Rural Tracks: Daughn Gibson's Country Noir

If folks are familiar with the rich, hallowed ground of country music that deals with trucking and the open road, then these new contributions by Daughn Gibson will come as a surprise.

His first record, All Hell, has been available for a few weeks, with interest in Gibson's unique musical-collages steadily gathering steam in the music press. Here's Larry Fitzmaurice, writing in his Pitchfork feature on the artist:

There are moments of genuine noise and terror on singer-songwriter Daughn Gibson's debut solo LP, All Hell, but not of the devil's-horns kind. Instead, the 31-year-old Carlisle, Penn., resident fashions ghostly, haunting country-ish ballads out of Christian gospel samples and looping audio software while his rich baritone narrates small-town tragedy.

Gibson's affinity for country music-- as well as the genre's cherished storytelling tradition-- began when he started driving trucks for a living nearly a decade ago. "I started listening to country when there was nothing else to listen to on the radio when I was driving," he says. "I started liking the stories, no matter how absurd they sounded. I liked that they were portrayals of people, or scenarios, or nostalgia." To this day, he's stillworking in the trucking industry, as an HR representative.

I have been recently been reading, and re-reading, Collage Culture, a collaboration between poet Mandy Kahn, filmmaker/curator Aaron Rose, and designer Brian Roettinger. Across these essays, they give an impassioned argument for artists, writers, and musicians to move beyond collage as an end-in-itself, and they offer a thoughtful critique of how an admixture of styles, references, and cultural debris liberally scattered together (like a Google image search) negates all the history, ideology, and human experience contained in each discrete element of a collage. Though this publication emanates from Los Angeles, and is entirely concerned with urban art forms, I sense that its thesis would be enthusiastically received by many of our readers and collaborators.

No genre is more complicit in "collage culture" than electronic music, which brings us back to Daughn Gibson. The compelling, catchy, and, at times, unsettling effects of the songs on All Hell seem to transcend the pitfalls of Collage Culture and sample-based music. Is this because Gibson is working with country music material that emerges from his lived, placed, experience? Does the style and texture of these songs also emanate a kind of spatial sense of the open road, the rural interstates of Pennsylvania, the quality of constantly traveling between points on a map? 

It may be a challenge to not to contextualize, or even romanticize, some elements of this music's creation. Please feel welcome to offer your own takes of this on our Arts and Culture Feed. 

Included below is another song from All Hell, "Tiffany Lou," followed by a video trailer for Collage Culture directed by Aaron Rose:

Rural Tracks: Early December

Harry Smith's Celestial Monochord

Today we begin a new series on Art of the Rural that seeks to serve as a resource for the wide range of music expression -- rural and urban, past and present, national and international -- waiting to be explored in libraries, record stores, and online.

We really value our readers' input, and we'd like to feature folks' suggestions in this space as well. What music has been moving, inspiring, or challenging you lately? If this music has emerged from rural place, or points toward rural-urban or rural-international connections, we would love to hear about it -- and share it. Please feel free to post your ideas (with links, if possible) on the Facebook thread for this piece, or send us an email at artoftherural at gmail.com. Thanks!

I'd like to begin with a few selections that Dust-To-Digital recently shared on their Facebook page. Some Crazy Magic: Meeting Harry Smith is an short animated film that puts to image John Cohen's story of first meeting the man behind the Anthology of American Folk Music. This extraordinary piece was created for the American Standard Time blog by Drew Christie -- and there are others to be explored on his site:

Mr. Christie and AST editor Greg Vandy also produced this gorgeously filmed interview piece with John Cohen. :

American Standard Time Presents John Cohen from colony on Vimeo.

The Dust Busters also make an appearance alongside Mr. Cohen; longtime readers of this site may remember our piece on Down Home Radio -- its editor Eli Smith is a member of TDB. Folks can see an interview with Mr. Smith and TDB at The Jalopy Theater here, via Brooklyn Independent Television. Below, The Dust Busters offer "Black Bottom Strut:"

Last weekend The Daily Yonder shared the music of 2/3 Goat. Here's lead singer and mandolin player Annalyse McCoy, who hails from Inez, Kentucky, in an interview with Jeff Bigger:

"Music is such an integral part of Appalachian culture and tradition," said McCoy, who grew up in Inez, Kentucky and also works as an actress in New York City. " As a child of Appalachia, I felt that there was no better or more natural way to "give back" to try and help my community than through song. Amid all the destruction that mountaintop removal causes -- all the thousands of miles of streams that have been buried, all the remaining water that's been tainted by heavy metals -- there is purity and light left in Appalachia; there is Hope."

The good folks at Dust-to-Digital also shared this extensive feature on another Kentuckian, musician and folk archivist Nathan Salsburg, who is currently working to archive a massive collection of 78 rpm records found in a house in Louisville. Mr. Salsburg has released two of our favorite records this year, the earlier Avos (guitar duets with James Elkington) and, just last month, Affirmed - a solo guitar record that finds a meditative center within the legacies of many of the Kentucky Derby's Triple Crown winners. Please see our archive for our previous pieces on Mr. Salsburg's work with Root Hog or Die and the Alan Lomax Archive/Cultural Equity; here, from Affirmed, is "Back Home in Bogenbrook:"

Back Home In Bogenbrook by Nathan Salsburg

I was excited to recently discover the music of Blaze Foley, a musician who spent a good deal of time living in a tree house in rural Georgia before moving to Austin and living an itinerant lifestyle as perhaps the most bonafide Outlaw of that country music movement. He was the inspiration for Lucinda Williams's "Drunken Angel," the subject of some recent CD reissues, and his music has also happily reappeared on vinyl. Here's the trailer for the Duct Tape Messiah documentary, followed by a song that never really gets old, Blaze's "Oval Room:"

Part of what we hope to achieve with Rural Tracks is a kind of unexpected and meandering path that leads to some unlikely but revealing comparisons -- for instance, considering Harry Smith alongside Blaze Foley.

Please follow the links at the start of this piece to share your suggestions; we will publish them in subsequent updates to this feature. Thanks again for reading The Art of the Rural.