Legal Ruralism and Western Swing

The Side Kicks performing in Goree, Texas; photograph by Hanaba Munn Welch

Legal Ruralism is a site that we've been wanting to highlight for a while: it's a blog with a staff of two dozen writers that discusses issues of law, governance, and policy--and many other elements of contemporary rural life. Recent posts have considered President Obama's signing of the Tribal Law and Order Act, the bias against rural whites in college admissions, and a fascinating report on how the town of Beatrice, Nebraska passed their Homestead Act of 2010 in order to reap the tax benefits from vacant properties. Legal Ruralism is an invaluable resource, and it's one of the sites that fall under our "daily reading" category. 

They recently offered a link to Wade Goodwyn's NPR piece on the Bobby Boatright Memorial Music Camp in Goree, Texas. Established in memory of a local fiddle player who died of leukemia, the Camp serves as one of the dwindling opportunities for this small town (population 300) to come together as a community. It's a chance for local youth to learn the music of their parents and grandparents; in a town in danger of disappearing from the map, folks are seeing this camp--and this musical heritage--as a way to preserve families, culture, and even a sense of economic sustainability. Here's an excerpt from Mr. Goodwyn's report:

The camp is housed in what used to be the junior high in Goree — that is until last September, when the school district gave the building and campus back to the town and said, "Good luck." That was a big blow because the junior high was pretty much the only reason anyone still came to Goree.

Tammy Trainham looks out over the school courtyard and smiles. She is the mayor's wife and this is her doing — she talked them into bringing the fiddle camp here. These five days are all that's left between Goree and oblivion. 

"We're trying to rebirth a town," Trainham says. "It was dead — graveyard dead."

If you're new to western swing, the NPR link will provide a few other articles that will help to tell the story of this music and its artists. Western swing has a special place here at The Art Of The Rural: our first post discussed Texas Dancehall Preservation, and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys are always in constant rotation. Leading into the weekend, we'd suggest checking out their Tiffany Transcriptions records. If you are familiar with their studio recordings, the Tiffany recordings will be a revelation--with a little more room to expand the songs, it's easy to see Mr. Wills as country music's Duke Ellington (they do indeed cover some of Duke's compositions) and the Texas Playboys as a group that undoubtedly cleared a path for later rock musicians--some of the guitar and pedal steel solos on these records are just scorching. Here's a television performance of "Ida Red;" it lacks the verve and grit of the version of the Tiffany Transcriptions recording, but still swings:

An Almanac For Moderns: Thrush Song

July Seventeenth

I never hear the thrush now, without wondering if it will be the last time this season that he sings. After each burning day I feel sure that, like a flower of the field, the song will be wilted in the heat. All too soon the thrush will molt. He will be here hopping about silently in the woods and thickets, but he will not sing. Then indeed the dead of summer will be upon us; breathless heat and heavy-hearted silence will settle on the spots where now he still takes up his evening station to refresh the hour when the soul can breathe in quiet, the brief, brief moments between the fiery setting of the sun and the falling of the heavy-leaved darkness.

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

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:

New Work From Minnesota Artists

Apparatus by Bradford Kissell

One of our earliest posts related our discovery of MN Artists, an organization with a mission "to improve the lives of Minnesota artists and provide access to and engagement with Minnesota's arts culture." Their site is a model that other states would be wise to follow: it offers, in one place, a rich and various selection. While artists can display and sell their work, MN Artists also offers a good deal of interviews, features and reviews--in short, it's the portal through which anyone can learn more about the Minnesota arts. 

As our readership has expanded since our earliest months online, we'd like to re-present this site and offer a small selection of the work to be found therein. When the artists have offered statements to accompany these pieces, we'll include them below. Enjoy:

from The Disappearing Homestead Project, Jeffrey Morrison

Futures of our rural landscape continue to be the focus of my work.

Currently interested in exploring systems involved with suburban expansion into agricultural lands, my art practice probes philosophical notions regarding shifting populations and land stewardship.

As more and more rural acres are appropriated for urban development and city expansion the disappearance of family farms continues to grow at alarming rates—current annual rate average of prime agricultural land converted to developed uses is 2,416,200 acres. [As reported by National Resources Inventory Census of Agriculture]

Vested in bring agricultural-related issues into the public eye to attract audiences as well as raise awareness, I continue to explore our relationship to the land and to the pioneering spirit our ancestors brought to the Midwest.

Overseeing The Crops, 54" x 19" Oil Paint on Canvas, Jill Peterson

"Overseeing the Crops was inspired by black and white photographs that I found in my grandmother's old albums. Besides seeing family members, some I had never met before, it gave me a chance to glimpse at brief moments of history that made up generations of a life in rural North Dakota. As technology progressed, the tedious work with horses was replaced with the invention of the combine, which led to a more productive way of working the land. It also allowed oneself to stand back and admire the vast golden fields of wheat, a collaborative effort that has been built upon by many generations of farmers."

