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How much is the Hope Diamond worth? Ask Smithsonian.

Our inquisitive readers are rising to the challenge we gave them last month. The questions are pouring in and we’re ready for more. Do you have any questions for our curators? Submit your questions here.

How much is the Hope Diamond worth? — Marjorie Mathews, Silver Spring, Maryland

That’s the most popular question we get, but we don’t really satisfy people by giving them a number. There are a number of answers, but the best one is that we honestly don’t know. It’s a little bit like Liz Taylor’s jewels being sold in December—all kinds of people guessed at what they would sell for, but everybody I know was way off. Only when those pieces were opened up to bidding at a public auction could you find out what their values were. When they were sold, then at least for that day and that night you could say, well, they were worth that much. The Hope Diamond is kind of the same way, but more so. There’s simply nothing else like it. So how do you put a value on the history, on the fact it’s been here on display for over 50 years and a few hundred million people have seen it, and on that fact it’s a rare blue diamond on top of everything else? You don’t. – Jeffrey E. Post, mineralogist, National Museum of Natural History

What’s the worst impact of ocean acidification so far?- Nancy Schaefer, Virginia Beach, Virginia

The impacts of ocean acidification are really just starting to be felt, but two big reports that came out in 2011 show that it could have very serious effects on coral reefs. These studies did not measure the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but rather its effect of making the ocean more acidic when it dissolves in the ocean. Places where large amounts of carbon dioxide seep into the water from the sea floor provide a natural experiment and show us how ocean waters might look, say, 50 or 100 years from now. Both studies showed branching, lacy, delicate coral forms are likely to disappear, and with them that kind of three-dimensional complexity so many species depend on. Also, other species that build a stony skeleton or shell, such as oysters or mussels, are likely to be affected. This happens because acidification makes carbonate ions, which these species need for their skeletons, less abundant.

Nancy Knowlton, marine biologist
National Museum of Natural History

Art and artifacts from ancient South Pacific and Pacific Northwest tribes have similarities in form and function. Is it possible that early Hawaiians caught part of the Kuroshio Current of the North Pacific Gyre to end up along the northwest coast of America from northern California to Alaska? — April Croan, Maple Valley, Washington

Those similarities have given rise to various theories, including trans-Pacific navigation, independent drifts of floating artifacts, inadvertent crossings by ships that have lost their rudders or rigging, or whales harpooned in one area that died or were captured in a distant place. Some connections are well-known, like feather garment fragments found in an archaeological site in Southeast Alaska that appear to have been brought there by whaling ships that had stopped in the Hawaiian Islands, a regular route for 19th-century whalers. Before the period of European contact, the greatest similarities are with the southwest Pacific, not Hawaii. The Kushiro current would have facilitated Asian coastal contacts with northwestern North America, but would not have helped Hawaiians. The problem of identification is one of context, form and dating. Most of the reported similarities are either out of their original context (which can’t be reconstructed), or their form is not specific enough to relate to another area’s style, or the date of creation cannot be established. To date there is no acceptable proof for South Pacific-Northwest Coast historical connections that predates the European whaling era, except for links that follow the coastal region of the North Pacific into Alaska.

William Fitzhugh, archeologist
Natural History Museum

Former Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart on the drum kit. Courtesy Smithsonian Folkways

Mickey Hart, the former percussionist for the legendary San Francisco jam band Grateful Dead has never met a world beat he didn’t like. And that’s reflected in the new Smithsonian Folkways world music series that he’s curating, “The Mickey Hart Collection,” that will be released October 11.

Comprised of 25 albums, the series includes music from regions that span the globe, including Sudan, Nigeria, Tibet, Indonesia, Latvia and Brazil. Listen to the albums in this series and no doubt you’ll come away having heard genres and instruments you’ve never heard before, like the ngoma, oud, bouzouki, darabukka, or the dungchen. The album series includes Hart’s solo projects, plus other artists’ productions, as well as re-releases of out-of-print titles.

But how did the drummer for a counter-culture jam band become entranced with rhythms from around the globe? It turns out he’s been worldly for some time. “I was entranced as a young boy by the rhythms of West Africa by way of Cuba, Haiti,” Hart told Smithsonian Folkways in a recent interview. “They all were the rhythms that spawned the music of American music, because they were everywhere and you could dance to them. They were polyrhythmic. They were dance music. And I loved the music that made you dance.”

