Double Weekly Feed: Wild Girls, Our Town, Native Ground, Westbrook Artists, and more

 International Sonoran Desert Alliance, recipient of a NEA Our Town grant

By Rachel Beth Rudi, Digital Contributor

• Congratulations to our colleague Mary Stewart Atwell, whose debut novel Wild Girls was recently published by Scribner. "Fire-lit from start to finish, Wild Girls is a story of Appalachian magic, conflagration, and supernatural violence," writes Swamplandia! author Karen Russell. Around Art of the Rural, we call it The Appalachian Anti-Twilight. Check out the book trailer below, directed by Charlie Cline:


Wild Girls by Mary Stewart Atwell Book Trailer from Charlie Cline on Vimeo.

• GALA Hispanic Theatre is bringing a reality of rural Southwestern culture to audiences in Washington, D.C. via the Mexican dance company Teatro Linea de Sombra and their newest multimedia program. Celia Wren offers this introduction in The Washington Post: "a theatrical meditation on the harsh realities that face undocumented migrants and their families, “Amarillo” also features projections, throat singing, a surveillance camera, 100 water bottles, a 15-foot-high wall that actors climb and bounce off – and a poem by Harold Pinter." 

This event was made possible, as Wren writes, thanks to "Southern Exposure: Performing Arts of Latin America, a program of the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, supports U.S. arts presenters that band together to bring Latin American performers to this country."

 

• National Endowment for the Arts Our Town grants fund creative placemaking projects that enliven communities through vibrant and sustainable art. Information is available online, and two webinars are scheduled to aid in the application process. 

November 6: 
http://artsgov.adobeconnect.com/our-town-guidelines-nov6/ 

November 13:  
http://artsgov.adobeconnect.com/our-town-guidelines-nov13/

Rural projects have been prominently featured in this program in the past, so folks should consider applying. We will be featuring much more information on the Our Town program in the weesks to come.

• The folks at Dust-to-Digital are directing a new non-profit, Music Memory, which will feature an expansive digital database that "will serve as a musical Rosetta Stone for future generations by showing the links and cross-influences of the many musical styles captured on phonograph records in the first half of the 20th century."

• "I'm not nothin' new 'cause I'm black. Bill Pickett was black. He was one of the greatest rodeo acts of all time. A black man, DeFord Bailey, was the first country-music superstar ever. I'm just doing what the greats have already done before me."

Wild Bill Young infuses his country singing, and his strutting, with elements of hip-hop and rap, a mixture of the musics and lifestyles of his Missouri childhood, and has found he is able to defy racist stereotypes and expand cultural understanding among the audiences he performs for across the country. Calvin Cox offers a profile in The Riverfront Times.

• On Native Ground "captures a demographic of youth through elders, and reaches past all cultural and ethnic barriers, by highlighting positive role models and current and historical events that are uniquely Native American." 

Here's the premiere episode, first broadcast on First Nations Experience on October 24:


On Native Ground vol 1 from jack kohler on Vimeo.
 

• Don't Forget This Song, the Carter Family comic book, is out now – complete with a CD of eleven rare radio recordings. Says American Songwriter Magazine: "Affectionate and admiring, The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song captures the family’s rise to success through numerous struggles as well as the enduring power of music and love." 

 selection from Don't Forget This Song

• Check out this great write-up on Brian Frink and Rural America Contemporary Art in The Free Press of Mankato, Minnesota. We encourage folks to check out the amazing range of work presented on the gorgeous new RACA site -- and stay tuned, RACA is about to debut its online magazine!

• Located in Madison County, Iowa, The Westbrook Artists' Site operates as "a project for exploration of the post-industrial rural condition." We are excited about their mission statement: 

The Westbrook Artists’ Site (WAS) explores the continuity between rural and urban contexts. If the rural is typically viewed as what was left behind in the process of urbanization, WAS insists, to the contrary, that rural life and landscape need to be seen as vital parts of a system that is urban and rural. WAS cultivates art and design as purposeful interventions within such an interconnected system. The WAS project mission challenges participants to find and explore the connective tissue binding rural and urban worlds and to create modes of address that speak from a rural landscape to both rural and urban audiences. 

• "Big Tex – his mouth moved as he uttered ‘Howdy, folks!’ – was celebrating its, or his, 60th birthday. But on Friday, Big Tex caught fire and was all but destroyed in the flames and thick smoke. His fiberglass head, hat and boots were consumed, as were most of his fabric clothes, leaving only his outstretched arms, belt buckle and metal skeleton intact." Folks can read Manny Fernandez's piece New York Times story here.

