A Summer Vacation Sabbatical, See You Next Week

Flea Shack and $1 Flea Market, Outside Steubenville, Ohio; Matthew Fluharty

Folks, the lights are out at Art of the Rural headquarters this week for summer vacation. We will return on Monday, July 3oth.

Many thanks to all who helped by voting and sharing news of our proposal for the Rural Arts And Culture Map. We hope to have news on this front by Monday morning as well. 

Thanks again for your support and collaborations. See you all next week!

Final Vote: Let's Make A Rural Arts And Culture Map

Screenshot of projects already logged into The Rural Arts and Culture Map

Please consider casting your vote for The Rural Arts and Culture Map proposal within the Rural Digital Advocacy Grant crowd-source competition. Voting takes about 10 seconds and requires no login or user information. Today is the final day of voting.

Folks, we coming up on the last day of the crowd-source competition -- and all of us at Art of the Rural would like to thank the individuals and organizations who have voted to support this work and who have shared it with their friends and colleagues. Many thanks also to our collaborators at Appalshop, Feral Arts, and the M12 art collective.

Today we're asking folks who may not have had a chance yet to vote or share this project to consider our proposal, and its accompanying video, which can be reviewed here. For the duration of this voting period, we are opening for public view the Rural Art and Culture Map project -- which will debut in a more developed form in a few weeks. 

In correspondence with Mark Lynn Ferguson of The Revivalist, I was asked how I would break down the necessity and the promise of this proposal into the simplest terms. Here's a few points:

• This map is 100% participatory. Rural people, and their urban advocates, drive this project.

• Art of the Rural will also collaborate with artists, writers, bloggers, and a host of organizations to create partnerships and increase the community within the Map project.

• PlaceStories is a gorgeous and infinitely resourceful mapping platform. We can post music, video, interviews, images, discussions, and documents -- as well as their handy "postcard" storytelling options.

• PlaceStories enables the Map, and its parts, to be embedded on other sites. With this, the Map becomes a vehicle for new connections.

• This is a great resource but, even more so, a place for people to meet and share ideas, a powerful metaphor for all kinds of campaigns to increase visibility and support for rural people.

• Plain and simple: contributing to a PlaceStories project is fun and immediately gratifying.

For a more detailed description of the process, please see our previous introduction to The Rural Arts and Culture Map and the crowd-source campaign. Here's our introduction to the project; for full image/sound credits please follow the vimeo link:

Final Vote: Let's Make a Rural Arts And Culture Map

Screenshot of projects already logged into The Rural Arts and Culture Map

Please consider casting your vote for The Rural Arts and Culture Map proposal within the Rural Digital Advocacy Grant crowd-source competition. Voting takes about 10 seconds and requires no login or user information.

Folks, we coming up on the last day of the crowd-source competition -- and all of us at Art of the Rural would like to thank the individuals and organizations who have voted to support this work and who have shared it with their friends and colleagues. Many thanks also to our collaborators at Appalshop, Feral Arts, and the M12 art collective.

Today we're asking folks who may not have had a chance yet to vote or share this project to consider our proposal, and its accompanying video, which can be reviewed here. For the duration of this voting period, we are opening for public view the Rural Art and Culture Map project -- which will debut in a more developed form in a few weeks. 

In correspondence with Mark Lynn Ferguson of The Revivalist, I was asked how I would break down the necessity and the promise of this proposal into the simplest terms. Here's a few points:

• This map is 100% participatory. Rural people, and their urban advocates, drive this project.

• Art of the Rural will also collaborate with artists, writers, bloggers, and a host of organizations to create partnerships and increase the community within the Map project.

• PlaceStories is a gorgeous and infinitely resourceful mapping platform. We can post music, video, interviews, images, discussions, and documents -- as well as their handy "postcard" storytelling options.

• PlaceStories enables the Map, and its parts, to be embedded on other sites. With this, the Map becomes a vehicle for new connections.

