The Rebirth Of The Small Town Movie Theater

photograph by Fred R. Conrad, New York Times

We're back today from an extended Fourth of July holiday with two items. First, below this post, is the next installment in our Almamac For Moderns project: one of Donald Culrosss Peattie's dispatches that might resonate with readers who spent the holiday vacationing away from their usual part of the world.

We're also passing along this article by Patricia Leigh Brown on the resurgence of small-town movie theaters across The Great Plains. Her piece appeared in The New York Times on the Fourth of July, so some folks may have missed it. "In an age of streaming videos and DVDs, " Ms. Brown writes, "the small town Main Street movie theater is thriving in North Dakota, the result of a grass-roots movement to keep storefront movie houses, with their jewel-like marquees and facades of careworn utility, at the center of community life."

This well-written article touches on a number of themes present in the work we've been presenting on this site. It's also helpful in that it links to Meadowlark Arts Council,  a local arts organization that preserved The Dakota theater in Crosby, North Dakota. Tim Kennedy, a landscape architecture scholar, describes these movie theaters as embodying the notion of  “buildings as social capital." As rural communities look towards the future, it's an idea worth considering, worth arguing for among the other conventional ways of engendering economic growth. Here it is, in plain view on the floor of The Dakota:

Today, the Dakota is a star with many roles. It is a destination for high school students on a Saturday night. It is where county employees and local farmers discuss noxious weeds, and where the crowd pours in after football games to watch highlights on the big screen. On Oscar night, the program is shown live. Everyone in town gussies up and walks a red carpet donated by a local furniture company.

"Old Movie Houses Find An Audience In The Plains" can be read in its entirety here. 

An Almanac For Moderns: The Imaginary Land

July First

I have no quarrel with the people who long for the sea. The soul craves immensities, fresh emptiness where it can repose. But I would go now, if I could, to the mountains, and I don't mean what they call mountains in the Berkshires. Some gentle hills, a mere unevenness in the land, will not help me. I need a peak to lift the heart, a forest dense as moss upon a rock, laced with foaming brooks. 

But on the clearest days the Blue Ridge is not visible here even as a mirage, a high tossed smoky line penciled on the west. Only within me can I hear the song of a waterfall--not the obliterating crash of a Niagara, but an airy cascade, spilling water from the tilted ledges. Water poured so fine that it shatters on the air and drifts, as a smoke, as a lightly laden breeze, amongst the filmy leaves of the sweet Appalachian flora. There the maidenhair and the foam flower tremble forever in the breeze of the fall, and the faces of the mountain bluets, deep gentian blue in tiny forests of theadfine stems, are spangled with spray. And over the gleaming rocks creep the mosses--the deep black moss, the frail Jungermannias sending out green fingers everywhere--and the flat liverworts sprawl fast under the overhanging ledges, translucent emerald green, like seaweeds, or gray-green and nubbly, like a lizard's skin. There the gentle wood frog lives, and in the wet moss the little red triton runs, perpetually grinning, a slippery living bit of coral. Who, of a burning day upon the plain, cannot feel the coolness, the repose, of recurring phrases in the dryest of botany books, "in rich mountain woods," "in wet moss," "on dripping rocks," "in cold springs"?

More information on our Almanac For Moderns project and the work of Donald Culross Peattie can be found here.

Hamper McBee: The Good Old-Fashioned Way

Well they got some damn songs, now, hell, a man can't even figure out what in the hell's going on, don't you know. But the old songs, usually they was made in telling a damn story. A lot of the old English, old Irish ballads--they'd tell you story, a tragic story, usually. But they make some songs now that don't show you nothing.

This week the Twos & Fews label is releasing The Good Old-Fashioned Way by Hamper McBee. This record is an instant classic--a document of a singer, a storyteller and a spirit that, in this combination, truly has no match. Readers of this site may remember our earlier post on the label and its curator, Nathan Salsburg. At that time we discussed Nimrod Workman's I Want To Go Where Things Are Beautiful, as well as Mr. Salsburg's work with Cultural Equity, his excellent radio show and his own music. This latest recording seems to draw from all of these streams and--among the folk/field-recordings I have heard--occupies a space all to itself.

