Walking the Fields, From Liberia to California

Sacramento Bee

High Country News has long been one of our favorite publications; they consistently think in new terms about the West, but also about urban-rural and rural-international connections. Such a perspective continues with "In Rural California, a Liberian Family Finds an Agricultural Refuge," by Laura Markham.  

Markham's article offers not only an inspiring story of how immigrant families are contributing to local agriculture, but also a much-needed look into how African-Americans helped to transform such practices in the state last century. We'll include an excerpt below:

On a historic 50-acre ranch in Northern California, Cynnomih Tarlesson and her nine children drop watermelon seeds into the ground. Behind them, her father, Roosevelt, uses a tractor to churn up the dirt for tomatoes, zucchini and eggplant -- along with some lesser-known crops, like the Tarlesson-named 'Billy Goat Pepper,' from the family's native West Africa.

When war erupted in her Liberian hometown in 1990, Cynnomih and her family fled their farm and lived for over two years in the bush, foraging for berries, shoots and small fish. After several years in a refugee camp in the Ivory Coast, Cynnomih, now 43, finally received permission to come to the U.S. as a refugee, along with 25 younger siblings and children (biological and adopted). They joined her father, Rev. Roosevelt Tarlesson, in Vacaville, Calif., where he had lived since the 1970s.

Vacaville was a peaceful escape from the harsh refugee-camp life in Ivory Coast -- plenty of food, friendly neighbors and teachers assisting their transition to U.S. life. Yet in this suburban environment, the family's job prospects were low and financial pressures high. They missed farming; they missed the land. So in 2007, the Tarlessons secured a loan to buy property in nearby Guinda, population 254. 'When refugees are brought to this country, they are put in cities, making minimum wage at factories. Why? They know how to farm. Let them farm!' says Rev. Tarlesson, who's pushing this idea with resettlement agencies at the national level.

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40 Years in the West: High Country News 

New Multitudes: Singing Woody Guthrie's Lost Lyrics

The cover art for New Multitudes; Rounder Records

As we've mentioned previously, 2012 marks the centennial of Woody Gutrie's birth.

We've just learned more about one of the birthday year's most anticipated releases: New Multitiudes, an effort that pairs unpublished lyrics from The Woody Guthrie archives with new music. A band comprised of alt.country luminaries has reimagined this material: Jay Farrar (of Son Volt and Uncle Tupelo), Yim Yames (or, Jim James of My Morning Jacket), Will Johnson (Centro-matic frontman), and Anders Parker (of Gob Iron and Varnaline).

A first cut from the record, "Old L.A." is now available. Lead vocals here are covered by Anders Parker:

Old LA by FarrarJohnsonParkerYames

The accompanying press release offers some context, and also helps illuminate the turmoil and disconnection between the instrumentation and the lyrics, which comes to also stand for the tumultuous circumstances of Guthrie's at the time:

Under the invitation of Nora Guthrie, Woody’s daughter, to tour the Guthrie archives, each of the four songwriters were offered the chance to plumb and mine the plethora of notebooks, scratch pads, napkins, etc. for anything that might inspire them to lend their voices and give the words new life. “These guys worked on an amazing group of lyrics, much of it culled from Woody’s times in LA. Lyric wise, it’s a part of the story that is still mostly unknown. From Woody’s experiences on LA’s skid row to his later years in Topanga Canyon, they are uniquely intimate, and relate two distinctly emotional periods in his life.”

The Library of Congress American Memory archives offer an overview of Woody Guthrie's sojourn in Los Angeles, where he performed on local radio station KFVD. His songwriting from this era sought to present the realities, and not the popular myths, of life in the golden west during the Depression:

Although the perceptions of California as a land of unmitigated opportunity had brought a rush of agricultural laborers from the South and Southwest in the mid-1930s, the reality was quite different. The great farms that stretched across California's rich valleys did need pickers, but so many hands were available that wages were pushed steadily downward, even if a family could find steady employment harvesting the state's many seasonal crops. The pickers lived in their cars, tents, or shacks they built out of whatever materials they could find. These camps were sometimes called "Hoovervilles" and the people in them "Okies."

Although Woody never lived in one of these camps, he did make his way to California as a "Dust Bowl refugee" and traveled around the state singing to the migrant laborers during the spring of 1938. He also sang at government camps that gave these people some measure of dignity, health, and safety.

New Multitudes will be released on February 28 in both a standard or deluxe 2CD format, and will also be available on vinyl. To learn more, visit the New Multitudes Facebook page and follow along with the year's festivities on the official centennial site.

