Stories From The Hardest Year

photograph by The Hardest Year

Last week The Daily Yonder continued its analysis of the changing demograhics in rural America; in this latest report Roberto Gallardo and Bill Bishop have coauthored a piece that considers the recession's impact: 1.2 million jobs lost in rural America. With a few exceptions (where a small amount of growth occurred) the recession has left many rural communities that were already hurting for positive economic growth in a more desperate situation. 

While, especially in an election cycle, it's easy to read these numbers, to peruse the  Yonder's maps, and feel a sense of dismay, it's important to remember the creativity and resiliency of these same communities. One source that brings us back to this foundation is The Hardest Year, a 2009 cross-country journalism project undertaken by Julie Donofrio and John Sanders. Their search for stories and perspectives led them, in most cases, into rural America; the voices they document across these videos and articles are unforgettable. It's hard not be moved and inspired by what Ms. Donofrio and Mr. Sanders have chosen to share with us. 

Their piece on Donna Sue Groves and her barn quilts was included in last week's post on the subject, but there is a lot more to The Hardest Year. I'll include two videos below, although the full story is revealed through following the links to their site. 

Here's a piece on how many tobacco farmers across central Appalachia are taking the leap of faith by transitioning from the practices of their parents and grandparents into the world of organic farming. In conjunction with Appalachian Sustainable Development, a regional organic movement is emerging in the heart of what was once tobacco country:

 

In this second selection, we travel to Eskridge, Kansas to hear the story of Maisie Devore. Ms. Devore collected cans along a one-mile circuit of local road for thirty years so that she could raise enough money to build a pool for the town's children. 

Following The Quilt Trail

photograph from the North Tennessee trail by Suzi Parron

Last week Noah Adams produced an excellent piece on NPR's All Things Considered that discussed Tennessee century farms -- both the history of these families and their uncertain future. Mr. Adams journey to these farms followed the North Tennessee Quilt Trail, one of many such trails throughout rural America. 

The barn quilt phenomenon began in Adams County, Ohio in 2001, when Donna Sue Groves set a painted plywood "quilt" on her barn in honor of her mother Maxine, an accomplished quilter. What followed was the Adams County Clothesline of Quilts, a 105 mile circuit that now includes dozens of barns. As Ms. Groves developed this trail--and a movement gathered around the artform--the practice blossomed into a force that both sustained the community and brought in lots of folks to wander the trail and engage in some agritourism. This has led to the formation of regional, and even national, communities of barn quilters; almost a decade later, one would be hard-pressed to drive through many rural counties without having your journey annotated by a few of these quilts. 

An internet search demonstrates how widespread this new artform has become, and how many local rural communities are seeing the wide array of benefits inherent to the art of barn quilting. Suzi Parron, a writer and high school English teacher, has partnered with Ms. Groves to tell the story of this movement in Barn Quilts and The American Quilt Trail, set for publication by Ohio University Press in 2011. Ms. Parron maintains an excellent blog documenting her book-writing process and her travels to barns across the country. 

Below is a video that tells another angle of the story behind these barn quilts. Here, the producers behind The Hardest Year visit Ms. Groves, who is now undergoing treatment for breast cancer. In the face of challenges so painfully common for many Americans in the last few years -- job loss, illness, mounting health care bills -- the community that Ms. Groves helped to create is now reaching to offer their support and friendship.

James Magee and The Hill

photograph by Tom Jenkins, via Granta

"Everybody who has been [there] divides their lives into two parts: before and after they've seen The Hill."

      - Rick Brettell, co-author of James Magee: The Hill

Ninety miles east of El Paso,  deep in the West Texas desert, lies one of the most elaborate and, until recently, unsung American art installations -- The Hill, a site 25 years in the making and 15 years from completion. With Revelation: The Art of James Magee opening at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, an opportunity has emerged for the public to begin to encounter--from a comfortable, air-conditioned distance--what only a few people have experienced. It's also a chance to learn about the artist; here's an introduction from The Hill's official site:

For more than a quarter of a century, the American artist, James Magee, has been engaged in a massive, largely secret, almost solitary endeavor in the vast plains of West Texas. A Michigan-born, Ivy League-educated lawyer, Magee’s unusual trajectory through New York taxi driver and off-shore roughneck led him to make his home in El Paso, Texas, a border city made up of equal parts Mexico and the U.S., where, fittingly, he produces a vast body of work both under his own name and under the names of Annabel Livermore and Horace Mayfield, liminal identities in a liminal place. A painter, sculptor, poet, film and video maker, widely featured in museum and gallery exhibitions across the U.S. from the Yale University Art Gallery to the Santa Monica Art Museum, Magee here reveals himself to be an architect, engineer and builder as well.

While following the link above will offer perhaps the most detailed description available of The Hill, this provocative essay by Pamela Petro, published in Granta, attempts what seems to evade much of the reportage on Mr. Magee and The Hill--that is, it tries to use language to approximate an experience that defies description or summary. Here's Ms. Petro approaching the site:

Somewhere on the road ahead, Jim Magee is chatting through a translator with China’s Minister of Culture. Like me and the group of people I’ve been travelling with, the Minister wants to see Jim’s Hill.

No one who’s seen The Hill has been able to describe it to me without visceral discomfort. Actually, no one’s been able to describe it at all.

‘It’s, ah, well, um…Jim’s like an onion,’ were the words that came out of my friend Alan’s mouth when he picked me up at the El Paso airport last night. I wanted to hear about The Hill, but Alan could only touch on the layers of its creator. ‘You’ll see for yourself,’ he finally said.

Fair enough. So far I have only basic facts in a notebook: James R. Magee, a sixty-two-year-old Michigan transplant by way of New York, city and state, has since 1982 acquired 2000 acres in the desert outside of El Paso. On it he has created…what? I don’t know. Something that reduces articulate art historians to murmuring wonder. Something large and multifaceted and of the land, but not Land Art, in the sense of a particular environment manipulated to human design. A work capable of making adults weep and begetting terror in its viewers, even nightmares. From the awkward descriptions I’ve heard, The Hill seems insistent on resurrecting the word ‘awe’, allowing it to once again summon ‘solemn wonder tinged with latent fear'.

Here also is an interview segment with Mr. Magee from the Art & Seek program, which covers the arts and culture of North Texas. While this interview (beginning at 16:50) is not entirely satisfying, it (again) adds a layer of approximation to the experience of The Hill. 

While this piece comes out of a different sort of experience than many of the rural artists we've covered, and while it has a complicated relationship to rural place that may not be as intimate (in some ways) than modern artists we've discussed such as David Lundahl, James Magee may deserve to considered alongside those artists, musicians and writers for the ways in which local place has directly come to bear on how The Hill has been sculpted and articulated. If Mount Airy gave birth to a particular style of music, then, judging from Mr. Magee's reverence for these West Texas plains, there's something just as honest and site-specific about The Hill.

The Alan Lomax Archive Channel

Lomax in the Carribean, 1962; via the Library of Congress

We're just coming back from a Labor Day holiday and wanted to share this new YouTube channel for The Alan Lomax Archive. We've written previously about The Association for Cultural Equity, the organization which continues the work of preserving Mr. Lomax's archive as well as forwarding, in the digital age, his belief in cultural equity as a basic human right. This YouTube channel is a perfect extension of those goals, representing footage shot during Mr. Lomax's American Patchwork project. (The edited episodes can be viewed on Folkstreams, just scroll to the bottom of the link.) Here's what we have too look forward to on the channel:

Represented are former levee and railroad workers, farm women, bluesmen, and young tall-tale rhymers from the Mississippi Delta; New Orleans jazz parades; Cajun cowboys; Sea Island game songs; Sacred Harp singing; clogging contests from Virginia; country gospel, Primitive Baptists, and coal miners from Kentucky and Tennessee; bootleggers, balladeers, tobacco workers, and a Georgia bluegrass festival. There is also footage of breakdancers in Philadelphia; Italian and Italian American folk musicians at the Giglio Festival in Brooklyn; Latino car clubs; Yaqui Indian dancers, and Norteno musicians from Arizona.

Here are three of our favorites, though artists we've previously spoken of, such as Nimrod Workman and Tommy Jarrell, are also included on the site. Enjoy:

Joe Savage -- Dangerous Blues (1978)

The 1982 Holly Springs Sacred Harp Convention - Hallelujah

Sheila Kay Barnhill Adams - Little Margaret (1982)

Returning To Mount Airy, North Carolina

Photograph from the Tommy Jarrell Festival, via The Surry Arts Council

Today we would like to share more information on the music scene surrounding Mount Airy, North Carolina--the home of WPAQ and the "Merry-Go-Round" weekly radio show we mentioned last week. We would also like to thank The Rural Blog for  featuring our write-up; it's an honor to be part of the site's conversation, as our daily reading of The Rural Blog was one of the sparks of inspiration which led us to start The Art of the Rural.

One of the first places to begin exploring the musical abundance of the Mount Airy region would be The Surry Arts Council; based in Mount Airy, the Arts Council features a host of events from jazz, theater, and dance performances to The Tommy Jarrell Festival. Mr. Jarrell (1886-1985) was a legendary and widely-influential fiddler from the Mount Airy region, and the Festival in his honor is held each year on the weekend preceding his March 1st birthday. A fine biography can be found here, while Mr. Jarrell can also be seen in Alan Lomax's film Appalachian Journey. The  1991 film was produced in conjunction with The Association For Cultural Equity and is featured above on the excellent Folkstreams film archive.

Mr. Jarrell is also featured in the extraordinary films of Les Blank, an artist the New York Times aptly described as "a master of films about the American idiom." His film titles tell the story of his peripatetic documentary imagination: Dizzy Gillespie, Gap-Toothed Women, and Ziveli! Medicine For the Heart (a look at Serbian-American communities). Here's My Old Fiddle (1994),  a follow-up to this 1983 documentary on Tommy Jarrell Sprout Wings and Fly:

North Carolina Public Television's Folkways program, hosted by folk-musician and storyteller David Holt, recently produced this excellent half-hour piece on the musicians of Surry County, documenting the origins of the Surry County sound. There's some wonderful stories and anecdotes about Mr. Jarrell and his fellow musicians:

As if the videos above aren't enough to make you want to move to Mount Airy, there are also these clips courtesy of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, an organization with a mission to "help the true pioneers and forgotten heroes of Southern music gain recognition and meet their day to day needs" while presenting these musical traditions to larger audiences and working to preserve these artforms. Here's a music lesson with Mount Airy fiddler Benton Flippen, followed some video from his time at the 28th Annual Mount Airy Fiddler's Convention:

Almanac For Moderns: Gold In The Wing

August Thirty-First

August, the aureate month, draws to its blazing close - a month of sun, if there was one. Gold in the grain on the round-backed hill fields. Gold in the wood sunflowers, and in the summer goldenrod waving plumes all through the woodlot, trooping down the meadow to the brookside, marching in the dust of the roadways. Gold in the wing of the wild canaries, dipping and twittering as they flit from weed to bush, as if invisible waves of air tossed them up and down. The orange and yellow clover butterflies seek out the thistle, and the giant sulphur swallowtails are in their final brood. The amber, chaff-filled dust gilds all the splendid sunsets in cloudless, burning skies. Long, long after the sun has set, the sun-drenched earth gives back its heat, radiates it to the dim stars; the moon gets up in gold; before it lifts behind the black fields to the east I take it for a rick fire, till it rises like an old gold coin, that thieves have clipped on one worn edge. 

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

Standing Up For Local Radio And Local Culture

photograph by Kelly Kress of Learn NC

Yesterday afternoon NPR's All Things Considered presented a feature on "The Merry-Go-Round," a weekly live music show broadcast out of Mount Airy, North Carolina on WPAQ radio. "The Merry -Go-Round" has been their Saturday morning staple since the station first went on the air in 1948; in fact, the station has remained true to founder Ralph Epperson's original mission, despite its place in an era where radio is increasingly pushed to follow homogeneous programming standards. Here's how WPAQ describes its relationship the community:

Fortunately for his friends and neighbors, Ralph Epperson believed in individualism and he had a mission in mind:  to serve his community.  In his application to the Federal Communications Commission, the young man pledged to reflect the cultural and musical values of the people in his station’s listening area.  He said he would present local talent, and he made good on that promise from the start.  Unlike many other station owners, however, Epperson largely stuck to his mission over the next six decades.  Live music by local musicians is still presented each Saturday on WPAQ’s Merry-Go-Round program.  Epperson himself hosted another program, the Blue Ridge Spotlight, on Saturday afternoons, on which he presented early recordings from the WPAQ archives and other recordings of area musicians and WPAQ’s weekly play lists are peppered with recordings of local musicians.  Preachers still hold forth on weekday mornings and nearly all day Sunday.  Announcers read the obituaries at least three times a day, and the Pet Patrol helps listeners get back together with wandering critters from blue tick hounds to hogs and heifers.  The music lurches from old time and bluegrass to easy listening after the evening news.  Ralph Epperson explained his philosophy to reporter Michelle Johnson of WFDD this way as she prepared a story about WPAQ for National Public Radio: “If people are doing the same thing in 25 places up and down the radio dial, why should I be number 26?”

If "The Merry-Go-Round" stands as one of the last live (and local) music shows on radio, at least in the old-time genre, then it is as much a testament to how Pete Seeger's belief in technology's ability to sustain traditional music can exist even after the culturally-deadening effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996--the legislation that, with the sweep of President Clinton's pen, removed regulatory protections for local broadcasting outlets. 

However, we can now hear WPAQ live online from any location in the country, with unfettered availability as long as Net Neutrality is not a concept that meets an end similar to many small-market broadcasting outlets after 1996. In many ways, what the story of WPAQ presents to us is how such seemingly distant regulatory issues are rural issues, and how they can forcefully alter the contours of the rural arts. Listening to WPAQ, hundreds of miles from Mount Airy, it's hard not to be moved, to feel the need to work in our own finite and individual ways to spread the word about Net Neutrality--and to protect our access to treasures like WPAQ and "The Merry-Go-Round."

What other local radio stations are our readers listening to, either on the radio or on the internet? Feel free to drop us a line or comment on our Facebook page; we would love to follow up with more features on these stations, and to add them to our Rural Arts Map.  

Also, many thanks to Lisa from Legal Ruralism for alerting us to the NPR feature.