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.

We Juke Up In Here: Mississippi Juke Joint Traditions

Red Paden at home in Red's Lounge; Lou Bopp

This month will see the release of a new documentary from Jeff Konkel of Broke and Hungry Records and Roger Stolle of the Cat Head music and art store. We Juke Up In Here, co-directed with Damien Blaylock of Atavistik Pictures, explores the living tradition of Mississippi juke joints:

We Juke Up In Here follows producers Jeff Konkel and Roger Stolle as they explore what remains of Mississippi’s once-thriving juke joint culture. The film is told largely from the vantage point of Red Paden, proprietor of the legendary Red’s Lounge in historic Clarksdale, Mississippi. Paden, a true Delta character and jack-of-all-trades, has been running his blues and beer joint for more than 30 years – providing one of the region’s most reliable live blues venues and an authentic stage for a cavalcade of veteran blues performers, both legendary and obscure.

Told through live music performances, character-driven interviews and rare on-camera blues experiences, viewers are taken below the surface of the quasi-legal world of real Delta jukes – while it’s still living and breathing. Mississippi’s juke joint culture may be at a crossroads, but as Red likes to say, “The Game’s for life . . . and that’s for damn sure!”

Konkel and Stolle previously collaborated on 2009's award-winning documentary M for Mississippi: A Road Trip through the Birthplace of the Blues. The producers have made a life's work of recording and promoting the living blues in Mississippi -- through the artists on Konkel's Broke and Hungry label and through Stolle's legendary Cat Head music and art store and his book The Hidden History of Mississippi Blues.

The trailer for M for Mississippi, also co-directed with Damien Blaylock, is included below:

New Work From Places: Rural Studio, Cotton Farmers, The Sound of Music, And Our Natural Space

Bloom, 2010; Michael Lundgren 

One of the most valuable resources for considering how the arts intersect with and enliven the rural-urban exchange can be found in Places, "an interdisciplinary journal of contemporary architecture, landscape and urbanism, with particular emphasis on the public realm as physical place and social ideal."

Today we would like to offer links to some recent work from Places that expands conversations and ideas we've shared with our readers and collaborators. Below we will feature a brief selection from each piece followed by links to the larger, visually-rich articles:

Samuel Mockbee of Rural Studio

Lessons From The Front Lines Of Social Design is an essay by Will Holman that charts this designer's time spent at the Arcosanti urban laboratory, YouthBuild, and Rural Studio - while also touching on projects we've also discussed: Epicenter and Studio H. 

Below is an excerpt from Mr. Holman's time at Rural Studio:

The Rural Studio was founded in 1993 by architects Samuel Mockbee and D.K. Ruth, around the same time I was dreaming away afternoons in my elementary school library. Both professors at Auburn University, Mockbee and Ruth set up shop in Newbern, Alabama, three hours away from the main campus. Greensboro, ten miles north, along with nearby Moundville and Tuscaloosa, were at the center of James Agee and Walker Evan’s Depression-era study of sharecroppers, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men [10]. Mockbee and Ruth hoped to expose students to three things usually missing from modern architectural education: construction, clients and social engagement. “Rural Studio is what architecture should be about, not what it should theoretically be about,” said Danny Wicke, a former instructor and student. “Engaging in practice makes school real and gives it context.” [11] Mockbee died in 2001, and Ruth in 2009, but not before the Rural Studio earned Mockbee a MacArthur “genius” grant and a wave of positive press from around the world. Now directed by British transplant Andrew Freear, the studio has concentrated on raising standards of professionalism and building larger civic projects. “I want to get students to dream about our society,” says Freear. “Architects are not just playthings of the rich.”

The Hills Are Alive is an interdisciplinary and wide-ranging essay by Michael P. Branch, a Professor of Literature and Environment at the University of Nevada, Reno and a columnist for The High Country News. 

