How the work of American folk song collectors inspired The History of Sound

Period romance The History of Sound focuses on the relationship between two musicians, Lionel (Paul Mescal) and David (Josh O’Connor). The duo begin an affair at the New England Conservatory of Music in 1917, but their lives diverge with the US’s entry into the First World War. David is drafted to fight on the Western Front. Lionel, whose poor eyesight precludes military service, returns to his family’s modest farm in Kentucky.

Post-conflict, the men meet again for a trip across Maine, visiting rural homes to record folk songs on wax phonograph cylinders – sometimes called Edison cylinders after inventor Thomas Edison (1847–1931). But in a film of lost love, there’s no conventional happy ending here. The drama also deals with class, repression, missed opportunities, grief and the way we all time-travel across our own personal histories so that, to quote director Oliver Hermanus, we sometimes find ourselves “having conversations from the past in our heads”.

Underpinning the emotional truth of the drama is the filmmakers’ research into the early 20th century – and, more specifically, into the work of those hardy souls who set out to document the traditional music they heard in shacks, on porches and around campfires.

Is The History of Sound a true story? And were Lionel and David real?

No, the History of Sound is not a true story – it’s based on Ben Shattuck’s 2018 short story of the same name – however, Paul Mescal’s Lionel and Josh O’Connor’s David are historically plausible figures, despite both being fictional.

From the 19th century onwards, men and women on both sides of the Atlantic were fascinated by the folk tradition and set out to catalogue songs, first by collating lyrics and annotating tunes, and later via making recordings.

Who were these real-life collectors?

In the UK, the major name in the field was Cecil Sharp (1859–1924). Among his many achievements, Morris dancing enthusiast Sharp co-founded the English Folk Dance Society. This later merged with the Folk-Song Society to form the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS), based at Cecil Sharp House in Camden, London, which remains a centre for those researching folk music.

Sharp also collected songs Stateside, in the Appalachian Mountains. However, it’s the Lomax family that’s most associated with song collecting in the US. It was John Lomax (1867–1948) who brought Lead Belly (1889–1949) to wider attention after hearing the folk-blues legend on a visit to Louisiana State Penitentiary, a notorious jail better known as Angola. Lomax was a key figure in building up the Archive of American Folk Song, the first national collection of the country’s folk music. John’s children, Alan (1915–2002), John Jr (1907–74) and Bess Lomax Hawes (1921–2009) were also important folklorists.

Some American collectors specialised in particular locales. Several names are particularly associated with Maine, where David and Lionel go collecting in The History of Sound. They include Fannie Hardy Eckstorm (1865–1946), who documented the music and culture of working people and Penobscot Native Americans, and field recordings pioneer Robert Winslow Gordon (1888–1961), born in Bangor, Maine and the first head of the Archive of American Folk Song.

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Why was this work important?

Generations of musicians have benefited from their work. What’s come to be known as the American Folk Revival began in the 1940s. Along with Lead Belly, important early figures included Woody Guthrie (1912–67), who in 1940 wrote ‘This Land is Your Land’ as a riposte to what he saw as the jingoism of Irving Berlin’s ‘God Bless America’, and the tireless activist Pete Seeger (1919–2014).

Many figures in the revival were associated with left-wing politics. Guthrie’s guitars in the 1940s bore the legend, “This machine kills fascists.” Seeger was blacklisted during the McCarthy era. In the 1960s, another generation picked up the baton, which had metaphorically been left in Manhattan’s coffee houses. It may be an exaggeration to suggest that, without song collectors, we wouldn’t have had Joan Baez or Bob Dylan, but these artists’ careers, and our shared cultural history, would have been very different.

Building the world of The History of Sound

Jonathan Wright spoke to the film's director, Oliver Hermanus

HistoryExtra: Ben Shattuck adapted his own work, his first screenplay. How did this come about?

Oliver Hermanus: It felt like the natural fit. You sensed that Ben had all of the bigger spaces of the story in his head. When you’re adapting a novel into a movie, it’s a process of reduction. In an interesting way, a short story is a more fruitful process because you get to add. It’s a bit like it’s a house, and Ben’s designed the whole house. And the short story is just the front room. When I come along, I want to see the kitchen and the upstairs bedrooms and the bathrooms, and he knows what they look like.

How did you go about finding the historical details that help establish the characters?

I’ve now made three different films back-to-back, all set in different periods and in different countries. I do love the process of learning. Of course, we make creative decisions about certain things historically, it’s not a documentary. But if you’re making something super-specific, you obviously want to get it right. The Smithsonian was very helpful to us. We were also able to make contact with community research and historical societies in different parts of America, in Kentucky and Maine. They had all sorts of things that we could use, either artefacts or information about how people lived – the size of farms and houses, and the wood people would use to build things.

Were there any details that to which you were particularly drawn? At one point, you show a mixed-race community in Maine.

That was definitely one of those moments of expansion with Ben. I asked him, “When they go to Maine, what else could they encounter?” Ben immediately suggested this story from Malaga Island. In history, the Malaga Island episode [where an interracial community was evicted from an island off Maine] happened in 1911 [before Lionel and David’s trip in 1920]. But it was one of those moments where you felt that the connection between community and music – and this migration of people from the south of America to the north, and how the music they brought with them might have differed from the music that existed in Maine or Massachusetts and Connecticut – felt like a worthy intersection for the characters to experience.

Considering my own background from South Africa [the son of ANC activists and part of a multiracial family living under Apartheid], it felt like something that gave me a sense of connection to American history.

Can you tell us a little about the role of folk singer Sam Amidon in shaping the film’s soundtrack?

The story was very much Ben’s love letter to this kind of music, its history and its context within the greater American narrative. From the very beginning, there was a playlist of songs that were part of Ben’s childhood and Ben’s life. The interesting thing is that we had loads of songs in this playlist, but we often had the same song done by different people in different times. And so you sensed how melodies and lyrics would be reimagined, re-orchestrated or redesigned.

The song ‘In the Pines’ [also known as ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’] became a famous song for Nirvana, but that is a very old American song from the South. We knew that we would never use ‘In the Pines’, which was just too popular, but we wanted to find songs that had stories inside of them that felt like they were echoes of the story of The History of Sound. A lot of them are ballads of misplaced love or loss and grief. We also wanted to have songs that came from the right regions. Sam was very helpful in then taking these different songs and being able to arrange them in a palette that felt tonally appropriate.

The History of Sound is in UK cinemas now. It will be available to stream in the UK later in the year.