• This is a great resource but, even more so, a place for people to meet and share ideas, a powerful metaphor for all kinds of campaigns to increase visibility and support for rural people.

• Plain and simple: contributing to a PlaceStories project is fun and immediately gratifying.

For a more detailed description of the process, please see our previous introduction to The Rural Arts and Culture Map and the crowd-source campaign. Here's our introduction to the project; for full image/sound credits please follow the vimeo link:

North Country: Introducing A New Series

Girls with banjos; Veazie, Maine circa 1900-10; Maine Folklife Center Collection

By Alyce Ornella, North Country series Editor

Maine exists in an in-between place in the American consciousness.  Well worn imagery of lobsters and long winters instantly are called to mind by many, yet the state lies so far north of New York and Boston that few beyond the eastern urban centers have visited, let alone chosen to live here.  Like many rural places, Maine is often defined by imagery that is intrinsic to its heritage, yet it becomes lost in translation when transmitted beyond its borders.

Buried beneath the lobsters and lighthouses that dot the collective imagination lies a secret: country music has always been a part of the vernacular landscape of Maine, from the pre-radio days through the present.  While the perception exists that Nashville brought country music to the rest of the nation, rural music has always been performed in the kitchens, gatherings, and grange halls in communities from one far corner of the United States to another.   Nashville’s voice -- and the voices of those who moved to the city from all over the country in order to be from Nashville -- became loudly amplified in the era of mass produced recordings, radio barn dances, and powerful transmitters that beamed the sounds between south and north.  Here begins a complex dialogue expressed through the language of country music and pulled by the tensions of tradition, commercialization, and regional identity.  

Al Hawkes (right) in the Event Records studio, ca. 1956; collection of Al Hawkes

Over the summer, we’ll be sharing the roots of Maine and New England country music through stories, sounds, and images that illuminate this little known cultural history.   Our series will explore how country music and radio become a means for Maine to connect with the rest of the country, and helped create the crisscrossing connections between Northern and Southern musicians on a path that connected two far-apart regions.

Some of the histories (and even present days) this series will share include:

- A young radio enthusiast who built a pirate station in his family’s barn, and went on to create a regional country music empire.

- A family of performers who encountered both fame and tragedy as their journey in search of stardom took them from the shoe factories of Maine to West Virginia, Nashville, Canada, Los Angeles, and back.

- One of the very few documented interracial country music duos on either side of the Mason-Dixon who performed before the Civil Rights Era.

- The yodeling cowboys of New England.

- From the Crown of Maine, a deep voiced balladeer who brought the genre of truck driving songs to listeners across the country.

Like many of their southern counterparts, these musicians were deeply invested in their craft and some even dreamed of making in that Music City of Nashville -- and some had the chance, but walked away.  Their legacy illustrates that country music exists as an expressive force undefinable by state lines nor immutable boundaries of cultural ownership.

Your Vote Counts: The Rural Arts And Culture Map

This morning we are asking for your time and assistance in advocating for the necessity of a dynamic Rural Arts and Culture Map. 

Art of the Rural, in collaboration with the Appalshop, Feral Arts, and the M12 Art Collective, is one of thirteen organizations under consideration for a Rural Digital Advocacy Grant provided by the Kellogg Foundation and the Rural Policy Action Partnership.

The Institute For Emerging Issues is currently hosting a crowd-sourced competition, whereby the grant application with the most votes will immediately receive funding. 

In short: every vote for this Map counts and puts this project closer to becoming a reality. Voting is open only for a few days, closing on July 19th. Voting is quick and easy -- no login or user information is required.

Please see the short project video below*. What makes all of us at AOTR so excited is that we have the opportunity to create this new map in collaboration with the PlaceStories mapping platform designed by Feral Arts. Much like the "open canon" philosophy of AOTR, PlaceStories encourages participation and open dialogue -- and it offers some dynamic ways for stories to be told, and then shared across the internet and beyond.

We are honored to count Appalshop and the M12 art collective as collaborators in the project; their guidance will be invaluable as we consider how to best reach out to diverse communities and cultures while also speaking across disciplines and considering rural-urban exchange.