Charles Wolfe, in the included liner notes, does the herculean effort of succintly describing all the facets of Mr. McBee:

Here is Hamper McBee, the ginger man of Monteagle Mountain. He's a fine singer, a hard worker, a hard drinker, a wildly funny storyteller, a semi-reformed moonshiner, and a general all-purpose life force in this end of Southeastern Tennessee. Here he is at his best, relaxed, among friends, working his way through a couple of six-packs, sitting in Jake Marlowe's big front room, telling stories and singing his songs in the way that has made Hamper a local legend, and has won him friends from Memphis to Johnson City.

          ..........

Hamper was born in 1931, in Emory Gap in Roane County, Tennessee, but moved to Sewanee when he was a small boy. His father was a state highway inspector who supplemented his income by searching the mountains for herbs and roots. Hamper himself did this for a time after he quit school--he sold Black Haw bark for 65 cents a pound--and then in 1950 joined the army, doing a hitch in Korea and Germany. "After that I started in to making whiskey," Hamper recalls. "And I stayed drunk a lot of the time. I did all sorts of jobs: construction, timber cutting, mule driving, working in taverns. Spent some time working for three or four carnivals." All the jobs usually lead back to Monteagle, though, and it's there that Hamper lives today, in a trailer set back in the woods a few hundred feet from I-24.

Mr. Wolfe's reminiscences above are reprinted from a 1978 lp, Raw Mash, that has long been out-of-print. As it stands, Twos & Fews is effectively bringing the music and the storytelling of Hamper McBee back into the American vernacular and, via its partnership with the Drag City label, introducing this man to a new generation of listeners. Here's Mr. Salsburg's own thoughts on discovering the work of Hamper McBee for himself, published on his Root Hog or Die blog:

I had only heard of the moonshiner, carnival barker, singer and raconteur Hamper McBee (who was first recorded by Guy Carawan and ended up an impossibly scarce Prestige LP called “Cumberland Moonshiner” in 1965) in passing – just as a subject of one of [Sol] Korine’s films I had never seen – until I met Sol himself through his filmmaking son Harmony. Knowing my interest in those folkloric films of his dad’s, made with Blaine Dunlap in the ’70s, Harmony had a screening of Sol and Blaine’s “Raw Mash” profile of Hamper in his Nashville home, and it rendered me speechless. There’s no other way to say it: Hamper was an absolute original. His clothes; his mustache and pompadour; his lusty dedication to booze, cigarettes, and light cussing (“goddamn” and “hell” being foremost in his lexicon); his keen intelligence and creative grace (sincerely) sharing space in his conversation and repertoire with hysterically bizarre, irreverent, and filthy songs and tales from a life spent on the carnival circuit, at the moonshine still, in the Wauhatchie railroad yards, in the back of Sheriff Bill Malone’s patrol car, and as Hamper McBee.

The above song, "Jasper Jail," is included in a different from on this newly released album, which was recorded by Charles Wolfe and Sol Korine in Mr. Mcbee's home in November of 1977 and January of 1975. Click here to listen to the version of "Jasper Jail" as it appears on The Good Old-Fashioned Way. I'll leave it to our readers to pick up the record to learn more about Mr. McBee's thoughts on drinking on Sundays, making moonshine, and all his other philosophies on life, love and work. If for no other reason, his story about "Hot Rod Hogan," a carnival monkey, is worth the price of admission. "The Good Old-Fashioned Way," in all its forms, is the true art of Hamper McBee.

In Memory of Robert Byrd

photograph of Bruce Jaeger playing with Senator Byrd

Poetry, simply put, is beauty defined.

Today, among the many other remembrances and celebrations of Robert Byrd's life, we'd like to reflect upon the Senator's life-long love and support of the arts. While Congress has lost the longest-serving member in its history, and West Virginia has lost one of its tireless advocates, we all have lost an individual who carried himself through the halls of Congress with a sense of purpose and responsibility, with a sense of historical (and poetic) perspective we wish to see in all our elected officials.

Senator Byrd was a man who would come from a segregationist South, as a former member of  the KKK, who would later renounce those views--and would renounce his early opposition to the Civil Rights legislation that transformed America. His story of change is also the story of a changing perspective in many rural communities. The Senator was not afraid to admit his mistakes, and to correct them; and as his opposition to the second Iraq War so clearly demonstrates, he was also not afraid to take unpopular positions when he felt that government was not working in the best interests of the American people. 

These are personal qualities that Senator Byrd would learn from his rural upbringing, but also from the pages of books written in far-distant places, far-distant times. There are precious few lawmakers (or, for that matter, poets) who can now quote from both Shakespeare and The Bible, Tennyson and The Constitution. Here is Senator Byrd enlisting the help of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to remember his good friend Ted Kennedy:

Like many of this country's best artists, Senator Byrd was able to see with a historical and cultural perspective that could trade lines of Tennyson with fiddle runs, to see a broader and richer spectrum of human expression. Though this may be less commented on in the memorials to come, he was also an accomplished fiddle player. Here he is, atop Mount Parnassus, on stage at the Grand Ole Opry:

Lastly, here is Robert Byrd with accompaniment, playing fiddle and singing a song equal to poetry's greatest works: "Will The Circle Be Unbroken."

For The Weekend

photograph of the 2010 Mount Edgecumbe Dancers via The Bethel Council on The Arts

Here's three items worth checking out over the weekend, between enjoying the summer weather, rooting for the US Soccer Team and relaxing in general: 

I. If you took interest in our write-up of The Tundra Telegraph, pay a visit to The Bethel Council on the Arts: they host a series of arts events that highlight both contemporary and traditional forms of expression--with a specific emphasis on dance. Through this site and The Tundra Telegraph, there's a whole world of Native Alaskan dance to discover; we'll be featuring more soon. Check out their site for the 2010 Cama-i Dance Festival, where, aside from a photo archive of the event, they are featuring a streaming selection of songs heard at the Festival. this week, then check out.

II. The Daily Yonder recently published this reflection by Dee Davis, the President of The Center for Rural Strategies. Mr. Davis reads in the current events emanating from the gulf a profound historical narrative that, as a country, we avoid at our own peril:

Dandling just above the sprawling crude is the future of hundreds of small towns and villages that have endured for generations, many since before we were a country. Whatever the odds, they’ve sustained themselves, the fisheries, the rookeries, and a uniquely American cultural heritage. And they’ve done all that sustaining in the face of storms, floods, pestilence and worse -- but maybe nothing worse or more toxic than what they face today, a spill with the potential to suffocate the ecosystem and chase away the towns.

In this sense “rural” is not empty expanse, or the trees and farms between the cities, or even the place where the rest of us get our supplies of natural resources. Now, “rural” is the test of our sustainability.  What must endure? Whose places are we willing to sacrifice for some notion of a greater good and smoother sailing?  Who gets to go home again?

 III. We've written before about The Revivalist, an excellent new blog authored by Mark Lynn Ferguson that focuses on Appalachian arts and culture. Mr. Ferguson has recently written about the peculiar business of accents and the culture of beaten biscuits, among other things. You may also want to visit his interview with Mike Geiger, the creator of the County Ghost cartoon. We'll include one of Mr. Geiger's episodes below:

"We Shall Not All Sleep" by Shane Seely

Today we're offering the second of two poems by Shane Seely to inaugurate our Rural Poetry Series. "We Shall Not All Sleep" is published in Mr. Seely's The Snowbound House and appeared in magazine form in Image.

We Shall Not All Sleep

Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.  -- I Corinthians 15:51

After the smell of lilies filled the tiny country church;
after we drove down valleys and across mountians
through winter rain and fog and dissipating

snow; after the funeral director
took our coats and intoned in a low voice
his professional compassion, a kind

of snow itself; after the unexpected shock
of first seeing the coffin; after the townsfolk
and childhood friends moved through, offering

their condolences, and after we shifted from one foot to the other
beneath the burden of their sympathy;
after the remembrances, after the sons, the daughter

their sons and daughters, after the old
farmhand, the surviving sister, and the neighbor who one winter
took all his meals beside her fire remembered her

kindness and good humor as we
suffered our own memories of her kindness and good humor;
after the preacher mounted his podium

and said For God so loved the world and
If Christ be not raised;
after we took or did not take

our consolations in the miracle of the Resurrection, and after
the fugitive sun shone through the stained-glass shock of wheat
just so, we gathered in the church basement

around long tables and ate.
The United Methodist Women fed us ham and potato salad,
Jell-O with fruit suspended inside.

We remembered to each other
that she, the absent one, had been one of these women,
had served food and spoken kindly

to the families of old farmers who had died in their hard beds
or in the dust of the fields, and had received
this kindness, too, upon the death of one husband

and then another, as outside
the rain began again.
One of the United Methodist Women cried

remembering her own dead husband, and was consoled.
Upstairs, in the empty sanctuary, the coffin
and its contents removed, I sat alone

in a middle pew. Through the floor
came voices
rising and falling together.

The Tundra Telegraph

photograph by Evan R. Steinhauser from his Photo Haiku project

We're back after a short time away, and we have a real treat today: The Tundra Telegraph. This site, which operates in conjunction with The Alaska Dispatch, was launched in February of this year--and it runs on a steady stream of writing and multimedia articles submitted by the Dispatch's staff and bloggers from the the Alaskan region. Here's editor Jennifer Canfield on the Tundra Telegraph's mission:

Tundra Telegraph is for all Alaskans, but we are working extra hard to give voice to rural residents. Rural Alaska has long suffered from a lack of media coverage due to financial, logistical and cultural challenges facing both the state's media and the remote parts of the state. This has contributed to an ever-present urban-rural divide. Tundra Telegraph aims to knock down those barriers and spur discussion. Our hope is that this will lead to a more connected state.

As editor of Tundra Telegraph, I view the site as a movement of sorts; a change in how we share our experience as Alaskans. By sharing our own stories, we ensure our voices are heard unfiltered by media and politics. This idea resonates with me. I come from a generation of young Alaska Natives who are searching for who they are and what it means to be Alaska Native. We find ourselves trying to right past wrongs our ancestors experienced as a result of insensitive education systems and laws that contradict traditional ways. Some of us live urban lives while trying to maintain connections and identity to a land where our spirit has existed for thousands of years. We do this in the face of losing the glue that holds any culture together: language.

Ms. Canfield is working to reach out both to those living in these rural communities as well as those who have migrated to urban locales; as her insistence on language suggests, The Tundra Telegraph seems deeply interested in how internet technologies can enable a kind of storytelling across spatial borders. Even after only a few months, it's a rich and wonderful site. Like so many of the place's we've discussed, one can really become immersed in what is to be found here--as one article leads to another link and so forth. 

I'm sure that I'm among the majority in saying that, before visiting this site, my knowledge of Alaskan arts and culture was pretty minimal. The great virtue of this site is that it gives its readership the tools to amend this. We'll be incorporating some connections we've discovered through The Tundra Telegraph in upcoming posts. Until then, here's two recent featured videos that speak to Mrs. Canfields' mission to "maintain connections and identity to a land." First, a video of traditional dance from the Emmonak community hall; in the second video, we get to hear from a student at The University of Alaska-Anchorage who is learning the Yup'ik language. There's many more fantastic articles and media on The Tundra Telegraph site.