Flood, from a Polaroid series, Jaid Jacobson

"This is a collection of polaroids taken in the summer of 2008 when Spring Green, WI was flooded out." 

Maturity by Sarah Hultin

"The reality of abandoned houses in rural areas is apparent but the past easily forgotten. The past cannot be denied because it is incapable of existing in lasting structures. Memories may not be visible but linger in the forms that still exist. The series of work titled “Rural Inhabitants” reawakens memories prominent in such structures. The walls of the abandoned house conceal the past. Beyond the structures, which have proved impermanent, we cannot distinguish ourselves from those of our ancestors. In effort to describe the past, I have introduced the human figure. The figure represents a memory while the structure itself is associated with the present reality. Inspired by the tendency to bury the past away in structures incapable of existing forever, the memories of the past too become a form, tangible and capable of decay."

Corn Mill, Leanna Becker

"In these times, farmers are overlooked and taken for granted, and rural family farms are disappearing more each day. The hog market has crashed in the last two years causing a crisis for farmers, especially in the Midwest.  People are constantly laid off and looking for jobs, but farmers have a steady job from dawn until dusk everyday. Our farm could not survive successfully without the family members. Everyone plays an important part on the farm, from working the fields and giving shots, to filing the papers and reviewing the payroll. This is a job that takes a large amount of labor, but is paid a low amount of income. However, this is still very rewarding no matter what the circumstances.

I have been working on our family farm since I was as small as a pig. When you are born into a farm family, you are immediately taught the importance of family and work ethic. Even though we have to work together day in and day out, we remain a really close-knit family. Most of our summer outings include our family, our aunt and uncle’s family, and my grandparents. My dad loves to quote the saying, 'Friends come and go, but family is forever.'"

Remembering The High Lonesome

Roscoe Holcomb, Daisy, Kentucky, 1959 by John Cohen

In the seven months since we began The Art of The Rural, the work of John Cohen has returned again and again to inform the artists and discussions in these pages. I was reminded once more of his experiences in Madison County, with Dillard Chandler, last week when discussing the insider/outsider tension at the heart of our nation's reckoning with Mountaintop Removal. Cut along the lines of this binary is another dichotomy that's just as slippery, one that (in the aforementioned post) Ashley Judd has been set between: the over-arching friction between "rural" and "urban." To see the distance between these two terms as set-in-stone, or of an easy-to-define textbook nature, is to misapprehend the fluidity of each classification. As mentioned last week, rural America (however it is defined) is in a process of radical and emphatic change. 

So much of Mr. Cohen's work is a moving example of this give and take--and should remind those of us living in rural America (or among the rural diaspora) that the dialogue between rural and urban, "insider" and "outsider," has produced so much of the intellectual and artistic material that best characterizes American life. We owe a great debt to Mr. Cohen for understanding this from an early age, and for making a life's mission out of preserving and celebrating that beauty. Regardless of the obstacles along the way, he repeatedly ventured from the city into Appalachia; in an age before the internet, he established a remarkable camaraderie, a common ground, with the folks he met and the singers he recorded and filmed. Without doubt, if this artist had not made the leap of faith from the city into these hollows, we very well may have lost these voices. 

I'd like to include some links below that may be of interest both to those who know and love his work, but also for those who may not have come across John Cohen before. First, here's Remembering The High Lonesome, a 2003 documentary film by Tom Davenport and Barry Dornfeld. Here's their introduction:

Remembering the High Lonesome is the story of the making of a classic documentary film. It is also a profile of filmmaker, photographer, artist, and musician John Cohen. Through interviews, as well as Cohen's own photographs and scenes from his classic film The High Lonesome Sound: Kentucky Mountain Music, filmmaker Tom Davenport focuses on Cohen's journey to rural Kentucky in the 1950s to document the lives of the people there and his "discovery" of the musician Roscoe Holcomb. Remembering the High Lonesome also examines the birth of a new artistic ethic and counterculture through John Cohen's involvement with the Beat Generation, abstract expressionist painters, and the Folk Music Revival, and explores the role of an outsider documenting the life and arts of an Appalachian community.

The full documentary is available for view, absolutely free, from the amazing Folkstreams website right here. Here's a trailer, followed by a clip from The High Lonesome Sound of the brilliant banjo player Roscoe Holcolmb:

The High Lonesome Sound Revisited is a fine companion piece to this documentary--it's a 2009 lecture Mr. Cohen presented at The Library of Congress that tells the story of both his field recording and movie-making, while also considering the impact these projects had on the development of documentary filmmaking and ethnographic research. Follow this link to a high-quality video of Mr. Cohen's talk.

In an effort linked to his song-gathering, Mr. Cohen also performed with the legendary folk group The New Lost City Ramblers during those watershed years of the late 1950's when America was rediscovering the value of its traditional music. Here's two links to documentaries that help tell the story of these musicians' impact on the course of American music. The first clip is from Play On, John: A Life In Music, a film by Rick King featured on The Smithsonian Channel; the second is from Always Been A Rambler, a film by Yasha Aginsky and The Arhoolie Foundation.

More of Mr. Cohen's photography, music and film are on display at his official website (also highly recommended: his book of photographs There Is No Eye). You can follow these links to also learn more about the heady milieu John Cohen was a part of in the late 1950's in New York City (Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, Alan Ginsberg) and how his work helped to influence those conversations that happened hundreds of miles from the towns where Mr. Cohen drew his inspiration.

The Zenchilada And Corn Cob Wine

photograph by Kat Kinsman, who also writes for Eatocracy

The Zenchilada is a new online magazine that aims to discuss the ways in which food can be "our vehicle for better understanding of ourselves and others." We'd like to thank Chuck, a reader from North Carolina, for suggesting this publication--we think that folks are really going to enjoy it.

What's fascinating about this magazine, most immediately, is it's format: when you direct your browser to the site, the current issue opens up, complete with an easy-to-use browser bar. The Zenchilada is gorgeously illustrated, and its layout is artfully done; the site accentuates these features without getting lost in the technology. What's also really exciting about this magazine (as opposed to the hundreds of other "cooking magazines") is that it's equally concerned with the culture that complements these dishes. A quick glance to this first issue's contributor's list speaks to this: chefs, food writers, poets and folklorists have all gathered in these pages to offer a range of perspectives on these foods' connections to people and place. 

The current issue opens with "Meditation on the Corn Tortilla Nation" by Ronni Lundy, the editor-in-chief and a founding member of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and the writing to follow also considers the culinary and cultural reach of maize. One piece that caught our eye was The Lee Brothers' introduction to corn cob wine. In this excerpt from their Southern Cookbook: Stories and Recipes for Southerners and Would-Be Southerners, they discuss and "end of the summer ritual" they learned from Gordon Huskey of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee:

Since it's difficult to shear all the kernels off the rounded cob, a fraction of sweet kernel gets left behind. Rather than send this residue to the compost pile, Huskey put it to a higher use, making wine by packing the half-naked cobs in a water-filled pail. Airborne wild yeasts did the work of extracting the remaining sugar from the cobs and converting it into alcohol. Corncob wine has a nice balance of sweet and tart and a nutty, unmistakably corny flavor.

Explore The Zenchilada for the corn cob wine recipe (on page 97) and to discover all kinds of other inspired takes on our staple crop. You'll also find poetry, storytelling, archaeology and some wonderful recipes within--we can't recommend this site/publication highly enough. It's a model for how we can use a sometimes-depersonalizing technology to share some profound stories with each other.

William Faulkner At The University of Virginia

photograph from Special Collections Library, University of Virginia

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.

This morning NPR featured a piece on an exciting new digital archive that should be of interest to many of our readers. It's the Faulkner at Virginia audio archive, an impressively comprehensive document of the writer's time on campus in Charlottesville during the 1957-1958 academic year.

This archive was directed by Professor Stephen Railton, with the assistance of a vast number of folks in the UVA community, and it is incredibly thorough: all facets of Faulkner's visit are covered in the contexts section of site, as this essay is complemented by ample photographs as well as dozens of primary sources from contemporary newspaper accounts and even Faulkner's own correspondence. For readers of Faulkner, this is a treasure. 

The entire audio archive of Faulkner's various lectures and discussions is included therein, and a full manuscript is also included--all of which is searchable. I have long been considering writing about Yoknapatawpha County--that landscape located between the creative mind of William Faulkner and his "apocryphal county" of Lafayette in Mississippi. This archive is a great step towards considering how this writer's visions of South, and of the rural, still haunt us and still feel so necessary to our lives. 

Here's just a taste; the audio clip can be found here:

Unidentified participant: Sir, why do you sometimes satirize the South, and at other times very—very strenuously satirize it? [And] what is your general feeling of the South, and the deep South?

William Faulkner: It's my country, my native land, and I love it. I'm not trying to satirize it. I'm—I'm trying—that is, I'm not expressing my own ideas in the stories I tell. I'm telling about people, and these people express ideas which—which sometimes are mine, sometimes are not mine, but I myself am not trying to satirize my country. I love it, and it has its faults, and I will try to correct them, but I wouldn't try to—to correct them when I'm writing a story, because I'm telling—talking about people then.

Enjoy wandering through these discussions. Also: In 2008, the University of Virginia Magazine featured this write-up on Faulkner's visit, including a video interview with alumni remembering his visit.