In this piece Dr. Branch takes a moment of family history - his daughter's performing a version of Julie Andrews' revelry on their Nevada hillside far -and transforms the memory into the groundwork for a meditation on romantic and ecological landscapes. Here's his introduction:

My grandmother’s highest compliment for a natural landscape was to say that it was “pretty as a picture.” Even as a kid I remember thinking that this aesthetic was somehow upside-down, that the beauty of art should be judged according to the inimitable standard of natural beauty rather than the other way around. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, well-heeled European travelers toured the countryside looking for views that would be as pretty as a picture — or, to be more precise, as pretty as a painting. And because they had a certain kind of painting in mind as embodying their standard of natural beauty, these early ecotourists often carried with them a small, convex, tinted mirror known as a “Claude glass,” after the 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain. When a picturesque landscape was encountered — say, the snow-capped Alps — the tourists would turn their backs to the mountains and whip out their Claude glass, holding it up to frame the mountains, which were not only reflected but also color-shifted to a tonal range that made them appear more painterly. And voila! The rugged Alps become not only pretty as a picture, but become a picture, as the pleased ecotourists admired not the mountains but rather the image they had created. But must we turn our backs on the land to see it as aesthetically pleasing? Why do we so often love our representations of the world more dearly than we love the world itself? 

a selection from a photograph from Kathleen Robbin's project

We also highly recommend visiting Places to view Cotton Farmers: Photographs from the American South, a collaboration between Kathleen Robbins and writer Mary Carol Miller. Ms. Robbins, whose grandfather was a third-generation cotton farmer, recently returned to her family farm for an intensive five weeks of photography and interviews, alongside Ms. Miller. (NPR also provides more of the context here.)

The Places slideshow captures the breathtaking sweep of the land, yet also communicates the physical and mental hardship of continuing these practices. Below, Mary Carol Miller's prose speaks to this situation:

We found a handful of men and women who remain where their fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers planted their flags. Each spring, they weigh the odds and walk the land, recognizing every turnrow and low point and subtle rise over a thousand or two thousand or even eleven thousand acres. And, once again, as their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents did, they will buy the seed and the fertilizer and service the tractors and the combines and hire the cropdusters and begin the daily prayers for more rain or no rain and sunshine and cool nights and no tropical storms in September and no frost in early October. And their children, muttering about the social challenges of being way out there and never having a next-door neighbor, will slowly, slowly find their own souls tied to that dirt.

Untitled, 2010; Michael Lundgren

Last week Places published a collaboration that speaks to the concerns delineated across these pieces. If There Be Such a Place is a slideshow of work by two photographers with divergent visions of the American West: Aaron Rothman and Michael Lundgren. Poet and Places Assistant Editor Josh Wallaert offers an introduction not only to their work, but to the problems of aesthetic representation in natural space. As a whole, this is an intellectually complex and visually stunning presentation, and we highly recommend it - the techniques and ideas here can find application across the American landscape. Here is a selection from Mr. Wallaert's introduction; please follow the links to larger, high-resolution examples of the photographs:

By sundown in this Western town, you’ve met an artist, likely an environmental artist, a role synonymous these days with a kind of citizen interpreter of landscape. This is a golden age for geography in art, and its artifacts range from embarrassing to inspired. We embroider birds on pillows and use historical maps for découpage; we also write gorgeous poems whose lines re-enact processes of geological transformation, engineer mobile apps that enable hikers to identify the Latin names of plants, and exhibit photographs of altered landscapes that challenge old notions about the dichotomy of built and natural environment. The artist invites the audience to participate in an active reading and interpretation of landscape. We all want to read the world these days, or, more often, have the world read to us.

