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.

The Snakes and Southern Vernacular of Harry Crews

Crews at home in his Florida; Oscar Sosa, New York Times

She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike. She loved the way the snake looked sewn onto her V-neck letter sweater, his hard diamondback pattern shining in the sun. It was unseasonably hot, almost sixty degrees, for early November in Mystic, Georgia, and she could smell the light musk of her own sweat. She liked the sweat, liked the way it felt, slick as oil, in all the joints of her body, her bones, in the firm sliding muscles, tensed and locked now, ready to spring — to strike — when the band behind her fired up the school song: “Fight On Deadly Rattlers of Old Mystic High."

The South lost two preeminent artists last week: Earl Scruggs and Harry Crews. While our Arts and Culture Feed covered many of the remembrances and documentary footage of Mr. Scruggs, we'd like to offer further gateways into discovering the solitary and one-of-a-kind fiction of Harry Crews. To begin, there's the excerpt above -- the opening paragraph to his critically-acclaimed 1976 novel A Feast Of Snakes.

Dwight Garner, writing in the The New York Times, shares this quote about how Crews dealt with the poverty of his rural place, qualities that place him among that other clear-eyed commentator of the rural poor, Joe Bageant:

“I was so humiliated by the fact that I was from the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp in the worst hookworm and rickets part of Georgia I could not bear to think of it … Everything I had written had been out of a fear and loathing for what I was and who I was. It was all out of an effort to pretend otherwise.” 

Pretend is a loaded word in Crews' fiction, which finds a powerful and often uncomfortable margin between brute realism and otherworldly imagination. Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, a sort of lyrical documentary on Southern culture also considers this quality. This clip features music from David Eugene Edwards of 16 Horsepower and Wovenhand:

By far, however, the most comprehensive and moving remembrance of Harry Crews has come from Maud Newton, a writer, critic, and former student of Harry Crews at the University of Florida. Her piece in The Awl reveals many sides to Crews beyond the work or the official obituaries, including this excerpt from his A Childhood: The Biography of a Place:

One of my favorite places to be was in the corner of the room where the ladies were quilting. God, I loved the click of needles on thimbles, a sound that will always make me think of stories. When I was a boy, stories were conversation and conversation was stories. For me it was a time of magic.

It was always the women who scared me. The stories that women told and that men told were full of violence, sickness, and death. But it was the women whose stories were unrelieved by humor and filled with apocalyptic vision. No matter how awful the stories were that the men told they were always funny. The men's stories were stories of character, rather than of circumstance, and they always knew the people the stories were about. But women would repeat stories about folks they did not know and had never seen, and consequently, without character counting for anything, the stories were as stark and cold as legend or myth.

Hiss Golden Messenger Takes To The Air

MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger; Abigail Martin

As we catch up on news we were unable to cover over the last few weeks, we wanted to share this: Frank Stasio of NPR's The State of Things, in conversation with MC Taylor of Hiss Golden Messenger.

As we've written previously, HGM's Poor Moon was one of the most extraordinary records of 2011, and it's wonderful to hear Stasio and Taylor talk through so many of the ideas that inform the music: folklore, place, and family. Taylor also performs two tracks live in studio, "Call Him Daylight" and "Bad Debt," and concludes by offering a new song, "Busted Note."

In other exciting HGM news, Poor Moon will be available on CD courtesy of the excellent Tompkins Square label on April 17th -- with a new LP run offered by Paradise of Bachelors.

Hiss Golden Messenger "Poor Moon" - out April 17th by TompkinsSquare

Studio H: Designing & Building Skills For Rural Youth

Studio H students, at the grand opening of the Windsor Farms Market

Today we feature an "In Brief" report on an inspiring project that we will discuss in far greater depth at the start of 2012: Studio H.