Captured: America in Color from 1939-1945

A crossroads store, bar, "juke joint," and gas station in the cotton plantation area. Melrose, Louisiana, 1940; photograph by Marion Post Walcott

Thanks to Mary, a reader from Massachusetts, for suggesting the photography exhibit Captured: America in Color from 1939-1945. The Denver Post's Photo Blog recently offered seventy large-scale reproductions on their site, and they are stunning both as historical documents and as works of art.

We've written before on the work of the Farm Security Administration, and we've also previously discussed the Library of Congress American Memory archives--an inexhaustible source for all of the government-sponsored photography taken during this period. These particular photographs, however, were taken later than the majority of the FSA's work, and constitute only 1,600 images compared to the 164,000 black and white photographs; browsing through each, one can get the sense of rural America changing with the new technological and political realities of a new war. This segment of the archive is entitled America from the Great Depression to World War II: Color Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1939-1945;  visit here for a list, with links and biographies, of the impressive body of staff members (Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and more) who undertook this important work.

The archive is very easy to search and browse through, so if you see any images in the Denver Post's selection you particularly like, you can head to the above site and see all prints from the same shoot. There are so many stunning images here, but we'll include a few more below:

Boy near Cincinnati, Ohio;  John Vachon

Spreading fertilizer from a 4-mule team wagon, Georgia,  1940:  Marion Post Wolcott

School children singing, Pie Town, New Mexico, 1940: Russell Lee

Japanese-American camp, war emergency relocation, Tule Lake, CA, 1942 or 1943; Russell Lee

 Japanese-American camp, war-emergency evacuation, Tule Lake, CA [transplanting celery], 1942 or 1943; Russell Lee

Farm auction, Derby, CT, 1940; Jack Delano

Dell'Arte International

This is an artform from five-hundred years ago in Italy. How is that relevant now? It's relevant because we can create on stage, without the permission of television networks or movie studios. We can create stories that reflect the concerns, the desires and the pain of our audiences. We can reach out, without permission to tell stories we would not be able to tell in the major media. The theater is absolutely vital to the survival of free expression in America.

           - Tim Robbins, accepting Dell'Arte's 2009 Prize of Hope

The small town of Blue Lake, California is the homebase of the Dell'Arte International--a theatre company with a vision all to itself. Approaching its fortieth anniversay, Dell'Arte are "a committed community of artists who model and share in a sustained ensemble artistic practice," with a mission that is "international in scope, grounded in the natural living world [and] inspired by [their] non-urban setting." From that imperative, they both honor the commedia dell'arte tradition and renovate it for contemporary use, presenting a touring company, acting workshops and youth programs, as well as an impressive series of outreach projects in the surrounding community.

Though they offer a regular schedule of performances, their principles converge in dramatic fashion every summer during the Mad River Festival. Each year the local community is joined by theatre fans from around the globe, as Dell'Arte performs their work alongside troupes from a number of other countries. This year Klinke, a contemporary circus show from Italy, as well as Los Payasos Mendigos, will perform--though a visit to their site will reveal many more performances and events than a single paragraph here could condense.

The Festival will also highlight Blue Lake: The Opera, a piece conceived by Dell'Arte to celebrate the Blue Lake's centennial:

On the 100th aniversary of the founding of Blue Lake, Dell'Arte takes us back to the wild days of Blue Lake's birth in 1910. Hogs in the streets, rowdy logging camps, mysterious Odd Fellows, gunfights, fires, housewives and socialists--and three tired schoolteachers in charge of 190 students--how could love possibly survive in a place like this? But it did, even when the great fire of 1911 tragically and spectacularly took down the Odd Fellows Hall...

And so... we open the 20th Mad River Festival with Blue Lake: The Opera. Nearly every word will be sung in this story based on actual events--both lurid and lyrical--in the early life of Blue Lake. A ribald blending of styles and influences, as quirky as Blue Lake itself, mixing the earthy sounds of folk music with the full-throated coloratura of classical opera, and featuring some of the finest singers in Humboldt County, alongside sheep, chickens, pigs and a milk cow.

What was spawned 100 years ago has hatched into the "peaceable hamlet" we know and love today. The machine guns may be gone from city hall, the gambling palace has a new hotel, the sewer system is still working--but what new visions await us in the next 100 years, that we seed today? As Shakespeare said, "What's past is prologue, what to come in yours and my discharge..."

Though there hasn't been much video or photo stills released yet in conjunction with this project, Tim Gray, the opera's musical director, has made available streaming demos of the songs as well as pdfs of the sheet music, so you can learn "The Woodsmen's Chorus" or "The Bear's Lament" before attending the show.

For further investigation, included below is a video compilation of the various facets of Dell'Arte International: