Notes From The Field: “Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard” and the Don Wahle Collection

By Jennifer Joy Jameson, Notes From The Field series Editor

The interesting part about any ethnographic study is putting the pieces together, stepping in and out of a culture or history that may or may not be your own in order to share it with others.

San Francisco's adventurous record label Tompkins Square recently assembled the three-disc set Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music, 1923-1936, arranged and annotated by Nathan Salsburg, Curator of the Alan Lomax Archive. There’s an interesting story of lost-and-found to this release. Salsburg writes in the liner notes:

One evening late in March 2010, my friend Joe called. He told me that his friend Chris had been on a dumpster job that day, helping clean out the house of a recently deceased hoarder. The hoarder had had some 78-rpm records, and Chris had brought a few home. Joe was there for dinner and he put him on the phone. “What kind of records?” I asked. “Old-timey stuff,” Chris said.

Just hours before everything at the Louisville home of the late Don Wahle was to be sent off to the landfills, Salsburg arrived to find boxes upon boxes of dirtied and molding 78s of both rare and popular country and hillbilly recordings collected by Wahle since the 1950s. Salsburg’s efforts to uncover these musical artifacts, working alongside the clean-up crew, became his own sort of archaeological dig as he found himself gathering and assembling clues of Wahle’s own aesthetics, interests, and desires.

In the liner notes, Salsburg admits his prior lamentations of a bygone era of record collecting, or “The Great Southern Record Canvass” as he calls it—something Mr. Wahle surely thought about, too. A longtime Louisvillian himself, Salsburg told me that the sheer serendipity of coming across Wahle’s fragile collection, in his own city no less, served as a reminder that golden eras are, in fact, fluid in time and space.

After the discovery, Salsburg and friends started the work of gathering Wahle’s history from whatever scribbled correspondences and musical want-lists were found. He and others looked for next-of-kin, but no one stepped forward. Salsburg states, “We don’t know what he did for a living, what he looked like, or virtually any other biographical details apart from his record collecting.” 

Wahle’s want-list, courtesy of Nathan Salsburg

But what’s more interesting is how the story of Don Wahle’s music collection leads to other narratives of life lived; through hard times, through good times, and through those very American ideas of end times.

While utilizing and acknowledging the curatorial model set forth by Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (famously organized into “ballads,” “social music,” and “songs”), Salsburg and his contributors steer clear of the legacy of mystifying the American experience as gathered in song. Rather, the set’s conceptual framework is “inspired by the life-cycles of the predominantly rural Americans that made this music.” Salsburg starts the process of interpreting these multiple histories through his careful and researched annotation. Thoughtful essays in response to the music and to Wahle (but mostly to the music) written by Editor of The Old-Time Herald, Sarah Bryan, music journalist Amanda Petrusich, and Southern writer John Jeremiah Sullivan, continue that work. The essays and annotation strive not to speak for the music, but to wonder about it. For the “Play Hard” disc, Sarah Bryan asks:

What about Mr. Wahle? What was his kind of fun? He was a collector, so we can assume that something about the process of seeking and acquiring gave him pleasure. […] Maybe the jollity of these records was for Don Wahle something like the moonshine skits were for listeners during Prohibition: a way to acknowledge, if not quench, a thirst for something just out of reach.

The songs tell enough of a story on their own—like my favorite two-part tune from the “Work Hard” disc, “Flat Wheel Train Blues,” recorded in Georgia in 1930 by Red Gay and Jack Wellman. Parts 1 and 2 set the scene for everyday life on the locomotive yard. Fiddles move the steam engine forward, producing a sweet rhythm while the singer hums verbal work-song encouragements that allude to the honest memory of a railroad man.
 


We can only know so much about Don Wahle. We don’t know why he decided to collect cowboy and hillbilly records while everyone else was buying up the glamorous sounds of big band and hot jazz; or why he furiously circulated requests for certain records but didn’t seem to ensure their care and sustainability; or why it is that, even as a member of a robust and communicative culture of record collectors, we still have so many questions about Wahle. What we do know is that Wahle was part of a grand tradition of giving new life to old stories. John Jeremiah Sullivan, in his notes for “Pray Hard,” writes:

The old songs are so easily lost. […] If this gathering of them is all that remains of Don Wahle, let nobody say he lived for nothing.