When Contributing Editor Rachel Reynolds Luster passed along news of Studio H, she mentioned something to the effect of "this is like The Rural Studio for high school students" - which is a helpful point of comparison for folks familiar with that group's work in Alabama. The spirit of Samuel Mockbee can be found here, as can the unique vision of Studio H's directors: Emily Pilloton and Matthew Miller. Both are extraordinarily accomplished architects, designers, and writers who, through their Project H Design organization, have made a commitment to bring their expertise out of the university grounds and into the lives of teenagers in Bertie County, North Carolina. 

This is such a rich and vibrant project that only a much more in-depth article can do justice to the work of these students and visionaries, but, for now, we encourage folks to visit Studio H, meander through their excellent blog, and learn more about their projects.

In addition to this, we were very excited to learn that a documentary film project is in the works on Studio H, led by the creative team of Christine O'Malley and Patrick Creadon and writer Neal Baer. They are currently seeking funders through Kickstarter to bring the story of Studio H to viewers across the country. Please find their campaign introduction below:

Here is a selection from the Studio H mission statement:

Studio H is a high school design/build curriculum for rural community benefit. The one-year program is offered to Junior-year students of the Bertie County school district in North Carolina, providing college credit, a summer job, and a hands-on opportunity to build real-world projects for the community (in this, our first year, we’ll build chicken coops and a farmer’s market in downtown Windsor!). By learning through a design sensibility and “dirt-under-your-fingernails” construction skills, we’re developing creativity, critical thinking, citizenship, and capital to give students the skills they need to succeed, while building the assets the community needs to survive. Given the opportunity to engage within a public education system, we believe the next generation will be the greatest asset and untapped resource in rural communities’ futures.

Related Articles:
Rural Studio and the 20K House
Striking the Epicenter in Rural America
Filming the Land Arts of the American West
M12: A New Vision for the High Plains
Richard Saxton's Vernacular Landscapes

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.

In Brief: North Carolina Farmer Voices

Horse Collar Farm; NC Farmer Voices, Alix Blair

Thanks to The Southern Foodways Alliance blog for leading us to learn more about North Carolina Farmer Voices, a program sponsored by Rural Advancement Foundation International that tells the story, through video and still photography, of a number of "innovative farmers:"

North Carolina Farmer Voices [is] a project of RAFI-USA and its Tobacco Communities Reinvestment Fund. This program assists farmers and community groups in developing new sources of agricultural income through the provision of cost-share grants.

In this website you’ll find a collection of stories—in photographs, sound, and multimedia—about projects that are leading models for agriculture in North Carolina. These farmers are innovators, entrepreneurs, and small business owners on the frontier of agricultural innovation. We believe the wisdom of farmers is one of the most powerful tools we have to bring economic growth to North Carolina. Explore their stories!

The site offers 15 short documentary clips that combine the gorgeous photography of Alix Blair with the voices of the farmers themselves. Ms. Blair's photography galleries on NC Farmer Voices are also well worth exploring--both from a compositional sense, and for the story and the spirit of her subjects. Below, Sammy Koenigsberg of New Town Farms discusses his family's work and the poultry processing facility that a RAFI-USA grant helped to be built on-site:

Sunday Song: Bonnie "Prince" Billy

 

This Sunday we'd like to offer this song by one of our favorite musicians, Bonnie "Prince" Billy. Over the last two decades he's made some of the most consistently interesting music we've heard, constantly shifting across the terrains of country, folk, rock and even a little gospel here and there.

He's just contributed two songs to Save Our Gulf in the hopes that the sales can help bolster the work of that organization and its collaborators at the Waterkeeper Alliance. Later this month Drag City records will release the "There Is No God" b/w "God Is Love" 10" LP, with downloads also available; all proceeds go to the worthwhile work of restoring the Gulf. The video and press release follow below:

On June 21, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy will present "There Is No God" b/w "God Is Love"  the new single from Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and features the musical talents of Emmett Kelly, Ben Hall, Pete Cummings, Peter Townsend, Billy Contreras, Cassie Berman and Rachel Korine. The songs were recorded by Mark Nevers and mastered by Paul Oldham.

We are so very lucky to have the profits from the sale of these recordings go to Save Our Gulf c/o Waterkeeper Alliance and The Turtle Hospital to support efforts to clean up and maintain waterways and the lives dependent upon them.

These funds and all funds donated to Save Our Gulf goes directly to supporting the work of seven Waterkeepers on the Gulf Coast who were directly impacted by the BP oil disaster.

Save Our Gulf is a coalition of Waterkeepers brought together in the wake of the BP oil disaster to lead the fight to restore and protect local watersheds, coastal communities and the Gulf of Mexico.  We hold polluters and decision makers accountable and promote the sustainability of our communities.  Our vision is for all communities to have waterways that are swimmable, drinkable and fishable.

The Florida Memory Archives

photo-postcard from the Florida Photographic Collection

After discussing the Farm Security Administration archives and the Captured in Color exhibit recently, it seems like a perfect moment to bring The Florida Memory site into the conversation. Administered by the state's Library & Archives department, the Florida Memory archives is a  comprehensive (and gorgeously designed) site that is fully-searchable; they offer an exhaustive list of photographs, postcards and films in their Photographic Collection, as well as a fascinating array of high-quality scans of important historical documents. They also offer an Online Classroom with education resources appropriate to Floridians, but also to students from any location--and the site's online exhibits are also provocative starting points for classroom discussion, contemplation or artistic inspiration (check out Pestilence, Potions, and Persistence: Early Florida Medicine).

There's yet another facet of this site that will interest a number of our readers. Adam from 50 Miles of Elbow Room introduced me to the Florida Folklife Collection portion of the Florida Memory site, which contains the absolutely exhaustive documentation of the Florida Folk Festival. Visitors will find complete listings and information on each year's festival, from the 1950's to the present day. What's even more impressive about this resource is that the performances from 1954-1979 are offered directly, for streaming or download, at no charge. Every conceivable form of folk music is represented here: gospel, shape note singing, blues, Native American song, (to name a few) as well as traditional music from around the world.

What's more, for those who would prefer a more concise selection from the Festival, The Florida Folklife Collection has created four compilations. These are available as complimentary mp3 downloads, but they will also send the CD versions of these compilations to your home for free. The discs are wonderful, and they capture the rich variety of performances across the decades, from well-known acts such as the Stanley Brothers to local folk musicians. 

Included below are a few short films of the Festival and Florida folklife available at their site, and also at their Youtube page:

Following Up: Movies, Maps, Cherokee Art and Rainbow Quest

Roscoe Holcomb on Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest television show

Here are some follow-ups on some artists and issues we've recently been discussing. 

First off, here's a regrettably short NBC Nightly News report on the resurgence of community-volunteered movie theaters in the northern plains:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Last week The Daily Yonder offered a fresh installment of Roberto Gallardo's analysis of the decade's census data--with an emphasis on the shifting population trends amongst rural young people. As you might guess from the preponderance of red below, rural America (like all of America, we learn) is getting older. However, Mr. Gallardo sees signs of growth and optimism in certain regions. 

We would like to thank Benjamin for offering this article to us on our Facebook page: Mike Osborne, writing for The Voice of America, spent some time recently with Cherokee artists in North Carolina and found a success story in the midst of our nation's recession--these artists are doing good business while also finding the resources to insure that their cultural traditions thrive within the coming generations. His article can be found here, and also contains (at the bottom of the page) a five-minute audio clip of artist Davy Arch talking about how he came to work in these art forms.