While living in the Bay Area during the late 1960s, Hart recorded exotic musicians like sitarist Ravi Shankar and sarodist Ali Akbar Khan. Though the musicians weren’t household names in the United States at the time, Hart respected their virtuosity.

“I treated each recording as if it would sell a million copies,” Hart recalled to Smithsonian Folkways. “I always recorded it at the highest resolution and had it mastered at the same place I was mastering Grateful Dead material.”

Listen to audio samples from “The Mickey Hart Collection.”

"Honeyboy" Edwards' album with Smithsonian Folkways, "Mississippi Delta Bluesman"

David “Honeyboy” Edwards was born in the farm community of Shaw, Mississippi, on June 28, 1915. Yesterday, he passed away as one of America’s pioneering blues guitarists and vocalists at the age of 96.

“He’s what we would think of as a tradition bearer,” says Barry Lee Pearson, a folklorist and professor at the University of Maryland. “I would consider him to be the epitome of a walking musician—a walking jukebox. He was a musician, first and foremost.” As perhaps the oldest surviving original veteran of the Delta blues style, Edwards leaves behind a legacy as an influential bond between the acoustic blues from the deep south and the electric Chicago style that would lay the roots for modern rock and roll.

Pearson wrote the liner notes for Edwards’ 2001 Smithsonian Folkways album, “Mississippi Delta Bluesman.”

Growing up in Shaw, Edwards quickly showed he had an aptitude for music. “He picked up a little guitar as a youngster, but really learned when [Delta blues guitarist] Big Joe Williams came through. Big Joe noticed he could play a little bit, and asked his father if he could take him along with him as a road musician,” Pearson says. After traveling with Williams, Edwards split off on his own and continued to develop his craft. “By the time he got back home, he surprised everybody with how good he could play,” says Pearson.

Over the next several decades, Edwards toured the South from Memphis to Oklahoma, performing virtually anywhere he’d be welcomed and traveling by hitchhiking, hopping on rail cars, or by foot. He lived at a time when simply being a musician was dangerous, says Pearson. “He always claimed the authority figures down south, especially the farmers, did not like musicians at all.”

“Usually his strategy was that he stayed in all day, so nobody would see him, and then after 6 o’clock he’d go out,” Pearson says. “That’s because if they saw you during the daytime, they’d put you in jail or put you out on the farm somewhere.” Once, he was arrested for riding the rails without a ticket, and had to befriend a guard to get released.

Eventually, Edwards hitchhiked up to Chicago with Little Walter, the Louisiana harmonica player whose legacy is legendary in blues and blues rock traditions, and over the next several years switched to electric blues, his career tracing the evolution of the genre from a rural Southern entertainment to an urban nightclub phenomenon. Although he never made a chart-topping record, Pearson says Edwards “always claimed that he wasn’t at the right place at the right time to do recording, that he was always on the move.” But Edwards recorded a number of albums and played with all the major blues musicians of the era, Pearson says.

Edwards’ relationship with the renowned guitarist Robert Johnson, who died in 1938 at the age of 27 after sipping a bottle of whiskey laced with strychnine, is a particularly interesting footnote. “They played together in Greenwood for a couple of months or so, until Robert Johnson was killed,” Pearson says. “Honeyboy was with Johnson the night he was poisoned, and has one of the more trustworthy descriptions of that entire event, because he was also supposed to play at the same juke joint that Robert Johnson was poisoned at.”

Having long played in relative obscurity, Edwards enjoyed a resurgence in popularity over the second half of the century, as the influence of blues on modern music genres became more well known. He continued touring into his 90s, retiring only in 2008. Among other honors, he was named 2002 National Heritage Fellow and was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2010.

“I always found him to be a very friendly, charismatic, warm-hearted, really a nice guy,” says Pearson, who has conducted several interviews with the late musician. “But I think there was a side of him, especially when he was younger, when you would say ‘tough guy,’ which you had to be in those days. I had great respect for him, and I still do.”

Listen to a sample of Edwards’ music from his Folkways album.