These exchanges are thrilling, yes, but also dazzling — as in, they can make you go blind. An afternoon hike with a naturalist friend can feel like immersion in a hypertextual, augmented reality, where the names of wildflowers hang, shimmering, in the desert air. It’s exhausting. I have often longed for the mute world I knew as a child: where a rock was a rock and a tree was a tree, and none of it spoke to me, except through direct perception and experience. Nature offers this still, if we are willing to accept it: the blank, unreadable, unbeautiful, apolitical moment. There have been times, when I found myself staring at exposed rock on the side of a hill, that I have known something about its formation; and times when I was accompanied by a scientist or artist who was obliged to translate. But there have been many more unreadable moments, when I could comprehend nothing in that open face of the world but its presence, when I had only the desire to climb the wall or poke at it with a sharp stick.

 Untitled, 2007; Aaron Rothman

Related Articles:

The Border of Nowhere and Nowhere

Rural Poetry Series: Josh Wallaert

In Brief: Water In The West

Fiction That Crosses the Rural - Urban Line
Rural Studio and the 20K House
Studio H: Designing and Building Skills for Rural Youth

In Brief: Regional Relationships

Two aspects of A Map Without Boundaries; Regional Relationships

Today we will introduce some work that we will be covering in greater detail soon: the Regional Relationships project. We're focused on bringing rural-urban and rural-international considerations to light, and it's very exciting to encounter these artists making multimedia art from such exchanges. 

A Map Without Boundaries, RR's first project, is a mail art installation by Matthew Friday that considers the cultural, environmental, and even aesthetic effects of the networks of abandoned mines in southeastern Ohio - and his project asks for RR's audience to become participants in the creation of a larger exhibit. RR's current project is Greetings From The Cornbelts by Claire Pentecost; the Chicago-based artist is connecting corn production in the fields of northern Illinois and with those of Mexico. Her field work in Mexico will be presented in postcards, posters, and written documentation.

Please follow the links to learn more, and to discover how this work can find its way to your doorstep: Here's their introductory notes:

What: Regional Relationships commissions artists, scholars, writers and activists to create works that investigate the natural, industrial and cultural landscapes of a region.
It is a platform to re-imagine the spaces and cultural histories around us. An invitation to join in seeing what we can learn—and learning what we can see—by juxtaposing spaces and narratives that are usually kept apart.
 

Why: Popular beliefs about human geography are composed of binary oppositions like “urban” and “rural” and “cosmopolitan” and “provincial”. These divisions naturalize synthetic borders and harden political boundaries, obsfucating their cultural function. 
Applying a regional lens encourages us to think more expansively about the disparate geographies that might exist within the space of one small town or across continents and oceans.

How: Published works will be sent to subscribing individuals and institutions on a semiannual basis.

These Regional Relationships projects contribute so much to the new kinds of dialogue that we can cultivate about rural and urban linkages, and about how rural places find connections of culture, economy, and practice with other places far removed from their local fields. This site is highly recommended, and we'll be expanding in greater detail on their work soon.

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.

Hiss Golden Messenger: Poor Moon, Rich Harvest

MC Taylor and his son; Paradise of Bachelors

Earlier this month, Hiss Golden Messenger released their fourth record: Poor Moon. It's a meditative and beguiling collection of songs that claims a space within some noticeable traditions, yet stands outside of a full-membership within a rock, country, or folk genre. 

This may speak to the boundary crossing of MC Taylor, an accomplished musician whose path led him out of San Francisco and into the folklore program at the University of North Carolina. Mr. Taylor, who collaborates in HGM with former Court & Spark bandmate Scott Hirsch, has settled in the rural Piedmont town of Pittsboro, North Carolina. Mr. Taylor wrote these songs at the kitchen table of his farmhouse, during spare hours while his son slept. These songs (some of which appear in stripped-down, field-recording form on his previous LP Bad Debt) speak to this context, but also exceed their creation myth in startling ways.

From the songs to their sequence, and even to the material object itself, Poor Moon is a stunningly complete work. The LP (or download) was brought into the world by the Paradise of Bachelors label, the same folks whose first release was one of last year's stand-out records, Said I Had A Vision: The Songs and Labels of David Lee. While the transition from a collection of North Carolina soul to Hiss Golden Messenger would be an unlikely bridge for some record labels, it makes perfect sense here. The Bachelors, Brendan Greaves and Jason Perlmutter, come from a folklore and record-collecting background, and their attention to place and culture expands how we think about southern music and reveals surprising commonalities between local soul 45s and the rooted meditations of Mr. Taylor.