Lastly, we'd like to present two video clips from Pete Seeger's Rainbow Quest television show, which he hosted in the mid-1960's. A little searching provides numerous performances online and speaks to the relaxed environment Mr. Seeger cultivated for the stunning list of folk, blues and country artists who stopped by to chat and play music. Kit MacFarlane, writing in PopMatters, has called Rainbow Quest an "Anti-TV TV" program that was more about the conversation and music than catering or pandering to audience demographics. He includes this quote by Mr. Seeger, one worth considering at this point now that we've traded tube televisions for laptops:

“This is one of the big worries of most people who like folk music. That television is going to obliterate region after region… Curiously enough, in spite of TV and everything ... I can see all around the country people doing things which are never heard of on TV, and it doesn’t make that much difference to them”

In that spirit, here are two performances. First we see John Cohen's friend Roscoe Holcomb; in the second video, Mississippi John Hurt offers a gorgeous version of "Lonesome Valley." Enjoy:

For The Weekend: Colbert, Silver Screens, and Mother Vines

photograph of The Mother Vine from southwynde.com

Here's a few follow-ups and items of interest for your weekend consideration:

Earlier in the week we discussed the United Farm Workers' "Take Our Jobs" campaign. Here's the UFW president Arturo Rodriguez with Stephen Colbert, who has become the fourth person to accept a job in the fields:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Arturo Rodriguez
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes 2010 Election Fox News

After our mention of Patricia Leigh Brown's New York Times article on small town movie theaters, Andrea, in a comment on our Facebook page, suggested this film: Small Town Silver Screen. Produced, directed and edited by Bryce Jarrett, this film describes the culture of small town movie theaters in rural South Dakota. The trailer is included below; you can follow this link to watch the whole film on YouTube:

We're looking to explore the culture of wine-making in rural America soon, and this NPR story caught our attention: The Mother Vine, the oldest cultivated grapevine in North America (400 years old!) was sprayed with herbicides by a utilities crew this spring. Melissa Block talks to John Wilson, a member of the family who is currently working to restore the vine to health.

An Appalachian And Agrarian Response to the Tragedy in the Gulf

photograph by The Associated Press

The people of the Appalachian Mountains and Louisiana bayous have a lot more in common than fiddle tunes and distinctive accents. More than most, they are called on to sacrifice to satisfy this nation's appetite for fossil fuels. And more than most, they are economically dependent on energy production.

Last week The Rural Blog posted a link to an editorial (quoted above) from the Lexington-Herald Leader that articulated what many folks, especially those in the Appalachian region, may have been thinking since the early days of the explosion in the Gulf Mexico. In the words of the editorial staff, this latest tragedy has "a familiar ring" to it. It follows the metric of all extraction economies in that it is tremendously lucrative and yet vastly destructive on all levels: the environmental, spiritual, and social. And especially in an "economic downturn" its oversized fiscal footprint disarms innovative and sustainable ideas in the region. Throw in lax regulatory oversight and a lack of political will in the statehouses and Congress, and what we see in the Gulf is Mountaintop Removal's first cousin. 

Certainly, the anger and resignation that our nation is working through this week--as officials warn that the oil may leak into the ocean for many more months--is of a kind similar to what many of us who may be from the Appalachian region are well acquainted with: that complicated and tortured understanding of how we all are linked, all implicated, to an industrial model that is destroying the structure of our communities all the while it puts on a show of setting up a few beams to hold things in place. 

This line of thinking has led me back to the work of Wendell Berry, and to the absolutely prescient short essay he wrote in the weeks after the September 11th attacks--Thoughts in the Presence of Fear. What Mr. Berry saw in that piece, and in the national conversation that followed 9/11, was an opportunity to engage in a kind of reappraisal of how, as a nation, we are carrying ourselves in our world, in our environment and in our local places. As an agrarian argument, it's worth revisiting in light of the events in the Gulf. Here are the first three sections: 

I. The time will soon come when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day.

II. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a “new world order” and a “new economy” that would “grow” on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be “unprecedented”.

III. The dominant politicians, corporate officers, and investors who believed this proposition did not acknowledge that the prosperity was limited to a tiny percent of the world’s people, and to an ever smaller number of people even in the United States; that it was founded upon the oppressive labor of poor people all over the world; and that its ecological costs increasingly threatened all life, including the lives of the supposedly prosperous.

