The Art Of The Rural

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

David Lee, Carolina Soul & The Paradise of Bachelors Record Label

David Lee with the Washington Sound record shop sign, in front of his storage trailer;

[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines, this seems like a good time to give a retrospective glance to the first two years of Art of the Rural. Over these weeks I will feature a few new articles, but also many favorites from the archives. Thanks again to everyone who has read and contributed; what began as a labor of love has become a project far larger, and far more rewarding, than I ever could have anticipated - and I deeply appreciate the readership and participation of such a diverse audience. Starting March 19th, we will offer new articles and share some new projects related to our mission.

David Lee's Carolina Soul was originally published on August 2, 2011.]

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Long-time readers might remember our piece from last year on the Carolina Soul site and the Paradise of Bachelors record label. POB's first release, Said I Had A Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee 1960 - 1988 was one of our absolute favorite records from 2010--and the release has continued to get some wonderful press, so I'd like to start off the week by sharing some of this information. If we've hit the summer doldrums (August), this record is the best antidote I can imagine. Paradise of Bachelors is now offering a limited edition LP repressing; folks can find the digital download at iTunes or Amazon Music.

Here's "You've Been Gone Too Long" by Ann Sexton. As the liner notes explain, "the tune must make any list of curious, 'Jody' genre songs, for its reference to the archetypal male opportunist who, according to Vietnam-era folklore, would latch onto women whose husbands or boyfriends were serving overseas."

While we are currently in a golden age of reissues and unearthed music, with more and more coming out each week, what sets Said I Had a Vision apart is its combination of context (rural North Carolina, from the civil rights era to the Reagan era), the quality of its songwriting, and the absolute exuberance of the performances. Many such records have these qualities in unequal parts, but Said I Had A Vision contains songs that exceed the normal obscurity-fetish that similar records often cultivate. After I play this record through, I generally feel like everyone I know needs to hear these songs.

It should be no surprise, then, that the music press has embraced this record and the regional vision behind the Paradise of Bachelors label, which is co-curated by folklorists Jason Perlmutter and Brendan Greaves. I was excited to learn that Wax Poetics had featured Said I Had a Vision in a recent issue; here's Jon Kirby:

A man of faith, [David] Lee's output tended towards the spiritual. And although most benefit from Cleveland County's proximity to Charlotte's Arthur Smith and Reflection Studios, perhaps his most generous offering was recorded on location at Mice Creek Baptist Church, in nearby Gaffney, South Carolina. "On My Way Up" by the Relations Gospel Singers showcases the careening lead of Steve Allen, whose exorcism range leaves church-van tracks through a field of delicate piano and choral support, recalling the fly-on-the-wall intimacy of an Allan Lomax artifact. Much of Lee's color-blind songwriting was realized by the Constellations, a salt-and-pepper ensemble who, during Shelby's annual Art of Sound Festival last October, proved they could still do "The Frog," walking sticks in hand. "They were just like kids to us when they started," revealed wife Nelena of Lee's most allegiant act. "We was just like a big family, rolled up together." With the exception of "northern soul" curiosity Ann Sexton, most on Lee's short-but-sweet roster still reside in Cleveland County, like blue-eyed crooner Bill Allen from nearby Cherryville. "You probably drove past there!" exclaims Lee. "You should have hollered for Bill when you was coming through."

Further write-ups on the resurgence of interest in Mr. Lee's work has appeared in Our State magazine and The Charlotte Observer. Earlier this year, Mr. Lee was awarded the Brown-Hudson award by the North Carolina Folklore Society, introduced by Mr. Perlmutter and Mr. Greaves. Afterwards, he gave a performance of "I Can't Believe You're Gone" and "I'll Never Get Over Losing You," the latter of which appears on Said I Had a Vision:

Paradise of Bachelors will release an LP/download of new material emerging from the South this fall: Poor Moon by the much-loved and critically-acclaimed Hiss Golden Messenger. Also in the works is a release of new and remastered material by Willie French Lowery, a member of the Lumbee Tribe in North Carolina and who has worked previously with the psychedelic bands Plant & See and Lumbee. I'll include a sample of each artist below; you can also follow the latest Paradise of Bachelors news on their Facebook page.

Hiss Golden Messenger from Gianmarco Del Re on Vimeo.

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[Discovering Carolina Soul was originally published on September 23, 2010]

The former Washington Sound on Buffalo Street in Shelby, NC; from Carolina Soul

Throughout the sixties and seventies, at least one hundred African-American-owned R&B/Soul record stores thrived in the Carolinas. These retail shops, with their close links to recording studios and local record labels, were on the front lines not only of new musical ideas, but of the civil rights struggle itself. Today, this music's story is being told in a compelling fashion on the Carolina Soul blog/archive, which has spent the last five years locating and documenting the wide array of R&B/Soul music created in North and South Carolina--much of which has never been re-issued since its original release as 45 rpm records.

If you peruse Carolina Soul's extensive discography the material object of the vinyl record begins to stand as a symbol for a kind of rural-urban linkages that revolutionized the last half-century's artforms and its push toward social justice. This effort to rediscover these recordings, and to tell the stories of these musicians and their communities, is led by Jason Perlmutter (a chemist and local music collector) and Jon Kirby (an associate editor at Wax Poetics). Mr. Perlmutter, in partnership with folklorist Brendan Greaves, has begun the Paradise of Bachelors record label and is currently pressing their first release -- a retrospective of the music released on David Lee's various record labels entitled Said I Had A Vision.

Mr. Lee, who currently resides in Mooresboro, ran the Impel, Washington Sound and SCOP (Soul, Country, Opera, Pop) labels and often contributed his own songs to his musicians. Carolina Soul recently visited Mr. Lee, and, earlier in the year, the folks behind this project spent time talking with some of the artists who worked with him. Here we see the The Constellations, both then and now:

Here, from the Paradise of Bachelors' blog, is a description of the ground-breaking work done by The Constellations:

We spent an illuminating and pleasant afternoon in Mooresboro, North Carolina with the Lees; Harold Allen, Don Camp, William “Butch” Mitchell, and Benjamin and Bryan “Brownie” Guest of the Constellations. Hearing these gentlemen’s stories about unflagging brotherhood, camaraderie, and the timelessness of “love ballads”–in the face of physical threats, racist invective, and a Southern and national climate opposed to their very existence–was truly inspiring. The Constellations were the first mixed-race combo in the area, and they did it as mere kids, getting started in 1958 or 1959 as teenagers and only dissolving upon the departure of members to Vietnam in 1964 and 1965.

In that time, they recorded six energetic sides for David Lee, all of which belie their tender ages, plus two unreleased tracks–”Have You Seen My Baby?” and “I Want to Jerk”–which Mr. Lee sent to Benjamin Guest while he was serving in Vietnam. Those tapes may yet emerge for your delectation…

We can only hope to that some of this music makes its way on to Carolina Soul or onto a newly-pressed piece of vinyl via Paradise of Bachelors.

As a closing note, for those who would like to hear these gentlemen put these songs into a more eloquent context than I can provide, please refer to their interview with Frank Stasio on NPR's The State of Things.

Tuesday, March 13, 2012

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Rural

Cast-iron stove reclaimed by David Lundahl from a local farm; the foundation for a new sculpture

What We Talk About When We Talk About The Rural was originally published on August 15, 2011.]

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While working on an Art of the Rural project at New Light Studios in southern Wisconsin, the self-created arts environment of David Lundahl (who, despite physical and economic hardship, rebuilt a dilapidated dairy farm into a vibrant arts space) I had a moment to learn that some of my comments after the recent Talk of the Nation piece on rural America were printed in The Daily Yonder, and that TOTN's Blog of the Nation gave The Art of the Rural an enthusiastic mention. It's an honor on both fronts, and timely, as I spent a good part of the drive up to New Light Studios thinking about the TOTN piece and its reception.

If folks haven't had a chance yet, I'd encourage a listen--and also a perusal of the TOTN comments section both there and on the Blog of the Nation follow-up. Very quickly, the real concerns over the loss of rural posts offices were either swept off the table by some commenters ("These towns have no other buildings they can't meet in front of?") or subsumed into predictably digested political rhetoric ("If you want rural America to have stuff like P.Os., health clinics, and communications access, you'd better vote for a "big-government" Democrat.").

Of course, this is the level of discourse on a number of internet forums and comments pages--a gruesome spectator sport all to itself. What's different here is that, in my opinion, the Talk of the Nation piece was not entirely successful in its communication of the diverse set of complexities enmeshed in contemporary rural life--and it almost entirely ignored the question of rural arts and culture, the very fabric that unites these communities.

While NPR consistently provides some of best broadcast news and commentary to be found anywhere, and while (contrary to aforementioned political rhetoric) both my conservative and liberal friends seem to value its in-depth coverage (see the reports from the GOP straw poll in Iowa), I left the rural segment of Talk of the Nation discouraged on a basic level. Here's a portion of my reaction published in The Daily Yonder:

More than anything, I wish the NPR producers had the foresight to keep Dee Davis [President of the Center for Rural Strategies] on the line with Neal Conan for the whole segment, so that he could have helped contextualize the excellent perspectives of the guests.

This is telling: culturally speaking, as Americans, do we all assume we "know" the rural equally well? Do we admit that the "face" of rural America is changing, that there are many people in cities who identify as "rural," and that rural youth have a stake in these discussions?