The limited-edition, hand-numbered LP release, which also features illustrations by UK-based visual artist Alex Jako, offers a few things to hold on to while listening. All of this culminates in a physical presence that sets a visual analog for the songs themselves - so clear when reviewing the album art alongside the opening track, "Blue Country Mystic."

David Bowie has called the music of Hiss Golden Messenger "mystical country," "an eerie yellowing photograph," some well-deserved praise that will no doubt be mentioned in many reviews. While such a quote seems to get at the atmosphere of the first side of Poor Moon, even the lines from this opening track suggest this is a "mystical country" with a vertical depth. In just a few lines we understand this mystic may also be a "little wandering one," possessed of a vision leading "from the city into the mountains," and that, by song's end, the singer himself becomes the mystic. Between the "wise one" whose image opens the opening song of Poor Moon, and the "little one" who follows, we discover a powerful metaphor for this collection of songs - a kind of spiritual search that reaches backwards while also reaching forwards to a new generation just beginning to learn their language and understand their place. The singer stands where so many of us stand: in between tradition and change, the past and future, looking for a foothold.

Such complex ideas are punctuated by the expert collaborations of over a dozen musicians. From lap steel to gongs, pump organ to saxophone, their contributions offer a coherent counterpoint to the lyrics. We hear many of these collaborators on "Drummer Down," [the third track locatable in the player above] and their instrumentation alongside Mr. Taylor's voice begs repeat listenings. After a few, though, the lyrics emerge - and the floor falls out from that taut, joyful rhythm:

Well it's alright now, the pain is gone.
It's alright now, little one. 
Riven from my body, as a ghost I dwell,
But my home, O I know I loved well

They drew a hex around my body, a hex around my soul,
called me from a place where I did dwell,
driven by my mind, down roads I didn't know
they were roads that I would never see again.

These cycles of birth and death, child to ghost, recur across Poor Moon - as do certain specific images and end-rhymes - and offer another testament to how complete, and how cyclical, a statement is captured on this LP.

Barring Mr. Bowie's words, and the comparisons to The Greatful Dead (and Canned Heat's "Poor Moon"), perhaps one of the most moving ghosts within this project is that of William Butler Yeats, an amateur folklorist, lifelong student of the occult, and, of course, a Nobel poet laureate. While many rock records get mileage by quoting a few lines from "The Second Coming," Poor Moon lives out a Yeatsian poetics without ever having to talk about slouching to Bethlehem. Beyond a line that may or may not reference Yeats's extraordinary late poem "What Then?" we're left with an overwhelming notion that the poet's ideas on lunar phases and their relationships to time and personality might be lurking beneath these songs. One of the rewards of Poor Moon is how it will send you to other sources, across mediums.



In the context of The Art of the Rural, and our interest in the rural-urban exchange, Hiss Golden Messenger's reading of Yeats offers a context and look forward to how else rural folk tradition could be honored and made new within contemporary music. In correspondence with Mr. Taylor, he confirmed that Yeats was an influence on these songs (along with Wendell Berry and the Bible); the Irish poet's own use of folklore and Biblical reference was a mixture of Victorian antiquarianism and a kind of cultural nationalism where the visions of Irish peasants signified how rural space was un-English, inscrutable, and the anchor of Irishness. In short, it was a pastoral, not that far from the pastorals that still flourish in the American arts today.

While some musicians like Sam Amidon take a more curatorial approach in relation to this complicated inheritance, Hiss Golden Messenger's music finds a deeper source, what Yeats himself found in the vernacular: "a powerful and passionate syntax." This selection from an interview with Emma Brown in Interview magazine, where Mr. Taylor discusses his field recording work in North Carolina, seems to suggest the common philosophical ground of his field work and his music:

Emma Brown: Have you always been interested in folklore?