Work Hard, Play Hard, Pray Hard: Hard Time, Good Time & End Time Music, 1923-1936 is available in three-disc sets on CD or LP from Tompkins Square or from your local independent record store. Thirty-five of the 42 sides are from Don Wahle’s collection (19 of which are un-reissued), and the remaining sides are from the collections of Joe Bussard, Frank Mare, and Christopher King. 

Folks can read more about salvaging the Wahle collection on Nathan Salsburg’s Root Hog or Die website. We also recommend perusing the Tompkins Square catalog. This label is bringing archival and contemporary music together in exciting ways; their book/cd set He is My Story: The Sanctified Soul of Arizona Dranes was recently nominated for a Grammy in the Best Historical Album category.

Making Connections: Community Radio In Appalachia

Making Connections reporter Sylvia Ryerson

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

This week from the Rural Arts and Culture Map, we bring a story that's floated to us on the airwaves from atop Mayking Peak in Letcher County, Kentucky: a service of Appalshop, WMMT is a radio station broadcasting a wide range of music and news throughout communities in Central Appalachia. The writing of this piece, for instance, is being fueled by volunteer DJ Old Red's early bluegrass and country show, "First Generation Bluegrass." 

One WMMT program, Making Connections: Diversifying our Future shares with its listeners stories and commentary promoting a self-sufficient, multifaceted Appalachia. Making Connections has been posting PlacesStories updates since 2010, giving voice to regional agriculturalists, artists and policy workers and exemplifying just what a group can do with the digital mapping tool. From the "About Us" website:

While coal mining will play a role in the central Appalachian economy for many years to come, the industry continues to mechanize creating a dramatic drop in jobs – it currently represents less than 2% of employment. Analysts also project that recoverable coal reserves in the region could run out in 20 years.

Now is the time to develop a more diversified and sustainable regional economy that supports the current generation of coal miners while creating new jobs in new fields. We have no shortage of strengths to build upon, including our rich cultural traditions, unparalleled natural landscape and strong sense of family and community. To move forward we must honor our past while focusing on a future that provides healthy and productive lives for our children and grandchildren.

 

Making Connections' coverage frequently highlights Appalachia's especially high rates of residents without high-speed Internet; a recent audio story entitled "Like A Car Sittin' on Bricks – Broadband in Appalachia" was created by Sylvia Ryerson and Mimi Pickering to further examine the problem. Reads the description:

The Federal Communications Commission's Eighth Broadband Progress Report finds approx. 19 million Americans, mostly rural, lack access to high-speed Internet. In Central Appalachia the digital divide is stark: in West Virginia's McDowell and Mingo Counties, upwards of three-quarters of the population do not have access; in East Kentucky over 50% in Leslie and Breathitt Counties are without it. So why is it so hard to get a good connection in the mountains? What will this mean for the future of our communities? And what can we do to change this situation?

 
An essential part of the answer is that, as with many disputes over political policy, there is significant disagreement between the haves and have-nots in a thing's true worth or function. In this case, access to high-speed Internet is still largely regarded by those who have it as an earned luxury, our heavy reliance on it an addiction by which we're jokingly embarrassed. But as Ms. Ryerson points out, quality Internet service is a vital utility of everyday information dispersal, not a superfluous iPhone app, whether combed for a student's homework assignment or used to relay local safety concerns.

As artists who try to push against traditional, institutionalized limitations on accessibility, education, and diversity of art, and who place our critiques, our manifestoes, and our subversive work onto the Web, "Like A Car Sittin' on Bricks" hits home and keeps this important issue on the table. We highly encourage readers to listen to Ms. Ryerson's reporting (if you are able), and to then expand on this conversation in your own communities. Please also explore Making Connections' other PlaceStories installments, as many fine productions come from these folks.

Weekly Feed: Rural America Contemporary Art, Poor Kids, The Changing Face of America

Each week we share selections from our Rural Arts and Culture Feed on Facebook and Twitter. What are we missing? Please drop us a line, and we'll add your links and connections to the Feed.

