What the River Carries by Lisa Knopp

Author:Lisa Knopp
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

10

Missouri River Music

Warble (River Mile 2,341, the Headwaters, to River Mile 700)

I am listening to a crude recording by Turkey Legs, a Northern Cheyenne. I can hear him capture a lungful of air before he blows a plaintive melody into his flute. His sound isn’t clear, pointed, and constant like that I can make on my silver, side-blown flute, but reedy and wavering, with wide spaces between the notes. At the end of a held note, the pitch rises quickly like the tail-flick of an alarmed white-tailed deer. The melody resumes. At the end—or is it the beginning?—of several phrases I hear a curious sound: a loud, low note that resembles the sound of a flag fluttering in a stiff wind.

In the early years of the twentieth century, ethnomusicologist Frances Densmore paid American Indian musicians twenty-five cents for each song that they played or sang into the morning glory horn, at once speaker and microphone, on her Edison phonograph. The wax cylinder into which Turkey Legs’s haunting melody was cut was one of almost 3,500 on which Densmore stored songs for the Smithsonian Institution’s Bureau of American Ethnology. Eventually, Turkey Legs’s song was transferred from the delicate, brittle, perishable cylinder onto a thin ribbon of tape. Even so, the scratchy sound of the rolling cylinder almost overwhelms the melody.

The curious fluttering sound that Turkey Legs makes with his flute on Dens-more’s recording is a “warble.” The Reverend Alfred Riggs, the Congregational missionary who in 1870 founded the Santee Normal Training School in northeast Nebraska, provides one of the earliest written descriptions of the warble. He explains that the Santee Sioux called their flutes cho-tan-ka, which means “big pith,” because the flute was made by cutting a straight piece about twenty inches long from a pithy sumac branch. To distinguish the wooden from the bone flute, the former is called a “murmuring” or “bubbling” cho-tan-ka because of the tremulous or warbling note it makes when the player stops all the holes and blows forcefully, causing the pitch to leap quickly and repeatedly up and down an octave.

What Turkey Legs was playing was a courting song. It was a widespread custom in the northern Plains tribes for a young man to play his flute to woo a woman. The warble was a highly coveted sound. If a young Lakota woman was moved by her suitor’s warbling song, she left her family’s tepee and went to him, where he stood waiting, wrapped in a blanket big enough to envelop both of them. Within the blanket, they could talk privately. The Lakota name for this ritual is ina aopemni inajinpi, or “standing wrapped in the blanket.” When Lakota youth were sent away to boarding schools in the late nineteenth century, the practice of this courtship ritual declined until finally it existed only in memory or in written accounts.

Turkey Legs’s flute was typical of those made by northern Plains Indians of various tribes. Within the hollowed-out tree branch, the flute maker constructed two chambers, a shorter one in the head and a longer one in the body.

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