is a really great example: You watch her work and similar to the folk thing, people can interpret it as dryness and coldness, where the camera is sitting there and I’m just watching this person do their daily activity. But I think there is this quality that comes through if you have these limitations, where there is an emotion that arises. And I think there’s a similar thing in folk music. You watch [someone perform] and you’re like, Woah, I am in tears right now and this person didn’t come up and give this huge emotive performance. But at the same time, I get really frustrated like you, where I’m like, Yeah, but I want to open the box up and I want to throw things around a bit.
It’s interesting to hear you say you were feeling that, and I can feel it in the record, too. You really did a good job of opening the box of folk music and just being like, “Let’s let in these certain things that I’m really interested in personally.” I feel the same thing in the film, where there was a part of me that really wanted to just open this box and be like, “These are the things I want to try to put into it.” I feel like it became this vessel for both of us.
Anna: Yeah. We were just trying stuff.
Peter: Yeah. And shout out to Folkways — there was no one telling us what the film had to be. Only now, later, I realize how unusual that is. Especially in film, when there’s more money or people or things involved, it can be harder to carve out that space to experiment in.
I guess we should wrap it up. But the one thing I wanted to say was: this thing sat on a hard drive for a while. I think we finished it right around the end of 2019, and we were going to put it out as an installation piece, but then the pandemic happened. All of our lives collectively changed, our lives both personally changed, and there was this moment where we both found it on our hard drive and were like, “We should do something with this.” So I also am just really grateful to the project, because I feel like it’s kept us in touch over these last couple years.
Anna: Oh, I know!
Peter: That’s all I really wanted to say about it: Thank you to Margaret for letting us make this film, so that Anna and I can hang out. [Laughs.]