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• Setting a tone of thankfulness, we have this Wendell Berry interview with Diane Rehm via The Boiled Down Juice. "I think people don't take care of things they don't have affection for. And so affection, for me, begins all the arguments."

• Great news: the first issue of Rural America Contemporary Art is now online – art, fiction, essays, and the work of Norwood Creech, artist/painter/printmaker/photographer:

Beans, Corn, and Clouds by Caraway, Arkansas

• Via Harry Smith's Old, Weird America: "The Carter Family recorded twice "Single Girl, Married Girl," the first time at their very first recording session in 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee, and the second time a few years later, in 1936, in New York City. It's striking to hear the differences between the two 

versions."

• Poor Kids is an unflinching and revealing look at what poverty means to children. It broadcasted last week on FRONTLINE. Full documentary below:

Watch Poor Kids on PBS. See more from FRONTLINE.

• Seminal art critic Dave Hickey decries the affluence and self-indulgence plaguing much modern art: 

"Art editors and cirtics – people like me – have become a courtier class. All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It's not worth my time."

Hickey says the art world has acquired the mentality of a tourist. "If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been. But I'm interested in Gary Huge and have written about him quite a few times."

If it's a matter of buying long and selling short, then the artists he would sell now include Jenny Holzer, Richard Prince and Maurizio Cattelan. "It's time to start shorting some of this shit," he added.

• Some thoughts, via The Association of American Cultures (TAAC): "Culture at its best should be about the dialogue by which diverse strands of thought become relevant to diverse people, and that is a matter oc actively connecting art to the realities of people's diverse lives. Right now our cultural sector seems to be failing at that mission, to its own detriment."

• MSNBC has reported tremendous news: "One of the nation's top coal companies, Patriot Coal, has just announced it will stop all of its mountaintop removal mining operations following a historic settlement with activists and environmental groups."

• Sonya Kelliher Combs and her students, in collaboration with the Alaska Native Heritage Center, recently displayed these new multimedia works created at her recent master artist workshop at the Anchorage Museum at Rasmuson Center

• From Toner's Bog to the Nobel Prize, Irish poet Seamus Heaney reading his ars poetica of agricultural practice, "Digging." Find more links to Heaney material at the Poetry Foundation & Poetry Magazine.

On The Map: Preserving Appalachia

Photograph by Giles Ashford

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

In this week’s update from the Rural Arts and Culture Map, we wish to turn your attention toward Preserving Appalachia, a branch of Appalachian Mountain Advocates. Through public law and policy, AMA supports Appalachian communities’ health and well-being, and fights the coal industry that has jeopardized same.

As most of AMA’s work occurs in the policy realm, Preserving Appalachia was developed by Dan Radmacher to celebrate and promote the rich heritage, past and present, of the mountains and reveal the beauty of an oft-misunderstood region. Writes Mr. Radmacher:

Preserving Appalachia probably had its origins in the first donor appeal letter I wrote my second week on the job. In that, I said this:

I’m writing to you today to talk about a new focus for the [AMA]. We will continue our successful legal battles that help stop the worst abuses, but we recognize that the fight for Appalachia cannot be won in the courtroom alone. This is a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of this region, and those outside it who enjoy the benefits of cheap electricity without considering the unseen costs. We need to engage in the court of public opinion as well as courts of law.

As I said in my final column in The Roanoke Times before coming to work for the Center, ‘The debate is about coal, climate change, state and federal regulations, the fragile economies of states like Kentucky and West Virginia, and the mountains, rivers and forests of Appalachia. It involves complex, emotionally powerful issues involving people's jobs, their health, their homes and their children.’

Writing that, I realized that one of my main goals needed to be helping those outside of Appalachia understand what is so special about Appalachia – to see both why it's worth saving and why moving away from it is simply not an option for so many residents. 

The notion [of Preserving Appalachia] is to supplement our work opposing mountaintop removal mining with educational and entertaining videos highlighting Appalachian art and artists as part of an effort to show why Appalachia is so worth preserving.