Left, LM Otero, Associated Press; right, John McKibben, Associated Press

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.

In Brief: Native American Raggae, Life In Exurbia, and Goat Cheese In Marfa

Native Roots

Revolutions Per Minute: Indigenous Music Culture is an site that covers an extraordinary range of contemporary Native American music--everything from traditional forms to the electronic "art trash" rap of Glad as Knives. I highly recommend a visit to RPM--I'm excited to have discovered this site, and I look forward to writing in greater depth about it soon. 

Here's RPM writing about Native Roots, a band that bridges cultures and brings people together: 

Native Roots has been making their unique “NDN-Jamaican” music since 1997. Their sound has a solid foundation in reggae but is blended with the band’s Indigenous culture.

The songs incorporate traditional drums, flute and chants, but you can hear the cultural influence in Emmett “Shkeme” Garcia’s vocals as well – his voice reflecting his experience singing traditional pueblo and powwow music

The Texas Mountain Trail Region recently shared this video on their Facebook page, the story behind Marfa Maid Goat Cheese. Surviving in West Texas isn't easy, Malinda Beeman tells us, but she finds that the process of running a successful agricultural business is a lot like the process of making art. 

This gorgeous 12 minute documentary was created by Barefoot Workshops, a non-profit "that teaches individuals and organizations how to use digital video, new media, and the arts to transform their communities and themselves." This organization has created a great deal of work that would interest our readers, so I encourage folks to head to their site and learn more; I'll also be writing at greater length about their films soon. Until then, here's Simple As That, which was filmed, written, and edited by Kari Branch, Russell Walker and Ashley McCue:

Simple As That from Barefoot Workshops on Vimeo.

It's encouraging to hear the story of Marfa Maid Goat Cheese. Their project, and the point in their lives when they commenced this work, suggests there could be a model here for how an older generation of rural citizens can affect local economic change. As a generation of baby-boomers considers "moving home," we may have an example of how (especially in the challenging economy) these returning neighbors do more than just settle down to retire in rural America. 

This suggests "The Road to Exurbia," a recent piece published in Places (see our article on their fiction series from last week): James Barilla offers an extraordinarily insightful essay on rural exurbias--those communities close enough to major cities that they can accommodate folks who really want to live (and raise children) in a rural environment. Mr. Barilla tells his own story, and the story of his father, but also discusses the larger trend of exurbias across the country. Here's the opening paragraphs to this essay:

Each year, by his own calculation, my dad drives as many miles as the circumference of the earth. He gets up while the dawn mist is still clinging to the hemlocks and the horses are still crunching grain in their pails, settles into the car with a travel mug of coffee and a book on tape, and makes his way from a tiny hill town in Western Massachusetts to his job in a city near Boston. He’s been doing it for over 24 years, which means he’s been rotating the earth longer than many satellites.

He lives on a dirt road, not far from the boundary of the state forest. It’s the kind of place where mountain laurel grows in gnarled thickets under the canopy of oak and maple and you can’t see your neighbors. Moose wander up to the barn to make eyes at the horses, coyotes yip to each other at dawn and snakes seize wood frogs under the porch. It’s a place where you can swim in a clear pond in summer and amble across its frozen surface in winter.

“Days like these,” my dad will say on a summer Saturday evening, sitting contemplatively on the deck after an afternoon swim in a nearby lake, “this place feels like a little bit of paradise.”

Following the Texas Mountain Trail

Sunrise in Van Horn, Texas; Texas Mountain Trail's  Facebook page

Yesterday we welcomed Beth Nobles onto our site as one of what we're calling our Rural Correspondents--folks who are working on the ground level to foster the arts in our rural communities. Beth is a visual artist and the executive Director of the Texas Mountain Trail, a non-profit organization working on community development and tourism marketing for Far West Texas.

Especially after considering the argument for regional collaboration within Grant Wood's essay Revolt Against the City, the Texas Mountain Trail organization seems to have their finger on a vision of the kinds of partnerships for which a number of rural regions could avail themselves. All of the pieces are here: broad cooperation amongst businesses, organizations and artists--and, importantly, an attractive and informative website with a social media component. As a sidebar on the site tells us, The Texas Mountain Trail is connected, through a program of the Texas Historical Commission, to the nine other Heritage Trail Regions of the state.

One feature of the site that fascinated us was the story of Van Horn's Clark Hotel, which hosts, every five years, an all-town reunion. Photographers were on hand at the last gathering to document, in portraiture, all of the returning families--a visual model of a town's family tree. 

A collection of 500 photographs contained in the Clark Hotel has also been digitized and included on the University of North Texas's Portal to Texas History archive. Just as our site is beginning to consider forms of vernacular architecture and art, this is a wonderful discovery, and it's in keeping with other such archives we've discussed at the Library of Congress and the Florida Memory Archives.

Here's one of our favorites: Costumed Ladies. Though the photograph contains no information on the occasion for such costuming, we are informed that the participants consist of "Clara Bean, Neva Harrell, Mrs. Wylie, Pansy Durrill Cleg, Mrs. D.B. Jackson, Mrs. Daisy Rowe, Mrs. Jack Price:"

Reimagining The Corn Crib

photograph by Ansen Seale

It would have been a completely different exhibit if this had been in a gallery somewhere, and we were only pointing to the land, saying yeah, it's out there someplace. No, you have to come out here to experience the land, and you have to walk into this building and see these glowing panels.

Last fall The Land Heritage Institute invited Texas-based digital photographer Ansen Seale onto their grounds to contemplate a site-specific installation. When Mr. Seale visited the LHI, an organization dedicated to preserving the "archeological, cultural, educational, environmental, historical and recreational resources" along a 1,200 acre stretch along of the Medina River, the artist found himself immediately drawn to a small stone shed that had once been used to dry corn. The end result of considering this place, and the agricultural traditions it represented, led to The Corn Crib, a series of photographs housed within this structure. 

When we say "photograph," we must explain that Mr. Seale's camera, and the method it uses to capture an image, challenge our assumptions about how this medium works. Here's the artist's explanation:

Rather than suspending a single moment, my photography examines the passage of time. To accomplish this, I invented a modern digital version of the panoramic camera. In my version, a single sliver of space is imaged over an extended period of time, yielding the surprising result that unmoving objects are blurred and moving bodies are rendered clearly. The model in the studio must move in order to be captured. In the Water series, the stones in the river do not move, and so, become stripes. The water flowing past them perturbs their static image, creating a kind of color field painting. This is no trick. This is photography in the purist sense, but a form of photography where abstraction is the norm, not the exception.

By placing this attention to "the passage of time" and "moving bodies" within this former site of agricultural work, Mr. Seale has created a space in which audiences can reconsider their relationship to the land, agriculture, and our shared cultural histories as these rows of kernels are re-presented in a solar glow. All of this is beautifully illustrated by this short piece by Walley Films:

The Corn Crib from Mark & Angela Walley on Vimeo.

Chris Sauter's Rural Installations

Mind/Body Split, 2008; graphite and spray-paint on MDF, 17"x17" installed

Today we would like to return to the work of Chris Sauter, the Texas-based artist whose writings on the rural avant-garde we recently discussed. Through Mr. Sauter's work, we've uncovered a whole universe of provocative contemporary rural art; these artists, which we will feature in the coming weeks, offer the other side of a kind of continuum in the modern rural arts--a push towards a kind of aesthetic innovation that is the related counterpart to the movements to document, preserve, and re-present folk artforms and folklife. This is not to say that these two impulses are contradictory, or that there is an antagonistic relationship between the two; instead, we find both the work of Mr. Sauter and, say, Dust-to-Digital, concerned with questions of community and place, and how technology and contemporary practices can be used to say something relevant--and revelatory--about our rural communities, their people and their land. 

Mr. Sauter was born in San Antonio, though he was raised on his grandparents' ranch in Boerne, Texas. As he writes in his artist statement, Mr. Sauter is "interested in exploring the links between biology and culture, the present and the primordial, the personal and the universal," and though his work considers an array of contemporary questions, his experience in rural Texas has shaped his notions of nature and man, science and art. As the pieces below suggest, this is an artist with a restless imagination and a willingness to defamiliarize our relationship to some of the most commonplace objects and markers along our landscape. The achievement of this project seems to stem from how he merges a sensitivity to these human connections with avant-garde aesthetic concepts. He continues:

Recently, I have been exploring agriculture and astronomy (cosmology.) Both are instances when we actively interact with nature and our origins. The origin of civilization stems from the advent of agriculture and astronomy actively probes space in the search for the beginnings of the universe.

Although it is not my main goal, using agricultural imagery positions the rural experience as something equally as interesting, important, and complex as the urban. An exploration (embrace) of my own roots is both part of that desire and a mode of inquiry.

Divide and Conquer (Guenther Family Tree), 2006; 18"x12'x12'

"Seven generations of the Guenther family tree are represented as a network of interconnected grain silos with the patriarch (Karl Hilmar Guenther) as the central grain elevator. Guenther founded the Pioneer flourmill, one of the oldest family owned companies in the United States."

