Maria Persson, Who Taught and Inspired Karl Tirén, Joik Musicologist

 

A post on February 17, 2008, about the Swedish collector of joik music, Karl Tirén, has always been one of my most popular offerings on Northwords. I suspect it’s because it turns up in searches on joiking, and Tirén was a key figure in recording joik music in the Swedish part of Sápmi in the early twentieth century.

 

Greta Persson, Maria Persson and Karl Tirén in Arjeplog, 1937

But Karl Tirén’s work couldn’t have been accomplished without the insight and traditional knowledge of his friend Maria Persson, from Arjeplog in Pite Sápmi, a highly talented joiker and a seamstress. 

During the last few years I’ve learned much more about Maria Persson, who is only mentioned in passing in the 2008 blogpost, and about her life and collaboration with Karl Tirén. A chapter in my upcoming book, From Lapland to Sápmi, is dedicated to exploring Tirén’s collection of wax cylinders of joiks (now at the archives of Musikverket in Stockholm). I emphasize the key role Maria Persson and other Sámi played in Tirén's years of collecting, recording, and writing about the joik.

Here's a brief excerpt from “Wax Cylinders, Sámi Voices”:

 Maria Persson was born in the mountain district of Luokta-Malvas, just south of the Arctic Circle, one of fifty-one districts carved out of Swedish Sápmi during the reindeer herding act of 1886...Maria’s parents were nomadic herders, and she grew up in a traditional siida, a community that still actively recalled and passed on stories and joiks. Her parents gave up the migratory life in the 1890s, and like many Sámi of the period, they became smallholders, with a farm outside Arjeplog; they raised goats and sheep, along with a few reindeer. In her teens Maria suffered an accident to her hip or back and was sent to the town of Piteå on the coast, where she lay in hospital for two years “in a plaster cradle,” according to her daughter in an interview years later....In Piteå she would have spoken Swedish nearly all the time; her fluency put her in the position of being able to negotiate the borders of Sápmi and Sweden. Perhaps it was for that reason she was asked to go to Stockholm in 1909 for the Industrial Arts Exhibition to help represent the large province of Norrbotten.

This exhibition followed on the world’s fair held in the city in 1897, an extravaganza that introduced Stockholm’s culture and industrial products to the world and that coincided with Artur Hazelius’s founding of Skansen and plans for the Nordic Museum. In the midst of “the summer city,” as the Industrial Arts Exhibition came to be called, a Sámi couple were invited to display themselves and their belongings as an example of nomadic life in northern Sweden. In the Norrbotten rooms they set up their tent and lit a campfire to boil coffee and make food. The fire created a ruckus with the managers of the exposition. Maria Persson stood up for the Sámi couple. A tent without a fire was not a home at all. Surprisingly, she was joined in her protest by a big Swede with a short beard whom she had met at the exposition. Karl Tirén was in Stockholm to show his paintings over in the Jämtland rooms. He too argued with the directors over the importance of the campfire....

When the Sámi couple decided to pack up and leave the Stockholm exposition, Maria went with them, and so did Karl Tirén. A short time later, Maria arrived as an invited guest to the home that Karl shared with his wife, Karen, and their five children in Boden. Tirén had long wished to hear true joiking and to learn more about the Sámi’s musical traditions. Over the course of a few days, Maria Persson shared joiks and explanations, and he noted down her words and melodies as best he could. In letters at the time and later in his published work, he emphasized the importance of his meeting with her: “What I learned from Maria Person . . . in the form of both tones and information on the character and concept of Lapp song greatly increased my interest and evoked the idea of making journeys to collect and research in this field.”

 

You can listen to Maria Persson and her sister Greta joiking by opening one of the historical Tirén collections on CD or online at Musikverket.