Neal's language during the transitions spoke (alternately) to all the old assumptions about rural America: it's either a pastoral or a broke-down ghetto. The guests offered perspectives that challenged this, but I worry that the format of the segment and Neal's questions may, in the end, not have done the work of challenging his listeners--something NPR is generally adept at doing.

Writer and producer Mary Phillips-Sandy has added a much-needed critique of that use of language on her excellent A Lot of Consonants blog:

One of the things that stood out to me was the host’s use of the word ‘heartland’ as a synonym for ‘rural America.’ It’s a common idiom and a disingenuous one. Where is this heartland, exactly? Does the expression mean a geographic center or an emotional center? If the former, it fails to include all the parts of rural America that exist at the nation’s edges and farthest-flung points. If the latter it is patronizing, because it locates rural America in the realm of abstract sentiment, instead of on a map, right there, or right here.

An emotional center, in the realm of abstract sentiment: this eloquently gets at how Americans with little direct rural-experience can sometimes describe and qualify non-metropolitan life. If we think about this from a literary perspective, the use of "heartland" is simply an updated term for "Arcadia," that place of the literary pastoral invented by Theocritus--writing from the library in Alexandria, ca. 300 B.C. For this poet, it was a place of shaded groves of song and love, a landscape of man's communal experience with nature.

In actuality, Arcadia was a rocky and barren region where very little grew. Two millennia later, we find that readers (and nations) need to have a pastoral myth, a place to invest the unalienable values of their people. And, updated in the modern age, they also need to view their Arcadia simultaneously as back-woods region where acts and sensibilities that would not be tolerated in urban centers can somehow be found permissible (consolidated schools, drastically insufficient health services, mountaintop removal, and so on).

Whether the author is Theocritus or a speech-writer for any of the forthcoming 2012 campaigns, this language ignores one basic and inseparable fact: the rural and the urban are intimately connected.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Abner Jay: The Last Southern Black Minstrel Show

Abner Jay, April 8, 1982, San Jose Flea Market; selection of a photo by Jon Sievert

Abner Jay: The Last Southern Black Minstrel Show was originally published on March 3, 2011.]

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In this post, and the previous post below, we're considering the life and music of Abner Jay--a figure whose art cuts across so many themes central to the American experience: race, class, regionalism, history, and place. Mississippi Records has just released Mr. Jay's final recordings, entitled Last Ole Minstrel Man.

I've heard from a number of folks in the two days since the previous post, readers who have been bowled over the emotion, creativity and cultural import of Mr. Jay's work. Today I'd like to share more information and links. Beyond that, the best thing to do is to sit down with his records, turn off the phone, and just listen.

Abner Jay was born in Fitzgerald, Georgia in 1921, into a family of sharecroppers. Though various internet sites tell the story slightly differently, Mr. Jay's grandfather--and perhaps his father--had been slaves. The legal terminology, however, is of less import than the realities of those early years of his life. Amoeba Records' blog offers a generous transcription (from the current release's liner notes) of Mr. Jay's own recollection of this time period:

"Abner was a slave sixty five years after the slaves were freed, because Abner grandpa and Pa love the slave life. Abner was hired out to white plantation owners when he was at the age of six. Abner worked as a slave side by side with his grandpa, a former slave. Abner could not and did not receive his pay until after he was twenty one years of age. Abner ate and slept in the barn with the mules. The White folk would hand his food out of the back door to him in a pan, mostly left overs and the food the white folk dogs wouldn't eat...

"Abner start singing on the public for the white plantation owner when he was eight. Abner start playing banjo at the age of ten, and became a one man band and bone player at the age of fourteen. Abner would play in the rich homes for the plantation owners when they wanted to entertain."

Mr. Jay later toured with minstrel and vaudeville shows, eventually striking out as a young man on his own--a one man band. Along the way he became friends with Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, James Brown and, according to some sources, Elvis. He was also the agent and manager to the phenomenal gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe. In the final decades of his life, Mr. Jay traveled from town to town in a mobile home that could convert into a performance stage

Again, Chris Campion so clearly articulates the many attributes of the sound that might surprise attendees of a local fair or flea market:

Jay finger-picked a bittersweet but heartfelt comic blues on a long-necked, six-string banjo that he said had been made in 1748. It had been passed down to him by his grandfather, Louis W Jay, born a slave and later to teach Abner many of the traditions he made it his mission to keep alive.

He was almost certainly the last living exponent of the 'bones' - a musical tradition that involved playing percussive rhythms using various cow and chicken bones that had been dried out and blanched in the sun. Jay claimed to have a repertoire of over 600 songs, which he sung in a bone-shaking basso profundo voice, the legacy of a battle with throat cancer that almost felled him in his twenties.