Plow Flag, 2006; 11'x11'x12'

Mind and Body, 2005

There are many more pieces on view in Chris Sauter's site, along with further links to his method and his philosophies. Through his site we discovered the work of the  husband-wife team of Walley Films, who put together this fantastic piece on Mr. Sauter's installation of Mind and Body:

Chris Sauter from Mark & Angela Walley on Vimeo.

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.

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:

For The Weekend: Plants, Prints, School Lunches and Gulf Coast Soul

The University of Nebraska Gardens site, edited by horticulturist Emily Levine, is also following Donald Culross Peattie's An Almanac For Moderns and regularly posting his entries online. The Gardens' site is a complete and visually stunning catalogue of everything in the Lincoln campus's Maxwell Arboretum.

The Florence Griswold Museum is currently featuring The Road Less Traveled: Thomas Nason's Rural New England. This printmaker's work is striking and austere--the perfect compliment to the work of Robert Frost. The sites features a series of videos with curator Amanda C. Burdan that explain the art and the inspirations of Mr. Nason's work. 

Along the lines of our recent "Farmville Files," here's Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project. "Mrs. Q" is a teacher with a mission to eat just what her students eat for an entire year. The site features commentary, a host of valuable links and, of course, a picture every day of what's on the menu.

Here's an article by Nancy Bless, the director of Texas Folklife, on Barbara Lynn--"The Empress of Gulf Coast Soul." It's a fantastic introduction to her work and to the cultural and musical history of the region. Here's Ms. Lynn singing her 1962 hit "You'll Lose A Good Thing."

Congratulations To Ryan Bingham

Me and my band were living out of our Suburban four years ago.

By the time Ryan Bingham spoke to reporters at the Academy Awards he was already a long way from the hard times of bullriding and roadhouse tours. Having won the Oscar for Best Original Song, for "The Weary Kind" from Crazy Heart, 2010 is shaping up to be a banner year for the young songwriter. He's set to have his Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way moment later in the summer as he joins the Country Throwdown Tour, and a new record is reportedly on the way sometime after that.

It's hard not to place this event alongside the passing of Mark Linkous in some ways; while Sparklehorse took the conventions of various forms of rural music and pushed them into the stratosphere, Ryan Bingham's work shows a willingness to accept and respect these same conventions and to work within them to leave this own mark on that tradition. In both cases, the results are honest--not contrived.

Yet Bingham is also a product of the small towns of New Mexico and Texas, and he stands now as perhaps one of the most prominent new figures for a term we're hoping to explore here at The Art of the Rural: the rural diaspora. Here's Scott Gold, writing of Bingham in the Los Angeles Times:

He was born just across the New Mexico border, in the boom-and-bust oil town Hobbs. His grandfather was a cattle rancher and owned 72 square miles, each more stark than the last, between Hobbs and Carlsbad.

Bingham's family lost the ranch amid a money dispute and would soon see more bust than boom. His father became a roughneck, an old-fashioned oil field worker who chased his work, first to Bakersfield, Calif., then to Texas -- to Midland, Odessa, Laredo. They never stayed anywhere long; Bingham eventually stopped unpacking, then reduced his belongings to a cardboard box that he carried from town to town.

His parents, he said, "were not mean people. They just couldn't get it together." Trouble came in heaps: "Fights. Pills. Alcohol." One day, he came home and slumped on the couch. The TV wasn't working but something underneath the set caught his eye. It was a mirror topped with a pile of cocaine.

"I thought: 'Well, no wonder the electricity got turned off again,' " he said.

Before his 17th birthday, he dropped out of school, where he'd grown tired of being the new kid in a small town, and left home for good.

Years of touring on the bullriding circuit and hawking his cds in the parking lot outside followed, and finally, after a few false starts and flirtations with cramming his music into a "Nashville" sound, Bingham met Joe Ely and was taken in by him and a number of other Texas songwriters. The results: his first two records on Lost Highway, Mescalito and Roadhouse Sun. Here's two songs to enjoy:

Saving Texas Dance Halls, One Two-Step At A Time

From John Burnett's piece on NPR:

Dance halls throughout Central Texas have been dying off from decay and disuse. The best way to save them? 'Dance in them,' says Patrick Sparks, a structural engineer and president of Texas Dance Hall Preservation Inc.

'My view is that the dance halls are the most Texas thing there is,' Sparks says. 'You get a look back at 19th-century Texas and the European immigrants that came and formed such a strong part of our character.'

Here's a video from Texas Dance Hall Preservation: