Tales of An Internet Drifter

My many travels upon the information super-highway lately have been leading me towards understanding how it used to be done, back before there ever was internet. Not having the internet seems now like almost something that never happened, almost like I don’t remember how things worked back before I relied on it so much.

One of things I’ve been studying historically, has simply been how information was transmitted from person-to-person. Anything from a simple story, news of an event, a song, a folk-tale, a specialized set of knowledge or an entire culture’s oral history. Troubadours, travelling bards and the like seem to have played a vitally important, though historically under-reported, I’m sure - since it was spoken from person to person, rather than written.

Repeat After Me

Specifically, what I have been looking for is something like a specific technique or a learnable mechanism which itself can be passed on from person to person, along with the volume of information itself. I may have found it in the Hebrew Mishnah, which is essentially the oral-accompaniment to the written Torah. The Tannaim were the Rabinnic sages (wandering teachers) who “wrote” what eventually was codified into the Mishnah.

The Tannaim operated under the occupation of the Roman Empire. During this time, the Kohanim (priests) of the Temple became increasingly corrupt and were seen by the Jewish people as collaborators with the Romans, whose mismanagement of Judea led to riots, revolts and general resentment. Throughout much of the period, the office of the Kohen Gadol (High Priest) was rented out to the highest bidder, and the priests themselves extorted as much as they could from the pilgrims who came to sacrifice at the Temple.

The conflict between the high priesthood and the people led to the split between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The elitist Sadducees (who generally controlled the high priesthood) were supported by the Hasmonean royal family and later by the Romans. The Pharisees were a more egalitarian sect; they accepted students from all the tribes, not only the Levites, and they also taught laws in addition to those set forth in the Torah.

And apparently the way they taught is actually encoded into the name of the practitioners and of the body of material itself:

The root tanna (תנא) is the Talmudic Aramaic equivalent for the Hebrew root shanah (שנה), which also is the root-word of Mishnah. The verb shanah (שנה) literally means “to repeat [what one was taught]” and is used to mean “to learn”.

Those Hobo Blues

Then tonight, I was looking for hobo videos on YouTube, and happened across John Lee Hooker’s excellent hobo blues. And while I was studying his stage presence, facial expression and tonal performance, something clicked. My mouse on a link, actually. (haha, sorry…) But seriously, the next video of his I found was this amazing song about a flood that wiped away several towns in Mississippi in 1927. Check it out a minute, before you go:

You’ll see (and hear, I guess) that after every line or stanza or whatever which he utters, he leaves a space. I understand this as being a blues “thing” and I’ve often heard about blues being heavily based on traditional african music, which relied on call-and-response patterns. Or that’s what the history books (and by that I mean Wikipedia, I guess) will teach you. That’s the written Torah. John Lee Hooker will teach you something else. The Mishnah. The oral Torah, the lived Torah.

Call And Response

This may be making a leap cross-culturally that stricter academic-types might not like, but I don’t see any of them around, so let’s just party. But what if there’s a totally practical purpose in the call and response song pattern? To teach people the song. So they can participate by knowing what to do next. To get everybody on the same page. I’ve never found anyone talking about it this way, but I’ve also lead a sheltered life, I guess.

So, you could loosely argue in that internet conspiracy-writer free-association kind of way that maybe the stylistic reason behind the pauses after each line in a song like John Lee Hooker’s, “Tupelo” (video above) would be spaces for a response, and the response would be repeating that line back to the speaker/singer, so that they know you heard them, and then they go onto the next line, you copy them again. Etc etc. //Tech Idea// It would be like a musical vocal lyrical equivalent of a copy machine, a mimeograph, a fax, a telegram or whatever other mixed communication metaphor we could throw in here.

But, the Tannaim. The repeaters. The wandering sages who taught the Law, their method was the same. Call and response. Listen and learn. Speak and spell. Repeat after me. Political chants. Advertising slogans. And the Tannaim sang their Torah. They had musical notation in their Biblical texts to bring it out, cantillation. Chanting Torah itself - that is, musically, singing it is called leyning.

Oh wait, and here we go, thanks to the power of The Almighty Internet™, an AV shorty on that same subject:

And here’s a lot longer video which you can watch on your own time of Jews leyning from the Torah, and there are definite call and response moments in it.

I’ll have to keep untangling this thread, but I just wanted to offer this chunk of it - as the realization of all of it has been kind of a major “download” for me in terms of my understanding.