Continue reading Thoughts in the Presence of Fear at Orion Magazine, and as always, make sure to visit Mr. Wendell Berry of Kentucky for more insight.

Grass Roots

Lavinia Nelson's Basket Stand in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, 2006 by Brian Crockett

There's a whole history behind these baskets, it's not just a basket. You have this tradition that's been handed down from generation to generation in their families, which goes back over three hundred years. So it's more that just a basket. You have a whole culture, a whole family, a whole connection of Africa and South Carolina, a whole history behind it. 

Last week we discussed the Black Banjo Gathering, and how those musicians were reclaiming the banjo as an African instrument while also celebrating how its role in American musics. The National Endowment for the Humanities, and their NEH On The Road program, are offering an exhibit that also celebrates a transatlantic cultural exchange: Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art. The exhibit's next stop is the National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC. Here's an introduction:

Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art traces the parallel histories of coiled basketry in Africa and America, and explores the contemporary evolution of an ancient craft in a global economy.

Featuring baskets from the lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, as well as from diverse regions of Africa including Senegal and South Africa, Grass Roots examines the origins of the African-American coiled basketry tradition on American shores, from the domestication of rice in Africa two millenia ago, through the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Carolina rice plantation, and then into the present day. Organized by the Museum for African Art in New York City and co-curated by Enid Schildkrout (Chief Curator, Museum for African Art) and Dale Rosengarten (Curator and Historian, College of Charleston), Grass Roots highlights the remarkable beauty of coiled basketry and shows how a utilitarian object can become both a masterwork of fine craft and a container of memory and collective history.

Last week we also discussed The Mid-American Arts Alliance and their collaboration with Dave Loewenstein on The Mural Project, and lo and behold, they've also worked with the NEH On The Road program to produce the two videos below. In the first, Dr. Rosengarten offers context for the art and a narrative on the project's development; in the second clip, Nakia Wigfall discusses her personal connection to basket arts. She's a fifth-generation basket-maker from Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, and also the director of the Sweetgrass Cultural Arts Preservation Society.

D Rosengarten Interview from Mid-America Arts Alliance on Vimeo.


Wigfall Interview from Mid-America Arts Alliance on Vimeo.

Geno Delafose

As we mentioned a few weeks back, The Western Folklife Center recently hosted its 26th National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Navada. This year the WFC invited grammy-nominated Geno Delafose and his band, French Rockin Boogie, to perform. Mr. Delafose is a rancher from Duralde, Lousiana and the son of legendary Zydeco accordion player John Delafose. Here's a video of the band playing at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, with interviews with Mr. Delafose as well as Nick Spitzer, the musicologist and host of American Routes. Enjoy:

The Western Folklife Center YouTube Channel has a wealth of videos from the Gathering, and it's really worth exploring. Here's a look at some younger musicians who are "carrying forward" cowboy music into this new century:

For Your Consideration: School Lunches and Prison Farms

Photo by Rick Loomis / Los Angeles Times

Editors note: this is a first in a new series of posts that we are hoping to function as virtual newspaper clippings--articles and perspectives that we are passing along to our readers to share and discuss. 

By Ian Halbert

More to chew on in our investigations into Farmville, USA.

Jamie Oliver, as highlighted in our last Farmville post, is mounting a new effort (complete with a companion series on ABC) to reform our dysfunctional relationship with food and our food’s dysfunctional relationship with industry. Consider the following preview clip concerning school lunches and “chicken”:

 

Now contrast this state of affairs with an Orlando prison:

WFTV Orlando: Marion Jail Inmates Growing Own Food, Raising Animals

That’s right: in this country, farm-fresh healthy produce and livestock are denied to our children, but freely provided to those who have broken the law. The newscasters’ focus on the economic advantages of using locally farmed and harvested food, while simplistic, is not surprising. There is a strange irony here: as thousands of families have been and are being dispossessed of their farms, we offer farming as a punishment to prisoners, to correct for the cost we bear in keeping them out of our communities.