MC Taylor: I guess I was, if you want to consider just being a really obsessive music fan and listener and collector and reader a folklorist, which it sort of is.  But when I went to graduate school, my definition of folklore both narrowed and deepened. We didn't talk about things like myths, not a single time, that's not what it's about. It's more about expressive and/or vernacular culture and how it's deployed in the public realm. To get a little academic about it! [laughs] I'm not looking for people that are old and possibly the only ones playing a certain type of music, I'm not looking for the last remnants of an old ancient story. If people are interested in a certain kind of cultural expression, whether it be low-riding, or hip-hop, or bluegrass music, that's what I'm interested in documenting. Obviously it's important to that group of people, so the question is how to they interact with that art form, what do they do with it, that sort of thing.

There's a gorgeous confluence of art forms in Poor Moon - poetry, music, and folklore - but not what folks might expect. There are indeed field recordings here, but no instruments, no human voices are heard. In interludes between the songs on the second side we hear cicadas, birds, and a rainstorm, as the rhythm of one subtly shifts into the rhythm of another. As these songs conclude with questions of religion and redemption, these field recordings not only place the singer back in the North Carolina Piedmont but they suggest how the largest, most cosmic cycles are rooted in our local hills. That knowledge is part gift, part revelation, part responsibility. As the LP or CD spins in its cycle, alongside that lush album art, we're reminded of the process inherent in what we create, what we cultivate. And we keep listening.

Listening To Miranda Lambert

To me, country music is about real life, the good and the bad. That's why country started, and it was because of Hank Williams telling true stories. And I don't see why a woman can't tell the truth just as fast as a man can.

Today on NPR's Morning Edition, Renee Montagne spoke with country music superstar Miranda Lambert. As folks might expect from her music and songwriting, the conversation had a substance to it that's missing from so much contemporary music coming out of Nashville. Here's an excerpt from the transcription:

When she was growing up, Lambert's parents would occasionally open their home to women who were in abusive relationships. She often shared a room with a displaced mother, daughter, or both, and heard from them the devastating effects domestic abuse. "Half of the women take your advice, use your help and get out," she says. "Half of them can't leave and always go back."

Lambert pulled from their stories to write the song that helped put her on the map, 2007's "Gunpowder and Lead," in which she sings, "His fist is big but my gun's bigger / He'll find out when I pull the trigger."

Here's Ms. Lambert performing "Gunpowder and Lead" live on Austin City Limits:

Watch Miranda Lambert "Gunpowder and Lead" on PBS. See more from Austin City Limits.

One of Miranda Lambert's earliest successes was "Everybody Dies Famous In A Small Town." This song came to mind again as the Occupy movement began to percolate in rural America. While the witty verses and that infectious hook are in keeping with what one would expect from Nashville, these lyrics also speak to a truth about the kinds of knowledge folks have in rural areas - and the kind of open humility that could make for some positive, and non-partisan, problem-solving in such small towns. It's a perfect country-pop song for such an urban - rural critique.

UPDATE: Folks may also be interested in feminist responses to Miranda Lambert's music. In "Rifles and Rural Feminism," journalist and blogger Kate Noftsinger considers the rural - urban dynamics of the term, and how its sensibilities are marketed in music. There's a wide range of feminist responses to "Gunpowder and Lead" within the feminist community - and the subject deserves an Art of the Rural article all to itself. Please feel free to send along any responses you might have to the idea of "rural feminism" or its critique here.

Sunday Song: Reverend Johnny "Hurricane" Jones

The cover to the most recent Dust-To-Digital release of the Reverend's music and sermons

It is a glorious thing when a person can say "I am walking with God. I don't have any money. I don't know how my bills are going to be paid." If God had not been walking with me, I could not have made the journey.