Mr. Radmacher has added to our videos to the map that feature the old-time music of the Black Twig Pickers and the fiery poetry of Crystal Good. As the project is still in its beginning stages, he also is eager to receive names of others whose work aligns with that of Preserving Appalachia and AMA. Much more is to come, and the artistry Preserving Appalachia is curating is fortifying a strong, and far more understood, Appalachian voice.

What's Up With Those Southern Beasts?

By Dudley Cocke, Artistic Director of Roadside Theater

Storytelling is a partnership between the person telling the story and the person receiving the story; each depends on the other. This exchange is not designed to be passive, unless the purpose is propaganda. “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers,” wrote James Baldwin. Likewise, isn’t such questioning an important part of the artist–audience exchange? And isn’t the measure of the energy of such exchange an indicator of a culture’s vibrancy?

A new film, Beasts of the Southern Wild, furnishes an occasion to test this assertion. Beasts is the latest film fantasy about the rural South. I think it’s a depressing film, so I’m wondering why millions of viewers and the critics find it so exhilarating. A.O. Scott’s review for The New York Times is typical, “a blast of sheer, improbable joy.” Philip Martin writing for The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette seems to suggest that anything less than total buy-in is unpatriotic: “Wild is ... a visual tone poem. To try to impose any orthodox sensibility, much less political correctness, on the film is close to blasphemy.” Obviously, the movie has struck a mass emotional chord; as one of a handful of naysayers, what’s my problem?

Beasts of the Southern Wild is the story of six year old Hushpuppy. Deserted by her mother when she was a baby, Hushpuppy is being raised (jerked up is more like it) by her abusive, alcoholic father, Wink, who appears to think she is a boy, the fabled Man Child come as the Redeemer of the least among us. For her part, Hushpuppy tells us, “I can count on two hands the times when I’ve been lifted up,” and she means held in someone’s arms. (For a detailed analysis of the Hushpuppy character’s lineage in popular culture, see bell hooks’ commentary "No Love in the Wild".)

Beasts is in a line of popular movies about the rural South that includes Deliverance (1972) all the way back to D.W. Griffith’s silent The Harum-Scarum and the Mountain Idealist (1909). The music in Paramount’s candy-colored Li’l Abner (1959) was nominated for an Academy Award. The opening number: 

Soloists: It's a typical day

In Dogpatch, USA.

Where typical folks

Do things in a typical way.

First we rubs the sleep from our eyes, 

Gets our grub, and shoos 'way the flies.

We spend what's negotiable,

Then we gets sociable,

Sittin' around swappin' lies!

And then we drops by to collect unemployment pay!


All: Which leads us to say it's a typical day

In Dogpatch, USA!



Lonesome Polecat: Lonesome Polecat, Indian Brave!


Hairless Joe: Hairless Joe, me need’um a shave!


Both: We livin' an' sleepin' n' doin' housekeepin' in big subterranian cave!

While Kickapoo Joy Juice we make’um is heap "grade A!"


Skraggs: Take us boys what's known as the Skraggs,

Mammy said she had us as gags!

Can't git that depressin' an' homely unlessin' ya comes from a long line o' hags!

There ain't any widders or orphans we won't betray!



Moonbeam: Howdy boys, I'm Moonbeam McSwine, 

Sleepin' out with the pigs is my line.

The fellas admire me, 

But they don't squire me

Unless the weather is fine!

But I does alright when the wind blows the other way!


All: Which leads us to say it's a typical day, in Dogpatch, USA...It's a typical day

(echo: it's a typical day) in Dogpatch, USA! 
Where typical folks ( echo: typical folks)

Does things in a typical way!