Smithsonian Folkways has released a collection of Civil War Naval songs. Cover art courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways.

In timing with the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, Smithsonian Folkways has released a new collection, Civil War Naval Songs: Period Ballads from the Union and Confederate Navies, and the Home Front. The album consists of 13 lively 19th-century tunes that sailors sung on ships or, when docked in port, or belted out in taverns, as well as a few songs their families listened to in their absence—all performed by an all-star group of folk musicians. To hear more about the songs and their origins, I recently caught up with the collection’s producer Dan Milner, a folk song collector and researcher and singer of traditional Irish songs who has teamed up with Folkways before (Irish Pirate Ballads and Other Songs of the Sea).

Download a free mp3 copy of “Monitor & Merrimac” courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways

How would you describe the style of the songs?

There are four main types of songs on the recording: firsthand reports from combatants, songs from ballad sheets, songs from urban variety theatres and concert saloons, and parlor songs.

The firsthand reports are blow-by-blow descriptions and are about victories. The losers had other priorities as you can imagine. “The Fight of the Hatteras and Alabama” and “The Brooklyn, Sloop-of-War” are examples.

Ballad sheets are a printed song format that doesn’t exist any longer. They were the first mechanically reproduced song medium. Essentially, they are the words of one song printed on one side of a sheet of paper—importantly with no musical notation—but frequently with a commonly known tune indicated as appropriate for singing. Many of these were sold on busy street corners but many were sent by mail to rural places. They are predecessors of both the modern newspaper and modern sheet music and were occasionally written by hacks working from early, sometimes sketchy, reports. They vary in tone and can be alternately rousing, sad, political, full of praise, damning, etc. “A Yankee Man-of-War” and “The Old Virginia Lowlands, Low” are examples.

Music from early variety (pre-vaudeville) theatres appears mostly in songsters: portable, paper covered booklets of perhaps 40 pages. You can liken ballad sheets to singles and songsters to albums. They’re frequently upbeat—“The Monitor & Merrimac” is an example—and some were used for recruiting purposes. Comic singers were the royalty of Civil War music halls. Our recording is very compelling because everyone is very loose and the arrangement works so well. Gabe Donohue thumps beautifully on the piano. Kate Bowerman’s piccolo and clarinet work is hilarious. The chorus is really alive. If Spike Jonze’s Jones’ grandfather had been a bandleader during the Civil War, his music would have sounded like this.

Parlor songs were printed on sheet music as we undertand the term today and meant primarily for performance in middle- and upper-class homes, where popular theatres were frowned upon. Parlor songs (“The Alabama,” for example) were usually more musically complex and textually refined than the other types.

How did you go about finding the tunes you included?

There are some obvious places to look, starting with archives that hold 19th century song material. The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress and the Lester Levy Collection of Sheet Music at Johns Hopkins University are two such important places and they have extensive collections viewable online. But I went to a number of research libraries as well, the Watkinson Library of Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, and the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, for example. “The Blockade Runner” came from the Bodleian Library of Oxford University.

Singers are always looking for good, interesting songs, and that was the first criteria in selection. But I also wanted the CD to be equally representative of Northerners, Southerners and Immigrants. I desperately wanted African-Americans in that mix too—18,000 African-Americans served in the Union Navy—but, try as hard as I could—I was not able to find any Civil War maritime songs that were identifiably the product of Black Americans, though I’m still looking. The answer to this apparent riddle is that real folk song passes from mouth to ear. Only occasionally are the words set down on paper. African-American songs were composed, they just weren’t recorded on paper and archived. Generally speaking, I bet for every one good Civil War naval song that was preserved another 99 were lost. The CD is nearly 53-minutes long and carries a tremendous amount of variety from song to song.

What can be learned about the Civil War era by listening to this collection?

Without question, people had a lot fewer diversions to occupy their time. One result of that was they probably sang a lot more. The Civil War period came towards the close of the end of the Second Great Awakening in America. During that period, the idea of duty was second only to religious commitment. I believe the ideas of service, patriotic fervor and fighting the “good fight” are strongly embedded in these songs.

(For more information on the battles and soldiers described in the song’s lyrics, download the liner notes.)

What did you enjoy most about the recording process?

Making recordings is fun but it’s also hard work. I immensely enjoyed working with Jeff Davis, David Coffin, Deirdre Murtha, Bonnie Milner and the other fine singers and musicians who took part. They are an extraordinarily talented crew. All were very generous with their time and contributed mightily to the CD. For all of us, hearing moments of musical genius emerge was tremendously uplifting. For sheer fun, personally, I really enjoyed the entry of the double fiddles on “The Brooklyn, Sloop-of-War.” I jumped in the air when I heard the playback.

It’s fitting that legendary jazz songstress-extraordinaire Billie Holiday’s (1915-1959) birthday today falls during Smithsonian’s Jazz Appreciation Month (JAM). “Lady Day,” as she was known, made songs her own, lazily wrapping her emotive voice like wisps of smoke around passages with distinctive horn-like phrasing. Her trademark songs like “God Bless the Child,” which went on to sell over a million copies, and the haunting tale of lynching, “Strange Fruit” still resonate today. Unfortunately for Holiday, the rock star lifestyle was not a recent invention. Drug abuse and drinking took its toll on her voice, and her limited legal ability to collect royalties left her with $.70 in the bank at the time of her death from cirrhosis at age 44 in 1959. To learn more about the life and times of Lady Day, Smithsonian‘s Ryan Reed corresponded with John Edward Hasse, the American History Museum’s curator of American music and a founder of Jazz Appreciation Month.

Portrait of Billie Holiday, Down Beat, New York City, circa Feb. 1947 (Library of Congress)

Who gave Holiday the nickname “Lady Day?”

The great tenor saxophonist Lester Young, who was a musical soulmate of Holiday’s. She, in turn, gave him the nickname “Pres,” short for “President.”

April is Jazz Appreciation Month.  How did Holiday influence the genre?

Like Louis Armstrong, she influenced other singers to take familiar songs and make them their own, changing the melodies and rhythms to match the singer’s artistic sensibilities.

What made Holiday unique?

Billie Holiday ranks close to Louis Armstrong among the greatest jazz singers. Acknowledging great inspiration from him, she practiced an instrumental approach to singing as she ranged freely over the beat, flattened out the melodic contours of tunes, and, in effect, re-composed songs to suit her range, style and artistic sensibilities.  Her voice was physically limited, but she achieved shadings, nuances, color and variety by sliding along the thin line separating speech and song.

Smithsonian Folkways has the recording “Mean to Me.” What can you tell us about this particular song?

This recording marks an early stage of a remarkable partnership, one that Holiday forged with tenor saxophonist Lester Young.

In contrast to Coleman Hawkins’ big sax sound of the time, Young took a new approach. Young’s sound was a feathery, almost vibrato-less, lightly swinging style that moved improvisation away from the underlying harmonic sequence to focus more on the possibilities of melody.  He personified ‘cool’ and influenced the bebop, cool jazz, and rhythm and blues that were to come.

The elegant pianist Teddy Wilson introduces Mean to Me, Young takes the three eight-bar A sections, with trumpeter Buck Clayton taking the B section or bridge.  Holiday sings the second chorus, and then the band returns to play the second half of the chorus—Wilson solos on the bridge and Clayton on the final eight bars.

Holiday recomposes the melody of the A section, flattening out parts of it.  In the bridge, she largely sings the original melody but makes the rhythms and phrasing her own.  For her, such rhythmic conventions as eighth notes, quarter notes, and bar lines were merely guideposts, not fences.  Holiday leans on the beat, then catches up, demonstrating her impeccable sense of rhythm.  She makes a then-familiar hit song into something personal and fresh.

What made you choose an image of Holiday for the poster of the 2nd annual, national Jazz Appreciation Month in 2003?

I wanted a major figure who was widely considered one of the greatest on her instrument (the voice) and felt it was important to represent women, who have often been undersung in the annals of jazz.

Is there an artist today that reminds you of Holiday?

Holiday has influenced generations of singers, but one in particular has captured some of her style uncannily, and that is Madeline Peyroux.

What is your favorite song by Holiday and why?

“Mean to Me,” because it well represents Holiday as well as Lester Young and Teddy Wilson.

–Additional reporting by Ryan Reed