     - "The Hurricane," Reverend Johnny L. Jones

The Atlanta publication Creative Loafing has recently published an excellent and extensive consideration of Dust-To-Digital, a record label and publishing imprint with few peers. I imagine that many folks are already familiar with the astounding range of material they have brought into the world; if not, please refer to the link above and enjoy exploring their archives of LPs, CDs, books, and radio programs. 

Dust-to-Digital has worked hard over the last two years to bring the live recordings of Reverend Johnny L. Jones to folks around the world -- first with Jesus Christ From A to Z (the title track is essential listening) and later with Rev. Johnny L. Jones: The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta, a two CD set. Here's a video Creative Loafing produced of the Reverend:

Joe Bageant: Rednecks And the Rural-Urban

Joe with younger brother Mike in 1951; The Daily Yonder 

Folks, I've returned from an inspiring weekend at BIG FEED in Yuma, Colorado -- an event so rich in ideas, music, and art that I'm going to have a great deal to share from it in the coming weeks. 

Until then, I'd like to point folks' attention to a piece that appeared in The Daily Yonder that I consider to be essential reading: it's Lisa Pruitt's thoughts on the life and work of "redneck" writer Joe Bageant. Dr. Pruitt has covered much of the same ground, though from a different disciplinary perspective, on her excellent blog Legal Ruralism, and I can think of no better introduction to the passionate, clear-eyed prose of Joe Bageant. Her response is provocative and deeply moving -- this is a voice and a critique that's missing in large part from our current economic debates, a dose of reality that we all would be wise to consider. I'll be including her insights to just those ends tomorrow.

Below, I'll also include the video embedded at The Daily Yonder:

Bill Frisell And The Great Flood

From the world premiere of The Great Flood at ELLNORA

Last month Bill Frisell premiered The Great Flood at ELLNORA: The Guitar Festival  at the Kranert Center, University of Illinois. Below we will feature a 5 minute excerpt from the piece, as well as a short documentary clip with Mr. Frisell and the director of The Great Flood film, Bill Morrison.

Aside from the artistry of these musicians, the project also highlights one of the key moments in the ever-changing rural-urban conversation, a period of time which gave birth to so many of the art forms and ideas we have covered in these pages.

This is a preview of an evening long suite - 75 minutes of original music to be composed and performed by Bill Frisell, Tony Scherr, Kenny Wollesen and  Ron Miles with accompanying film and staging by Bill Morrison, based on the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 and the ensuing transformation of American society and music. Frisell’s wide-ranging musical palette will use elements of the vocabulary in American roots music, but as always, it will be refracted through his own inimitable lens and filters to yield a highly personal and illuminating musical vision, with the overall objective of contributing to a journey of discovery for the audience.

The Mississippi River Flood of 1927 was the most destructive river flood in American history. In the spring of 1927, the river broke out of its banks in 145 places and inundated 27,000 square miles to a depth of up to 30 feet.  Part of it’s enduring legacy was the mass exodus of displaced sharecroppers. Musically, the “Great Migration” of rural southern blacks to Northern cities saw the Delta Blues electrified and reinterpreted as the Chicago Blues, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll. [reprinted from the project's United States Artists page]

The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams

Archival photograph of Hank Williams driving one of his Cadillacs

Bob Dylan's imprint Egyptian Records is set to release a twelve-song record next month inspired by the songs and lyrical fragments contained within Hank Williams's final notebook. Musicians all the way from Alan Jackson to Jack White have contributed interpretations of this material; here's a portion of the press release:

When Hank Williams died, at the age of 29, in the back of his Cadillac sometime early morning on New Year's Day 1953, he left behind a scuffed, embroidered brown leather briefcase, which he used to carry bound notebooks, among other items, darkening their pages with lyrics and song ideas. Some were fully finished, some just started.