He would perform field songs, minstrel tunes and Pentecostal hymns interspersed with his own nuggets of homespun philosophy, off-colour yarns and side-splitting one-liners. 'What did Adam and Eve do in the Garden?' runs one. 'Eve wore a fig leaf... and Adam wore a damn hole in it.'

Jay's own compositions were decidedly secular in nature and found him musing on atypical themes such as depression, the Vietnam war and substance abuse. Titles include 'The Reason Why Young People Use Drugs' and 'The Backbone of America is a Mule and Cotton'. 'I crave cocaine,' he moaned during crowd favourite 'Cocaine Blues', exaggerating his diction for comic effect. 'But I can't find nothing here in Atlanta. Cos those hippies dun used it all up... I want sum'tin to pep me up!'

For more information, The Down Home Radio Show features Eli Smith's interview with Eric Isaacson of Mississippi Records; the two discuss the label's release of The True Story of Abner Jay as well as the true story of the record label itself, which has become a faithful steward of many later Abner Jay re-issues.

Here's a rare gem: an excerpt from Mr. Jay's final performance at the 1993 Grassroots Festival in Trumansburg, New York. We see in this personal rendition of "St. James Infirmary Blues" what Mr. Isaacson means when he says that people called Abner Jay "the black Bob Dylan." Even more forcefully than Dylan, Abner Jay stood with one foot in a lost, folkloric America and the other in the ground of rock 'n' roll, radio, and television. The great achievement of his music is that these contradictions are fused together in ways that can be both deeply-moving and profoundly unique.

We learn that he passed away days later, on his way back home.

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selection from the cover of Mississippi Records' recent Abner Jay release

Folk music is high class music--of course a lot of low class people singin' it. Matter of fact, most so-called folk singers don't even look like folk. Folk songs tell true stories, but terrible stories--'cause folk are terrible. Terrible songs make big songs. Why do you think kids like rock 'n' roll ? Because it's terrible. You think they're gonna listen to the Philadelphia Symphony, 101 Strings? Why do you think I like cocaine?

Tomorrow we will write more extensively about Abner Jay (1921-1996), a multifaceted musician and artist--and the self-proclaimed "last great Southern black minstrel show." His music (and his life story) was complicated and unconventional, but also singularly brilliant.

Here Chris Campion of the Guardian writes of Mr. Jay:

Rather than cocaine, he used to claim that the secret of his eternal youth and vitality was lying on his belly drinking water scooped out of the Suwannee River in his home state of Georgia. And at least two of his albums (privately-pressed and released on his label Brandie, named after his wife) feature a photograph of him doing just that, along with the tracklisting, which he customarily scrawled over it in marker pen.

Jay was himself born near the source of one of the tributaries of the river in Irwin County, Georgia (in 1921). He started performing in medicine shows at the age of 5. In 1932 he moved on, to the Silas Green show, a travelling minstrel show and vaudeville revue that had also once employed Bessie Smith. Aged 14, he became a one-man band.

Enjoy these two selections from The True Story of Abner Jay, an earlier record re-released by Mississippi Records:

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Responding To The Kansas Arts Veto

Kansas Governor Brownback signing the 2012 state budget; John Hanna

Responding To The Kansas Arts Veto was originally published on June 21, 2011. To learn more about how national foundations only give 1% of their funds to rural America, please see our article here.]

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As many of our readers have heard, Kansas Governor Sam Brownback used the power of his line-item veto to erase funding for the Kansas Arts Commission from the 2012 state budget, a move that effectively shut down the organization and fired its staff. By deleting this state-sponsored entity, Governor Brownback also shut the door on matching funds The National Endowment for the Arts would have granted to the Kansas Arts Commission.

Today we'd like to offer some viewpoints and commentary on this issue and its devastating repercussions for rural communities. We'll begin with this recent NPR report by Elizabeth Blair, aired on Morning Edition last week. Ms. Blair's piece is an excellent introduction to this debate, and to the contrary opinions by some in the arts community that suggest private funding would be a more effective and more liberating avenue. Below is an excerpt:

Private dollars have been really good for the Topeka Civic Theatre and Academy where Shannon Reilly is artistic director. The company is celebrating its 75th year. "Through most of that history we've been funded solely through ticket revenue, donors and corporate support," Reilly says.

Reilly says for the most part, they have avoided government grants and that has worked to their advantage. "More and more I've seen that arts organizations ... receiving tax dollars were constantly under fire about their programming and what they were doing," Reilly explains. "I like being responsible to my donors and to the people who were investing in what were doing more than a larger tax base."

While this model is certainly attractive, only at the close of her piece does Ms. Blair allow for this harsh reality: private funding for the arts is likely to replace (or exceed) public funding only in urban areas. We can turn to this Kansas Citizens for the Arts press release for further analysis of the rural dimension to Governor Brownback's arts veto:

“With a stroke of his pen, the governor cost the State of Kansas $1.2 million,” said Henry Schwaller, chairman of the Kansas Arts Commission. “On July 1, nearly 200 local arts organizations and artists will lose critical support for local arts programs, operational funding and professional development. Without this support, jobs in the arts are at risk, and artists and arts organizations will lose the important infrastructure that has been created largely because of the funding and expertise of the Kansas Arts Commission.

Kansas Arts Commission grants were crucial to many organizations, particularly those in rural areas. If an organization received funds from the Kansas Arts Commission, donors were more likely to contribute to that organization, which leveraged additional dollars for the organization and its community. Because few foundation or corporate donors provide money for operations, the Kansas Arts Commission’s main grant program, Operational Support, was an important way organizations covered general expenses such as rent, utilities and salaries. Many organizations, particularly those in rural or impoverished areas, will find it difficult to replace the lost state and federal funds and will either restrict or eliminate important community programs, cut staff or close their doors.

The horrible irony here is that Governor Brownback's veto will disproportionately affect the life of the rural communities from which he has drawn overwhelming political support. His gambit overlays a national "culture wars" argument on the local arts programming in towns far removed from urban centers. As The Kansas City Star writes in a recent editorial, Governor Brownback is "hoping to make points with conservatives nationally," while ignoring the local and regional dynamics:

As was the case with Brownback’s misguided attack on public broadcasting, he’s applying a national conservative cause to his home state, without considering the damaging impact on rural areas. Public broadcasting provides one of the only sources of news and information in the sparsely populated western half of the state. Urban areas, the target of this notion, have other options and can replace public funding. The elimination of public arts funding, again, isn’t likely to hurt the Kansas City area as much as Lincoln County, Kan.

As rural developers know well, while technology makes it possible to create new business in the high plains, new business will consider quality of life as much, perhaps more, than tax advantages. Brownback has handed surrounding states an effective tool to beat Kansas communities looking to attract doctors and needed professionals.

In the space of this site, we've tried to document and also to complicate the notion of "the rural arts," but Governor Brownback's arts veto sets a giant and unmistakable corrective in the midst of this project. While we can turn to The Daily Yonder and The Rural Blog for their excellent and consistent coverage toward defining what's at stake in the organizing "rural" moniker, there's another dimension to the other half, the "arts" definition, that we at The Art of the Rural have been perhaps slow to cover--and it lurks beneath the articles excerpted above.

This would be the irreducible political element, voluntary or not, that always coheres around the reception of the rural arts. What we find here is an amalgamation of regional assumptions, as well as preconceived notions about the "place" of the arts; in many respects it's a remnant of the politically polarizing climate of post-9/11 America. To return to the dreaded red-state/blue-state mindset (as I intimately learned while living in Boston), a great deal of people from the larger urban and suburban centers of America implicitly view arts-making as a "blue state" activity, complete with its own ideologies and politics.

What the Kansas arts veto makes abundantly clear is that even some public leaders from the interior of this country--despite a wealth of evidence beneath their noses--have refused to challenge this cultural orthodoxy, despite how reductive and just plain-wrong it might be. This is not a Republican vs. Democrat or conservative vs. liberal argument, but a case of recognizing that the arts are vital to all communities, and that they can speak for a range of viewpoints and cultural histories beyond the boogey-men of Robert Maplethorpe nudes or Chris Ofili elephant dung paintings.

In turn, those of us making art and working to ensure its reception need to continue to stress its "site specific" nature, and we need to welcome work which challenges our own political and cultural orthodoxies.

In closing, we will offer an excerpt from last weekend's Kansas City Star editorial by Joyce DiDonato, arguably the most acclaimed opera singer in contemporary classical music. Born in Prairie Village, Kansas, Ms. DiDonato has spoken up for her home state in interviews around the world, and in the press following her award of the illustrious Gramophone "Artist of the Year" in 201o. (Her broken-leg performance of The Barber of Seville has become the stuff of opera legend.)

Here is an excerpt from Ms. Didonato's eloquent response to Governor Brownback's decision:

This is the Sunflower State that I have proudly boasted about across the world, fearlessly defending it even in the face of harsh quizzical looks from the most skeptical of folks (“You live where?”). It’s the state of my first piano recital and choir concert. The home field of my artistic curiosity and education. The homeland that taught me to freely dream big and without limitation; one where the arts were once alive, vibrant and supported.

I’ve welcomed the assumption of being an unsolicited but mightily proud artistic ambassador for Kansas to the great cities of the world. Now, for the first time, I feel shame. Eliminating a state arts commission is an ignorant, short-sighted, fearful and unspeakably damaging act to the spirit and soul of this great state.

I’m not a politician or historian. I’m a humble opera singer, a home-grown product of an agricultural state that used to value the arts, like all great societies and cultures of the past. But my anger rivals a good ol’ western Kansas Category 5 tornado’s destructive force when I begin to think of where I’d be without an education fueled by the arts that informed my way of thinking. Or without a community theater, choir or art exhibit that gave me true solace and an emergency exit from some of the great crises in my life. Or without that musical outlet that helped me understand myself and the mystery of life a little better.

Monday, March 5, 2012

The Legend of Cas Walker

The Cas Walker Knoxville city council fist-fight; LIFE Magazine

[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines, this seems like a good time to give a retrospective glance to the first two years of Art of the Rural. Over these weeks I will feature a few new articles, but also many favorites from the archives. Thanks again to everyone who has read and contributed; what began as a labor of love has become a project far larger, and far more rewarding, than I ever could have anticipated - and I deeply appreciate the readership and participation of such a diverse audience. Starting March 12th, we will offer new articles and share some new projects related to our mission.

The Legend of Cas Walker was originally published on April 11, 2011.]

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I recently received an email and suggestion from Chuck Shuford, a writer and arts commentator for The Daily Yonder and a number of other publications. I think that many of our readers will be interested in this: the life and times and televised work of Cas Walker (1902-1998). Here's an excerpt from Mr. Shuford's correspondence:

My friend sent me a link to Cas Walker pontificating on his early morning TV program -- this was probably sometime in the 70's. You need to know about Cas. He owned a chain of grocery stores in E.TN, E. Ky, and SW Va. He was also a politician, serving on the Knoxville City Council where he got in a fist fight at least once with a councilman holding a contrarian view. He was elected Mayor of Knoxville and then very soon after, recalled. He then ran for council again successfully until he retired in the early 70's. If god ever made an ornerier man, I've been hard to come by him. As someone once said "If I ordered a car load of SOB's and they only sent Cas, I'd sign for it." Dolly Parton and the Everly Brothers sang on his show as youngun's. His home, which he lived in until his death, is about 3 blocks from our home. Ironically, it is now owned by a lefty UT professor who recently wrote a book on Eugene V. Debs.

Writing in the Knoxville Metro Pulse, Betty Bean reveals how this "Hillbilly Collosus" also possessed an ability to manipulate media and technology:

Cas had served on City Council longer than I’d been alive, and had been among the first to grasp the power of television not only for selling stuff but for fighting off fluoridation, metro government, bad check writers, shoplifters, dog thieves, civic improvements of any sort, and police officers who hung around and drank coffee in establishments other than his own.

YouTube offers a small selection of Cas Walker Farm and Home Hour clips, including one of the Dolly Parton performances Mr. Shuford alludes to above. Is that Waylon Jennings playing on the right of the screen?

Cas Walker's life is impossible to summarize in just a few paragraphs, so please refer to this lively and surprising feature by Ms. Bean in the Metro Pulse. Mr. Walker's ascension to millionaire grocery magnate is marked by a rough, self-conscious transition from rural to urban life--and a hatred (an accurate word in this case) for "the silk-stocking crowd" who taunted him during his youth. While he had a combative sense of class, and an equally combative political sense, even those who opposed him in these regards were charmed and even awe-struck by the stubborn creativity Mr. Walker channeled into The Farm and Home Hour and his grocery store promotions.

Ms. Bean writes extensively of one of Mr. Walker's most legendary exploits, when he buried local character Digger O'Dell alive for multiple weeks, just to generate increased sales at this grocery stores:

"He [Digger O'Dell] said 'I will be buried, six feet underground, with a stovepipe running down to where I am so people can talk to me.' I [Cas Walker] said, 'What do you get for that kind of work?'"

He said "I get $100 a day.'

"I said 'I was thinking about offering you $25 a day, but I am going to offer you $50.' His wife was a Jewish woman and she was shaking her head yes so I knew I was going to start burying a man and I had never had that experience before.

"We dug our hole, and I got ready to bury him. Of course, I advertised that I was going to bury him at a certain time. You never seen a crowd like we had."

Digger had a telephone, and Walker remembers that he "talked with women all night. You have never experienced a ladies man such as this one was."

Walker put up a tent over Odell's grave to accommodate the crowd, which one night numbered 1,500 at 2 a.m.

But Digger wanted to be dug up before he had fulfilled his 30-day contract. Walker was having none of it, since daily receipts at the Chapman Highway store had increased from $3,500 to $8,000.

"I told him that was too much money to dig up," Walker said in a 1990 interview with the Knoxville Journal.

Digger started faking heart attacks and calling the newspapers and the health department to complain that Walker was denying him medical care.

Walker's solution was to dress two women who worked for him in "nurse suits" and station them above the grave, selling barbecued chicken sandwiches.

Knoxviews offers a brief write-up of these stunts (including the LIFE Magazine fist-fight)--make sure to read the comments section, as many local folks contributed their own memories of Cas Walker.

The Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound also houses many of the historical Cas Walker commercials and Farm and Home Hour tapes. TAMIS deserves its own post here on the The Art of the Rural, and that will be forthcoming, but, until then here is one of the archival commercials:

The Museum of Appalachia also features John Rice Irwin remembering Mr. Walker and his love for Coon Hunting.

Friday, March 2, 2012

Bob Dylan's Direction Home

[Editor's Note: As I am facing numerous writing deadlines over the second half of February, this seems like a good time to give a retrospective glance to the first two years of Art of the Rural. Over these weeks I will feature a few new articles, but also many favorites from the archives. Thanks again to everyone who has read and contributed; what began as a labor of love has become a project far larger, and far more rewarding, than I ever could have anticipated - and I deeply appreciate the readership and participation of such a diverse audience. In March we will offer new articles and series, and share some new projects related to our mission.

Bob Dylan's Direction Home was originally published on January 25, 2011. His summer tour did not travel through Minnesota.]

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City’s just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away.
I was raised in the country, I been working in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down.

--from "Mississippi"

Last week Aaron, a reader from Ohio, passed along some very interesting news. It appears that Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan's birthplace, is actively working to bring back their estranged native son for a concert on his 70th birthday. The news of these plans has been documented in forums on the encyclopedic Dylan resource Expecting Rain, and was confirmed last month in the Duluth News Tribune, where John Ziegler reported that city officials are currently in talks with Dylan and his management to bring him back to Minnesota on or around his May 24th birthday.

As with all things Bob Dylan, this story contains a good deal of rumor and apocrypha. For instance, I heard that the small mining town of Hibbing, Minnesota, Dylan's hometown, had originally sought to welcome the musician back on his 70th birthday (Aaron tells me that Dylan last visited for his ten-year high school reunion, where he was roundly ignored by his former classmates), yet Mr. Ziegler reports that Duluth had extended their invitation a full year ahead of schedule, contacting him on his 69th birthday. Regardless, if Dylan accepts this invitation we will see a great deal of media attention focused on his rural Minnesota roots. While there may be a nostalgic whiff to such reflections, it is significant to think of Dylan-the-70-year-old back in Minnesota, over four decades after he recorded his generation-defining howl of "no direction home".

If we put that song--and the long-view of Dylan's legacy--in perspective, then what could also come out of such a birthday in Minnesota could be a reappraisal of a whole generation's relationship to rural place. While Dylan did his best to shirk his "voice of a generation" status, it's clear that his life narrative, captured so eloquently in "Mississippi," is representative of many of his fellow baby boomers: that first wave of the "rural-brain drain," many of whom would later take part in the flight out of America's urban centers and into a suburban life where rolling stones meet their cul-de-sac.

However, Dylan's last handful of records have embraced the traditional forms of blues and country music just as baby boomers are returning to facets of their own rural upbringing. While the local and organic food phenomenon is part and parcel of this generational trend, many are realizing (as Wendell Berry did so many years ago, in his essay "A Native Hill") that you can go home again. In my own home region this has been occurring for a few years, as baby-boomers begin to form organizations to preserve our small Ohio Valley town--and to hopefully bring it back to some semblance of its former self.

Beyond this, the issue becomes one of what "homecoming" means, and how the rural diaspora negotiates this return. As this teenager's video from Hibbing suggests, life never stopped in these communities, and those who stayed both welcome and resent the influence of those who left.

We'll be following the events surrounding this birthday concert; until then, here's a short video produced by the University of Minnesota in conjunction with the UM Press's release of Highway 61 Revisited: Bob Dylan's Road from Minnesota to the World, edited by Colleen J. Sheehy and Thomas Swiss:

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Rural International: Luk Thung & Thai Country Music

The album cover for Luk Thung; Dust-to-Digital

Rural International: Luk Thung & Thai Country Music was originally published on September 10, 2011.]

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A few weeks back, I began an unofficial series of pieces that look to expand what we talk about when we talk about the rural, and today I'd like to discuss a recording that can challenge us to rethink our own categories and boundaries when it comes to rural arts and culture.

Luk Thung: Classic & Obscure 78s from the Thai Countryside is one of the latest releases from Dust-to-Digital, a record label that has, for over a decade, consistently produced some of the most thorough and thought-provoking reissues of vernacular music and visual art--everything from the southern gospel of their landmark Goodbye, Babylon set to the forthcoming Opika Pende: Africa at 78 RPM, a multi-disc package featuring diverse pan-African music that has never been released on CD. Luk Thung is one of the productions of the "phonographic arm" of Dust-to-Digital, Parlortone, though this music is also available for download. Luk Thung was compiled by record collector David Murray (see his Haji Maji music blog) and the notes were written by Peter Doolan of the Monrakplengthai Thai vernacular music site.

Many of our readers are no doubt familiar with the work of Dust-to-Digital; as both a record label and a kind of cultural sensibility, Lance Ledbetter's project has not only served as a catalyst for the thriving reissue movement, but has pushed an audience to reconsider the deeper dynamics of a place and its people.

Luk Thung continues in this direction, and provides an opportunity for many of us to expand our own deeper narrative of the rural arts. While many discussions of rural culture fail to consider the role of the rural diaspora, I cannot think of many instances where we've thought of this geographical movement--from the Great Migration to the farm crisis of the 1980s--in an international context. Luk Thung provides such an opportunity.

Here's Peter Doolan, editor of the Monrakplengthai music site, writing in the introduction to his liner notes:

Luk Thung is known to many as Thailand's "Country Music"; it's a vibrant and syncretic genre of pop song which aims to give voice to a disenfranchised rural population. Its history is intextricably linked to that of the nation at large, and it continues to provide a soundtrack to the political turmoil that abounds in today's Thailand. Despite its commercial nature and its roots in imported music, Luk Thung's use of local Thai melody, instrumentation, rhythm and vocal styling leads many casual listeners to mistake it for a sort of folk music. In any case, Luk Thung may indeed be filling the social gap left by a slowly vanishing traditional culture.

The term Luk Thung itself, meaning "Children of the Fields," refers to people of rural background, as opposed to Luk Krung, those born and bred in the city. Bangkok, the capitol of the Kingdom of Thailand, is a massive metropolis disproportionate to the rest of the country, and is, without rival, its political, economic and cultural center. The majority of Thailand's population, however, lives in the provinces outside of Bangkok, as has been the case for millenia. But in the 20th century, spurred by the nation's increasing status as a global commercial power, the capitol began to attract significant movement in from the provinces. By mid-century, a steady stream of migrants were making their way into Bangkok, with most joining an urban underclass of menial laborers, pedicab drivers, market vendors or slum dwellers. Some settled permanently in the city, some came and went with the seasons, but all had to cope with enormous changes in their lives. Music became a vital means of maintaining a feeling of connectedness to the world they were leaving.

As Mr. Doolan tells us in his extensive notes, this rural diaspora first met a state-controlled mass media that privileged western culture (everything from dress to dining utensils) and denigrated traditional Thai practices. After World War II, these forms of expression were re-integrated, as pop music blossomed into a complex and kinetic exchange of idioms, instruments, and experiences; in balancing these various sources and influences, these artists created what I've called before a kind of "rural modernism." Consider the breadth of expression Luk Thung incorporated: "Liké street theatre, antiphonal Lamtat field songs, and Klong Yao long-drum troupes," Mr. Doolan writes. "A particular interest was kindled in songs from Isan, the impoverished and drought-stricken Northeast...singers integrated both Isan's Thet Lae preaching style and Lam Klon poetic form into their performances, and many even began including words from Isan's distinct dialect in their lyrics."

From Peter Doolan's extraordinarily helpful notes we see that these musicians were working in a vein not at all that stylistically different than James Joyce or T.S. Eliot, or any of the modernist painters who incorporated a wildly divergent range of materials and images. Further, the span of Luk Thung runs the American timeline from the Great Migration to today, and from the explosion of folk, blues, country and rock music--all fueled in large part by what a rural diaspora brought with them to the city and its airwaves and recording studios.

Here's Phloen Phromdaen singing "Ruedu Haeng Khwam Rak (Season of Love)." Mr. Phromdaen, who grew up on his family's farm along the border with Cambodia, first encountered Luk Thung on the radio and saved his money to make his own recordings. A rise to stardom followed and was punctuated, Mr. Doolan tells, by his 1966 hit "Chom Thung (In Praise of the Fields)." Phloen Phromdaen is still singing today.

Mr. Phromdaen went on in his career to create a variant of Luk Thung called Pleng Phut, or "talking music," a development which seems to suggest, if we are thinking in terms of a rural diaspora, a comparison with Johnny Cash, or Elvis, or Muddy Waters or any number of other musicians. As Mr. Doolan writes, these musicians attained a level of stardom in their home country commiserate with the likes of their American counterparts. Given the cultural and political backdrop to Luk Thung, we find many similarities to the social commentary within the language of American folk, blues and country--even to the rebellious use of identity and dialect in "hard country," as discussed by Barbara Ching in her essential book-length study Wrong's What I Do Best.

Lastly, what such a vibrant release as Luk Thung can stir in us is the thought that, even within our own home borders, we may live near folks who most likely identify on one level or another as members of a more distant "rural diaspora," be it from Thailand, Mexico, Somalia or elsewhere. We do a disservice to these members of our community--and to ourselves--when we leave them out of a discussion on rural America.