Please find below a brief description of the project. Though the Rural Arts and Culture Map, under the careful stewardship of AOTR contributor and Digital Intern Rachel Beth Rudi, is currently in the process of completing a first phase of archiving material from rural sites, we are opening up the Map for the public to view during the duration of the voting -- and to get a sense of the exciting possibilities in working with the PlaceStories platform.

Art of the Rural, in collaboration with Appalshop, Feral Arts, and the M12 Art Collective, is requesting a Rural Digital Advocacy Grant to administer the Rural Arts and Culture Map on the PlaceStories mapping platform.

With these collaborators’ expertise in media-making, design, and community-engagement, Art of the Rural will utilize this dynamic open source Map to present new perspectives from rural America, with a focus on rural youth, rural-urban exchange, and a sustaining interest in the changing face of rural America: the next generation, and their membership in diverse ethnic and cultural communities.

Most importantly, this project is driven not by any single organization, but by the people themselves. With opportunities to share video, audio, photography, and text, PlaceStories will give full agency to an audience ready to become active participants in a mission to create new rural narratives. Thus, the Map becomes a manifestation of direct, local, experience; a digital tool that transcends itself; a meeting point for conversation and shared ground; and a foundation through which to unite and motivate rural citizens across the country and contribute to the work of the National Rural Assembly.

This project acknowledges that powerful campaigns for equity and social change emerge from cultural imperatives. Artists and arts practitioners are often grassroots innovators and adept partners in media campaigns. With The Rural Arts and Culture Map, this community promises give a compelling voice, and a new avenue of communication, to a wide range of rural issues.

*Please find below more information on the images and artwork contained in the Vimeo clip. In many cases, multiple articles on these artists have appeared on Art of the Rural and can be found through searching the archives:

Music:

"Amazing Grace" - Oakland's Famous One Man Band

Images:

Jetsonorama:

http://speakingloudandsayingnothing.blogspot.com/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/01/jetsonorama-panorama.html

Square dance caller T-Claw with the Hogslop String Band, Nashville. Photograph by Jennifer Joy Jaemson:

http://jenniferjoyjameson.blogspot.com/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/06/introducing-new-series-notes-from-field.html

M12 art collective Campito and Black Hornet projects:

http://m12studio.org/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/02/m12-collective-ornitarium.html

The Wormfarm Institute:

http://wormfarminstitute.org/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2010/12/making-connections-at-wormfarm.html

Double Edge Theatre:

http://www.doubleedgetheatre.org/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/03/double-edge-theatre-and-grand-parade.html

Feral Arts and PlaceStories:

http://www.feralarts.com.au/

http://ps3beta.com

Chris Sauter

http://www.chrissauter.com/main.html

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2010/10/chris-sauters-rural-installations.html

Appalshop:

http://appalshop.org

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-work-from-appalachian-media.html

Carolina Chocolate Drops:
http://www.carolinachocolatedrops.com/
http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2011/07/in-brief-carolina-chocolate-drops.html

Eamon Mac Mahon:

http://www.eamonmacmahon.com/index.php

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/05/eamon-mac-mahon-landlocked-north-on.html

Wendell Berry:

http://brtom.typepad.com/wberry/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/04/wendell-berrys-jefferson-lecture-it-all.html

Yarn Bombing:

http://iybd.blogspot.com/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2012/02/bringing-yarn-bomb-to-country_27.html

4wheelwarpony:

https://www.facebook.com/4wheelwarpony

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2010/03/native-american-skateboard-culture.html

David Lundahl:

http://newlightstudios.blogspot.com/

http://theruralsite.blogspot.com/2010/08/modern-rural-art-you-cant-make-that.html

AWOL: Bringing New Stories To the Screen

 Photograph by Irit Reinheimer

AWOL is a love story. It is a rural love story, and a lesbian love story, and a story about the choices that young people in this country have - and don't have. 

These lines accompany the Kickstarter campaign for an exciting new project: AWOL, a critically-acclaimed short film that recently took home honors at the Sundance Film Festival and elsewhere. Director Deb Shoval, alongside an accomplished team of producers and writers, is looking to expand this story into a feature length film. 

As this selection from the film's introduction demonstrates, we encounter in AWOL a story, and a series of concerns, too often left off the screen. Please find the Kickstarter video below as well, with much more information on this film's accolades and its mission:

Joey, 19, is a recent high school graduate who is slowly working her way toward nothing in rural Northeast Pennsylvania. Physically strong and honest, Joey lives up to the low expectations of others until she meets Rayna, 28, a sexy, married mother of two who is vivacious, bold - and lonely. Despite the realities of her Appalachian poverty, Rayna exudes a joie de vivre that is addictive. Rayna seduces Joey, and Joey is smitten.

But when Joey’s mother announces that it is time for Joey to move out, and Rayna makes it clear that their trysts will never become anything more, Joey must make some choices about her future in a post-industrial area with little to offer. With Rayna’s encouragement and without any other viable options for housing or employment, Joey joins the Army.

As summer becomes fall and fall becomes winter, Joey and Rayna exchange letters and fuel their passion. At Christmastime, just before her deployment to Afghanistan, Joey returns home with her first assignment: ten days of “hometown recruitment” in the local mall. Preoccupied by her infatuation with Rayna, Joey concocts bigger plans to run away from her home, her family, and the Army with Rayna and Rayna’s kids.

Gasland & The Language Of The Natural Gas Debate

Aerial photography of natural gas drilling sites from SkyTruth

Documentarian Josh Fox is currently at work on a sequel to his much-discussed film Gasland, a second chapter set to debut on HBO later in the year.

In the interim, Fox has produced a fascinating and urgent short film focusing primarily on the rhetoric of the fracking debate, and its effects on current considerations by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to allow fracking near the aquifer that brings drinking water to millions of New Yorkers. Beyond the particulars of discussions, and arguments, over the practice of natural gas drilling, this film presents a metaphor for how public discourse, and its access to information, can be manipulated by special interests -- while the media, in efforts to appear impartial, suggest that this lobbying constitutes a serious scientific form of "debate" on a topic.

The film is available for viewing below. Folks may also be interested in this spirited exchange between director Josh Fox and Andrew Revkin in The New York Times:

Course On Midwest Culture: The Paradox of Heartland Rock

Photograph from the insert to the Bruce Springsteen & E-Street Band Live 1975-1985 LP box set

By Kenyon Gradert, Course on Midwest Culture editor

Last week in the New York Times, David Brooks cited Bruce Springsteen’s vast international appeal as evidence for “the tremendous power of particularity” -- place being one of the most vivid of these particulars. 



Along with more Midwestern-based acts like Seger and Mellencamp, Springsteen took up the mantle of Skynyrd and CCR (and, of course, the many older musicians from America’s folk tradition) and re-channeled myth away from the south and into America’s “heartland.” He crafted what Brooks calls a “paracosm,” a little mental landscape of sorts that guides our actions and thoughts.


But here’s the rub: if Springsteen was an artist of particular place known for capturing the zeitgeist of the modern “Heartland,” why does no one quite know the geographical location of this heartland?

 Though Springsteen himself would surely have acknowledged the power of place, the reality is that he was a New Jersey boy and his music’s mythical place was flexible enough to accommodate Mellencamp from the Hoosier State, Segar from Detroit Rock City, Tom Petty from Florida, and the Iron City Houserockers. Deeming such a group “Heartland Rock” reveals both the loose boundaries of the term “Heartland” and the Midwest’s paradoxical identity as an everyman, embodying only the traits that transcend the quixotic oddities of particular places. A Midwesterner is more American than Midwestern, at least in mythic identity.



Likewise, an explanation for the vast international appeal of “Heartland Rock” lies in its name. The myth of the heartland is not particular to the Midwest. More so, it is perhaps the oldest and most universal of tropes: a romantic fall from (an often pastoral) innocence. Adam and Eve pine for their lost garden. Milton’s Satan does the same. Doctor Frankenstein regrets ever leaving the peaceful Swiss Alps. Springsteen sings lamentations on the death of his hometown:


Herein lies the tensions of regionalism. We love art that vividly captures the color of particular place, but art forfeits its title if local color fails to capture human universals. This is why the rural is a fundamental part of Midwest identity and why pastoral myths will remain popular. This is why John Mellencamp can sing “Pink Houses” to a sold-out crowd for the first Farm Aid concert in Champaign, Illinois in the midst of the Farmers’ Crisis of the 1980s:

Human history inevitably leads to Frankensteins and Rust Belts. We balance these Falls with our need for a mythic, pure landscape still untainted by the human imagination and its history.

Notes From The Field: Blues, Ballads, & Bluegrass

Still from Blues, Ballads, & Bluegrass

By Jennifer Joy Jameson, Notes From The Field editor

On a recent trip home to visit my folks in California, I was able to catch the world premiere of some newly unearthed archival footage from New York City’s Association for Cultural Equity — more commonly referenced as the Alan Lomax Archive. ACE editor and production manager Nathan Salsburg had alerted some friends to the premiere of Blues, Ballads, & Bluegrass on June 19 at the Grammy Museum as part of the Los Angeles Film Festival,  so I quickly found a seat for the event. 

The short film captures a musical house party in 1961 at the Greenwich Village apartment of folklorist and ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax. Party-goers are serenaded by musicians rooted in their culture’s own musical traditions such as former medicine show-performer Clarence Ashley, Delta bluesman Memphis Slim, and Kentucky coal-mining banjoist Roscoe Holcomb, as well as younger, revivalist artists like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and the New Lost City Ramblers. Salsburg noted to me that the film includes the earliest known footage of the late Doc Watson, who stands in this film as a liminal figure between these two social contexts—he is regarded as both traditional and revivalist.

During this time, a group composed of noted musicians, ethnographers, and music promoters known as the Friends of Old Time Music would organize regular concerts for New York City audiences, seeking to bridge the gap between the emerging folk revival and the traditional artists outside of that sphere. Lomax’s house party, which takes place after one of these concerts, catches—in an unexpectedly honest way—this particular moment in history when urbanite 20-somethings were reckoned by the folk musics of their parents or grandparents and sought to access it and re-create it in their own way.

The film is compiled and edited by Lomax’s daughter and President of the ACE, Anna Lomax Wood, who even assisted with the clapboard during the 1961 filming when she was just 16. In the film, her father emerges as a somewhat hammy emcee, but his careful interview questions which bookend most of the performances remind of his preparedness and natural ability as a folklorist. These conversations elicit particularly insightful and surprising responses or stories from the performers, making the film something substantially more lasting and timelessly relevant than what it easily could have been. Many Art Of The Rural readers will find Ballads, Blues, & Bluegrass a worthwhile segue into the heart of our discourse on the rural-urban dynamic and cultural heritage.

The film, which also features performances from Willie Dixon, Clint Howard, Fred Price, Jean Ritchie, Peter LaFarge, and others, has been restored by Wood’s cousin, the ethnographic filmmaker John Bishop, and is now available on DVD through his Media Generations production company. 

Related Articles:
Alan Lomax and the Southern Journey
Rural Urban: From Alan Lomax to Jay-Z

This Land Is Your Land

On this fourth of July, we're reminded of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," a song that, beneath its famous early verses, articulates a vision of a more just and equitable nation.

This is Woody's Centennial Year, an event that contributes to this conversation between Pete Seeger, Billy Bragg and other guests on Democracy Now: 

Many thanks both to Kenyon Gradert and Rachel Reynolds Luster for sharing these pieces.



Related Articles:
Woody's New Year Resolutions
New Multitudes: Singing Woody Guthrie's Lost Lyrics
Woody's 99th Birthday