The odyssey of Hank Williams' notebooks is recounted in the album's liner notes, penned by Michael McCall from the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, who observes, "The history of Hank's notebooks is as complex as the legend himself. Yet, in the end, what matters most are the songs, and these new works rise from the ether with ghostly relevance. As with his many standards, these new recordings tap straight into the soul of man. This is songwriting at its most artful and most powerful."

Weekend Song: Larry Jon Wilson

selection from the album cover to Larry Jon Wilson; Drag City Records, 2009

On the fringe of the 1970's outlaw country movement, and the progenitor of country-funk, Larry Jon Wilson's crafted one of the most unique catalogs of work over his four decades of recording. Below we'll include a song / documentary clip from Heartworn Highways that captures Mr. Wilson in his element. Much more information on Larry Jon Wilson can be found at this fan page; Stephen Deusner spoke to the artist in 2009, just before his death, and this interview can found here. At the center of this interview is a discussion about the excellent self-titled album Drag City Records released that year; along with Larry Jon Wilson's legendary Document recordings, this later collection of songs and covers is essential listening. Many, many thanks to Mike Luster for introducing me to Larry Jon Wilson's music earlier this year.

Here's "Ohoopee River Bottomland," from the Heartworn Highways film:

Lucinda Williams on Hank Williams

Many thanks to the wonderful Southern Folklife Collection and their indispensible Facebook page for this gem: Lucinda Williams prefacing a rendition of "Cold, Cold Heart" with a story about the time Lucinda's father (the poet Miller Williams) took Hank out for drinks after one of his shows. We've also added the performance below to our YouTube channel.

Saturday Portfolio: Freeman Kitchens, The Carter Family, and Drake Vintage Music and Curios

Mr. Kitchens in front of his store in Drake, Kentucky; Jennifer Joy Jameson

Today we'd like to offer a small portfolio relating to a forthcoming exhibit that promises to interest many of our readers. Yours For The Carters: Vintage Sound Collections of Freeman Kitchens, is an exhibit curated by Jennifer Joy Jameson that is set to open at the Kentucky Library & Museum on the campus of Western Kentucky University on Saturday, August 27th. The event begin at 3 pm, with The Hogslop String Band coming in from Nashville to help with the festivities. Following this, Ms. Jameson, who is a Masters student in the WKU Folk Studies program, will be leading a field-trip to Drake Music and Curios.

As Ms. Jameson would tell us, if you love The Carter Family, country/folk music, or if you are joyfully immersed in the music and art of the vernacular reissue movement, you owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Kitchens. Aside from his contributions on these fronts, Mr. Kitchens has also served a valuable role within his Drake, Kentucky community--as his Drake Vintage Music and Curios is at once a record store, general store, and United States Post Office. Here's Ms. Jameson elaborating upon the how the Yours For The Carters exhibit will work to share this story with us:

Since the mid-1940s, Freeman Kitchens has collected and sold early country music recordings out of his general store/post office in Drake, Ky., a small village about one hour north of Nashville, Tenn.

As founding member and president emeritus of the official fan club of the Carter Family, Kitchens and his club members have published and circulated some of the earliest forms of music journalism and grassroots documentation surrounding America’s beloved country music family, as well as other important country, blues, and country-western artists of the 20th Century.

With original images and artifacts from Mr. Kitchens’ shop, and from the collections of the Kentucky Library & Museum, this exhibit explores the wide reach of this local man, his small country store, and its legacy in contemporary music history.

Folks can follow this link to the Ms. Jameson's digital index of the vintage sound collection which consists of 250 7-inch reel-to-reel tapes of everything from recorded radio programs to his own field recordings. It's hard not to view the attached pdf file of this material and not get excited for the gems that this exhibit promises to share.

Included below are a few of Ms. Jameson's photographs from Drake Music and Curios. Far more, at far greater scale and resolution, are to be found on her flickr page. We encourage folks to visit the Yours For The Carters site, which offers a rich collection of images, sound files, interviews and archival material ahead of the exhibit. We will be sharing more information on this later in the month as well. Until then, here's some of Ms. Jameson's photography: