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In 1965, Austin Wiggin, Jr. of Fremont, New Hampshire encouraged three of his daughters (Dorothy, Betty and Helen) to form a rock band he called the Shaggs. In 1969, they recorded an album of twelve original songs, Philosophy of the World, which sank into obscurity until it was rediscovered in the late 1970s by NRBQ’s Terry Adams. Today, listening to this record reveals that, despite their best efforts, the Shaggs could not yet assemble the basic building blocks of music. To fans of non-mainstream musicians like the Shaggs—creators of what music critics call “outsider music”—such untutored music offers forms of expressive authenticity inaccessible to more professional bands. However very few authors have considered why the Shaggs sound like they do, by listening closely specific details of performance and composition. How did three young women from New England create music that continues to attract fans despite its many flaws?
Outsider music is a relatively new field, and very little work on it exists in music scholarship—Irwin Chusid’s 2000 book Songs in the Key of Z is the earliest extended treatment of the topic. However, the plastic arts have embraced the products of outsider artists since the late 19th-century. Music produces a different kind of object—a performance. As Christopher Small states, “music is not primarily a thing…but an activity in which we engage.” As an activity, music can only be create through interactions with others. Many define “outsider music,” as a genre, by who makes it. According to the moderator of one online discussion group, “outsider music includes all manner of incompetent but sincere recordings, music by the mentally challenged, industry rejects, eccentrics, singing celebrities, loveable oddballs.” Yet, the Shaggs owe their continued survival to their music, and Philosophy of the Wordl has been reissued multiple times. Their biography illuminates how their music was made and why it sounds like it does. Of course, as young women in a rock band in the late 1960s, the Shaggs were already outside the mainstream.
So, how did the Wiggins become a band and record Philosophy of the World? The daughters agree that Austin was at the center of the band’s formation. He bought the instruments, enforced long practice schedules, and booked several local appearances. By all accounts, Austin expected his daughter’s to become famous, and he was disappointed by their failures. According to Dot, “going into the recording studio was all my father’s idea. We didn’t feel like we were ready yet.” It is unclear exactly what the Wiggin’s musical training entailed: they never name an instructor, but have often mentioned how much Austin made them practice. Dorothy and Betty both received voice and guitar lessons and Helen had drum lessons. Their music shows that they learned much from some form of formal music instruction. For example, Helen’s drum solos on ‘My Pal Foot Foot’, a song about the search for Dot’s lost cat, can be heard as a series of exercises for beginning percussionists. Throughout ‘My Pal Foot Foot’ she rotates counter-clockwise around her small drum-set, carefully incorporating each drum available to her. In addition, Betty and Dot sing with fantastic diction, perhaps the result of voice lessons, and certainly not a prerequisite for rock ‘n’ roll.
However, none of these characteristics are unique to the Shaggs, and alone would not place them outsider musicians. Indeed, Charles Keil argues that for “music to be personally involving and socially valuable [it] must be ‘out of time’ and ‘out of tune.’” What distinguishes the Shaggs is the lack of what Keil calls “oneness” in their ensemble playing. As they were recorded, each sister followed her own, internal understanding of how ‘My Pal Foot Foot’ should unfold. It does not sound like Dot and Betty are listening to each other as they sing essentially the same melody, just as the drummer seems oblivious to the guitarists’ music. (Dot claims that Helen worked out her drum parts quite separately from her composition of each song’s harmonic and melodic material, a relatively common practice in rock composition.) Dot and Betty often sing the melodies in “unison,” but in such a way that their voices stand out too much, and their vocal lines collide instead of blend. Singing in school choirs or with friends teaches one how to mix with a variety of voices. All of the songs on Philosophy of the World were written by Dot. She wrote very simple melodies, where every syllable of almost every word receives a separate melodic note. Because she would play her vocal melodies on the guitar while she sang along, her tunes are often confined to chord tones.
Ethnomusicologist Benjamin Brinner argues that “the interactive knowledge and skills that musicians use in performing together constitute a central part of competence that is complexly entwined with other modes of social interaction.” Without a social network of musicians, the Wiggin sisters lacked an environment in which to develop performance competence. Although they should have formed an interactive community of sorts, their performances attest to the fact that in performance they were as isolated from each other as they were from the larger world. The results might be called, after Keil, “non-participatory discrepancies” since the Shaggs’ ensemble playing is best described as a simultaneous unfolding of each sister’s understanding of the music.
The Shaggs’ songs hint at the boundaries of their social and musical world. Remember, Philosophy of the World was recorded after three years of lessons and a rigidly enforced practice schedule. The Wiggins were left to rely on an understanding of music performance based in instrumental exercises, and other forms of music-making that do not prioritize precise ensemble performance. Isolated from a larger community, they lacked opportunities to engage in basic interactions with musicians beyond their family, and their songs musically reenact their isolation from both the world and each other. Their music joins their attempt at musical competence with their supreme naïveté and reflects the tragic end of their commercial dreams all the way down.
Caroline O’Meara is a graduate student in the Department of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is currently working on a dissertation about music and noise in New York City in the 1970s and 1980s. Her writings on popular music can be found in Popular Music, Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Popular Musicians: Since 1990 and ECHO: a music-centered journal.
http://www.kindamuzik.net/achtergrond/709/imperfect-pitch-inept-performance-and-the-world-of-the-shaggs/9078/
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