Fast forward more than half a century and the cartoonish Dogpatch has morphed into the Bathtub, something more akin to a graphic novel and now located near the southern Louisiana levees. Like the characters in Dogpatch, po’ folk in the ‘tub have the “typical way,” drinking from dawn until they collapse – plus now they have the added headache of the approaching Apocalypse set off by global warming. Thirty years before the Beasts, Hank Jr laid down the survivalist anthem:

The preacher man says it’s the end of time
And the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry
The interest is up and the Stock Markets down
And you only get mugged
If you go down town
I live back in the woods, you see
A woman and the kids, and the dogs and me
I got a shotgun, a rifle, and a 4-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive

So who feels exhilarated by a film that appears to be a grab-bag fantasy about the end of time, poverty, and alcoholism? I hope rural Southerners, despite some affinity for the Book of Revelation, know too much about themselves to swallow the concoction. With more than 2.1 million Americans in prison, there’s no easy way for people who are part of communities with modest incomes to gloss the damage done by drug and alcohol addiction. Ask the school teachers here in Appalachia, and any one of them will tell you about the real-life fates of neglected and abused Hushpuppies.

Is the film, then, thrilling, “a blast of joy,” for penned-up, pent-up middle-class suburban and urban people ready to break free into a hedonistic wild? If this is the case, are rural people and their tourism bureaus prepared to fulfill this urban fantasy? In an era when pop culture and cosmopolitanism appear to be synonymous, what do rural people actually think about the way they are being portrayed in today’s mass media? Have the relentless stereotypes of popular culture finally hypnotized us all, rural and urban alike, erasing any sense of history and present reality so at any given moment we’re liable to turn into a caricature of ourselves? I realize these are heady questions when one could just relax -- hey dude, it’s just a movie. Meanwhile, tens of thousands are lining up to feel the beast, the hype is on, and I wonder what the fervor signifies.         

                                                                           

                                                                                         

Dudley Cocke is the artistic director of Roadside Theater, the professional theater wing of the multi-media arts and humanities center, Appalshop, in Whitesburg, KY.

Weekly Feed: National Hispanic Heritage Month, Slovenian Bees, Bass Pro Shop, Johnny Cash, Heartwood in the Hills, Barbara Allen

By Rachel Beth Rudi

• In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Month, the Florida Folklife Program produced a podcast with audio tracks from the Florida Mexican American Music Survey. “The [survey] was undertaken...to document the musical traditions of Florida’s various Mexican-American communities: Apopka, South Dade County, Immokalee, the St. Johns River Basin, and Central Florida. ... Among the musical traditions were serenatas, conjunto, Quinceañara ritual music, ranchera, Michoacana, mariachi, norteno, Tejano, and pop music.” The FFP is wonderfully active in promoting its archives to the public, and makes many materials available online at the Florida Memory site and Facebook page.

Cabela "African Safari" Display; Minnesota Prairie Roots blog

• Writing for The Atlantic Cities, Scott Reeder of the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity investigated the dynamics of mom-and-pop versus box stores in the hunting industry.  “A Bass Pro Shop opened in Bossier City in 2005,” writes Reeder, “after city officials promised to give the retailer $38 million to pay for the construction of the 106,000-square-foot store in this Red River community.” This particular David-and-Goliath struggle is set in rural regions:

Both Bass Pro Shops and its archrival, Cabela’s, sell hunting and fishing gear in cathedral-like stores featuring taxidermied wildlife, gigantic fresh-water aquarium exhibits and elaborate outdoor reproductions within the stores. The stores are billed as job generators by both companies when they are fishing for development dollars. But the firms’ economic benefits are minimal and costs to taxpayers are great.

An exhaustive investigation conducted by the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity found that the two competing firms together have received or are promised more than $2.2 billion from American taxpayers over the past 15 years.

.....

Both firms have a history of targeting rural or smaller suburban communities and negotiating deals that involve extensive borrowing on the part of the municipality to build a store.

.....

For example, state and local taxpayers borrowed $60 million to build a Cabela's store and its supporting infrastructure in Buda, Texas. For that amount, every household in the 7,600-person community could have purchased a new 2012 Lexus CT Hybrid.

The Buda City Council even agreed to take the town's name off its water tower and replace it with the word "Cabela's." But government largess didn’t end there. The Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission provided Guadalupe bass, the official state fish, for the store's massive aquarium at no charge to the retailer.

.....

"Retail is not economic development. People don’t suddenly have more money to spend on hip waders because a new Bass Pro or Cabela’s comes to town," says Greg Leroy, executive director of Good Jobs First, a non-partisan economic development watchdog group based in Washington, D.C. "All that happens is that money spent at local mom and pop retailers shifts to these big box retailers. When government gives these big box stores tax dollars, they are effectively picking who the winners and losers are going to be."

• The ballad "Barbara Allen" "has been sung in parlors and on front porches for hundreds of years...It has branched into countless forms." In this recent spotlight essay, the Southern Folklife Collection offered a trip through Charles Seeger's field recordings of this song's many variants across the United States and British Isles. Here is country singer Don Edwards singing a fairly standard rendition of the tune:

• Grist.org’s Sarah Laskow covers one researcher’s examination of an ancient artistic process where art is not created for a viewer’s sake, but because it is an integral part of the architecture:

When Meredith Turk, a Fulbright scholar in Slovenia, talked to local beekeepers about their colonies, she found that their bees hadn’t been mysteriously dying off in the same way that American bees have been. Now, there’s probably a scientific explanation for this, but we’d like to believe that the gorgeous painted beehives that Slovenes provide for their colonies also have something to do with it.

Turk explains at Soiled and Seeded:

“Slovenians have painted their beehive panels for centuries, with the idea that bees have better orientation when panels are painted bright colors. When the paintings first appeared, the themes were drawn from Biblical imagery, held in high regard by a strongly Catholic population. After Slovenia’s entry into Yugoslavia, organized religion was banned and panel images depicted more cultural and landscape scenes rather than religious ones prior.”

• Calhoun County, West Virginia is home to Heartwood in the Hills, a community arts school that has been “celebrating the artist in every person since 1982.” For thirty years the organization has provided a variety of dance, art, music, theater, and crafts classes to community members of all ages and backgrounds, and its success is a testament to the transformative power of art in any region. Heartwood’s mission statement should serve as a model for all arts schools, rural or otherwise:

Heartwood embodies the ideal that the arts belong to everyone and the artistic gifts in each person deserve nurturing. Heartwood’s mission is to ensure that everyone has access to Heartwood’s programs regardless of their ability to pay. Heartwood’s Board of Directors and faculty are dedicated to keeping class fees low, ranging from $3.00 to $5.00 per class. Full and partial scholarships are available to all students. The Board and faculty are committed to providing scholarships to any student based solely on need.

Exploring Heartwood’s website feels like leafing through a family scrapbook, with old and new, sometimes blurry, photographs capturing homemade performances. Schools and companies with this amount of outreach are not uncommon in urban areas, though increasingly unaffordable, but the presence of such organizations in rural communities nourishes homegrown creativity that is as vital as the local foods movement.

A 2009 performance of “Min Nuit” by Heartwood in the Hills students, performed at Calhoun County High School:

• Johnny Cash passed away nine years ago this September. To conclude this weekly feed, we leave you with a heavy insight of Mr. Cash’s, excerpted from The Winding Stream: The Carters, The Cashes, And The Course Of Country Music, a forthcoming documentary. Mr. Cash’s words resonated strongly with us, and the hope he has in young people, we feel, is reflected in so many of the stories The Art of the Rural works to report.

My biggest kick is being in a record shop and watching the young people pick up a Carter Family record or a box set, and stand there and read it – you know, read all the print that’s on it, because they want to know. They’re hungry for it. And they’re hungry for a culture, the culture that we have lost, that we have abused, that has been taken away from us, that we’ve outgrown. With our money and everything else, we’ve lost a great, great part of our culture – the simple things of life, the simple things that are basic and fundamental to well-being and happy living.

Johnny Cash - My Big Kick from Beth Harrington on Vimeo.

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.

A Carter Family Flash Mob & The Winding Stream

photograph from The Winding Stream

Last week a flash mob convened at the Portland, Oregon Saturday Market and sang the Carter Family classic "Will The Circle Be Unbroken." 

These singers and musicians gathered to celebrate the work of the Carters, and also to raise awareness of The Winding Stream -- a documentary that charts the course of country music through its founding family and the lives of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Director Beth Harrington is currently leading a Kickstarter campaign to help with the editing and post-production work on the film. There are only eight days remaining in her campaign, so readers who taken interest in our previous coverage of the film have an opportunity now to contribute to the telling of this story. 

What's exciting about Ms. Harrington's project is how, with an arc that continues through Johnny Cash, we see the music of Clinch Mountain transcending rural/urban and traditional/contemporary boundaries -- offering the work of A.P, Sara, and Maybelle as a part of an inheritance accessible to all listeners, whether they live in Appalachia or New York City or London.

This quality is best demonstrated in The Winding Stream trailer, which is included below:

Related Articles:
Following The Winding Stream
In Brief: Carolina Chocolate Drops (filmed for The Winding Stream)

The Carter Family Fold and Johnny Cash's Last Performance 

Freeman Kitchens, The Carter Family, and Drake Vintage Music and Curios

Affirmed: Nathan Salsburg and the Kentucky Derby

Photograph by Tim Furnish

This weekend's Kentucky Derby offers a fresh chance for folks to revisit the work of musician, writer, and editor Nathan Salsburg. As many readers may be familiar, last autumn saw the release of Affirmed, a record of eight solo guitar compositions that meditate on the lives and afterlives of Kentucky Derby horses -- from Affirmed, the last Triple Crown winner, to Eight Belles, a filly that won second in the 2008 Derby only to be euthanized minutes later after fracturing her ankles. The songs speak to these contexts, but ultimately exceed their references, in lines that modulate between grief and joy, the terminal and the transcendent.

Thanks to NPR Music's Tiny Desk Concerts, we can give a listen to "Affirmed" and "Eight Belles Dreamt the Devil was Dead:"

Though references to John Fahey accompany many reviews of solo guitar records, Amanda Petrusich writes eloquently of how Salsburg's music resists such commonplace comparisons. "Affirmed," she wrote in The Onion, "is more a counterpoint to Fahey’s rhythmic early work than an explicit homage: Bright and elastic, his songs are less concerned with pulses and scales than with the ripples they kick up in your gut."

This video for "Sought and Hidden," created by cinemanonymous, works in concert with that quality in Affirmed, here combining "amateur Kentucky Derby footage shot on 8mm in 1936 and 1947 and Super 8 in 1973 and 2000." Like these songs, an expectation of nostalgia gives way to something more surprising and direct:

Related Articles:
Root Hog or Die
Hamper McBee: The Good Old Fashioned Way
Alan Lomax and the Southern Journey

Wendell Berry's Jefferson Lecture: "It All Turns On Affection"

On Monday night Wendell Berry delivered "It All Turns on Affection," the 2012 Jefferson Lecture at the Kennedy Center. Each year the National Endowment for the Humanities offers this lectureship, "the highest honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual and public achievement in the humanities." 

Mr. Berry's talk covers an extraordinary amount of ground -- from an epigraph from Howards End, to memories of his grandfather's struggles with the economies set in place by the American Tobacco Company, and to many locales and texts in between. Well-versed readers of Mr. Berry's prose and poetry will no doubt share my sense that this essay revisits (and re-contextualizes) many of the concerns of his work -- closing some circles, but opening up new ones as well. 

There is much to quote and discuss within "It All Turns on Affection," yet, in this brief piece, I'll include these two paragraphs, moving in how they call on all citizens -- rural and urban -- to return to first principles to find their relationship to place and practice:

I will say, from my own belief and experience, that imagination thrives on contact, on tangible connection. For humans to have a responsible relationship to the world, they must imagine their places in it. To have a place, to live and belong in a place, to live from a place without destroying it, we must imagine it. By imagination we see it illuminated by its own unique character and by our love for it. By imagination we recognize with sympathy the fellow members, human and nonhuman, with whom we share our place. By that local experience we see the need to grant a sort of preemptive sympathy to all the fellow members, the neighbors, with whom we share the world. As imagination enables sympathy, sympathy enables affection. And it is in affection that we find the possibility of a neighborly, kind, and conserving economy.

Obviously there is some risk in making affection the pivot of an argument about economy. The charge will be made that affection is an emotion, merely “subjective,” and therefore that all affections are more or less equal: people may have affection for their children and their automobiles, their neighbors and their weapons. But the risk, I think, is only that affection is personal. If it is not personal, it is nothing; we don’t, at least, have to worry about governmental or corporate affection. And one of the endeavors of human cultures, from the beginning, has been to qualify and direct the influence of emotion. The word “affection” and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.

Folks can find a transcription of the lecture here, along with an interview and further information on past Jefferson Lectures. Below we will offer video of Mr. Berry's talk, which is preceded by remarks by Jim Leach, the chairman of the NEH, and Bobbie Ann Mason, who reads from Mr. Berry's poem "Leavings." If the embedded video does not properly play on your browser, please find the permanent link here:

[video removed due to formatting problems; please visit the link above]

Also, as a fitting epilogue to the lecture, Mark Bittman has written an extraordinary piece today in The New York Times about his recent visit with Mr. Berry in Port Royal. Mr. Bittman receives a call three hours after leaving the farm from Mr. Berry, with this addendum:

“Mark,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about that question about what city people can do. The main thing is to realize that country people can’t invent a better agriculture by ourselves. Industrial agriculture wasn’t invented by us, and we can’t uninvent it. We’ll need some help with that.”

TONIGHT: Live Broadcast of Wendell Berry's Jefferson Lecture

Here's further news on tonight's live stream, from Ivy Brashear of The Rural Blog:

Poet, essayist, novelist, farmer and conservationist Wendell Berry will deliver the 2012 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities tonight at 7:30 at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. The National Endowment for the Humanities will be video-streaming the lecture live. The annual lecture is the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for intellectual achievement in the humanities.

Ivy Brashear's article continues here. 

Readings: The Unreported Arts Recession of 1997 by Dudley Cocke

Dudley Cocke; Imagining America

In our Readings series, we offer selections from visual and printed texts that offer perspectives, expand dialogues, and challenge assumptions. Today we feature the opening paragraphs from "The Unreported Arts Recession of 1997" by Dudley Cocke, the Artistic Director of Roadside Theater at Appalshop. 

Please find the full text of this essay in Roadside Theater's Reading Room.

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In the U.S. community-based arts field, the financial crisis did not occur in 2008, but in 1997. What happened then to those nonprofit arts organizations built for the majority of Americans is an unreported story, the consequences from which the field has not recovered.

The story of the 1997 arts recession begins in 1980 when the right wing, spurred on by Ronald Reagan's election, instigated a campaign to defame the National Endowment for the Arts. The ultimate goal was complete elimination of the federal agency established in 1965 by an act of Congress with the mandate to dedicate itself "to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education." The Reagan administration and Congress tried but failed several times in the 1980s to eliminate the NEA. Then in 1997 the agency's leader at the time, Jane Alexander, knuckled under to right wing political pressure, abolishing all of the NEA's more than a dozen discipline-based divisions (each of which had been armed with its own defense), installing in their place a few generic themes ("creation and presentation" is an example), and limiting organizations to one thematic application a year.

Promise of a Love Song; Roadside Theater with Pregones Theater and Junebug Productions

For the community-based arts field, the restriction to only one annual NEA application was especially problematic. Most progressive nonprofit arts organizations preferred competing for public money, because it was the people's tax money -- and they saw their work as public work. Consequently, the more developed community-based arts organizations were receiving support from multiple NEA programs. With the new single application rule, Appalshop, where I work, abruptly lost 90 percent of its federal arts funding, which represented 20 percent of its annual operating budget.

The 1997 restructuring of the NEA delivered a second punch: discipline-based knowledge and expertise -- which had been on a trajectory of becoming broader and deeper -- disappeared from the nonprofit arts discourse. A "dumbing-down" effect took hold. A good example of this regression is the limited opportunity the public now has to see new and experimental plays from different cultures and geographies -- a result of abolishing the NEA Presenting Program. Appalshop's theater wing, Roadside Theater, which I direct, lost 70 percent of its performance fee income with the collapse of the national touring market for new plays, which had been leveraged on NEA support for arts presenting as a discipline. Prior to 1997, Roadside had visited more than 1000 communities in 43 states, never failing to reach an audience reflective of the racial, economic, and cultural diversity of each host community.

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"The Unreported Arts Recession of 1997" continues here, in The Roadside Theater Reading Room.