Book Review: THE CAJUNS Essays on Their History and Culture

By C. Paige Gutierrez

Vol. 1, No. 10, 1979 pp. 24-25

Glenn K. Conrad, ed. The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture. Published by the Center for Louisiana Studies University of South-western Louoisiana, Lafayette, 1978. Illustrated.

The Southern psyche has long been analyzed, romanticized, and mythologized by scholars, journalists, novelists and others who have taken up the task of explicating that most peculiar region of the United States. However, in their attempts to make sense of the area below the Mason-Dixon line, too few of these observed have seemed to notice that they have subsumed in their -generalizations a sub-region lying south of the Piney Woods, south of the South. The distinctiveness of the central Gulf Coast has often been overlooked by both the national and the Southern media, partly because of the fact that the area is, for better or worse, parceled out among several states whose boundaries extend considerably northward into “alien” territory. The analyst who concentrates on that which is encompassed by political boundaries is likely to miss the greater significance of that which is encompassed by historical /cultural boundaries.

Coastal Louisiana has not been as complacent about this situation as have been coastal Mississippi and Alabama. For over a decade southern Louisiana has been declaring its cultural uniqueness through various aspects of what is loosely called the French Renaissance Movement. Since 1968, when the Louisiana legislature gave the name “Acadiana” to twenty-two southern parishes, this movement has manifested itself through language education programs, historical preservation projects, renewal of cultural ties with Gallic countries, advertising campaigns, and a generalized renewal of interest and pride in the regional heritage. Although the French Renaissance Movement has its share of internal conflict and inconsistancies – not the least of which revolve around the self-understanding of Louisiana’s French (as well as nonFrench) heritage – the resurgence of French pride, and especially of Cajun French pride, is a start.

The media through which the new Cajun consciousness is expressed range from bumper stickers and Tshirts to record albums, plays, festivals, television shows, periodicals, and scholarly books. Of the latter,Glenn Conrad’s The Cajuns: Essays on Their History and Culture is perhaps the most ambitious. Conrad and eleven other writers, all of whom are well versed in Louisiana studies, have produced a collection of scholarly yet readable articles on a wide range of topics related to Cajun or Acadian history, language, environment, architecture, folk song, education, folklore, and politics. – Some of the essays are rather narrow in scope, such as Gabriel Debien’s account of the Acadian exiles’ stay in Santo Domingo, or Elizabeth Brandon’s analysis of the folk song “La Delaissee.” Such essays are aimed at the experienced student of Cajun history and culture and presuppose a general knowledge of the problem under study.

Other essays in the book are of interest to a more general audience. Conrad’s article, “The Acadians: Myths and Realities,” provides an historical analysis of the portrayal of the Cajun in both the scholarly and popular media. He maintains that the Cajun image has been dichotomized in terms of two extremes: Cajun life has been seen as either that of the ignorant, superstitious swamp dweller, or as that of the pristine peasant of Longfellow’s Evangeline. Neither image is accurate. The entire book, in fact, is an attempt at bringing balance to the understanding of the Cajun experience, although the reader may suspect at times that certain of the

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writers have been so steeped in Evangeline that they can’t quite let go of the myth themselves.

Patricia Rickels makes one of the most useful contributions to the understanding of the modern Cajun in her essay entitled “The Folklore of Acadians.” Rickels distinguishes between the “Genteel Acadians” and the “Just Plain Coonasses.” The Genteel Acadians, or the Acadian Establishment, are the more formally educated and/or wealthier of the Cajuns. Their use of the term Acadian rather than Cajun reflects a propriety which Rickels claims is “diametrically opposed” to the philosophy of the Coonass. The term “coonass,” once used by outsiders as an ethnic slur, is now used by those Cajuns who have no qualms about their involvement in traditional activities such as beer drinking, cock-fighting, gambling, and other “earthy” pastimes. The Genteel Acadian is likely to speak a nonstandard Cajun dialect. These differences between the two groups have understandably been responsible for much of the conflict centering around the direction being taken by the French Renaissance Movement. It should be added that the Genteel Acadian and the Just Plain Coonass are, of course, ideal types best thought of as representing poles on a continuum, with most Cajuns fitting somewhere in between these Moreover, Vaughan Baker, in her essay “The Acadians in Antebellum Louisiana: A Study of Acculturation,” has traced the existence of the elite and the non-elite lifestyles in southern Louisiana through antebellum times. Although Rickels suggests that the non-elite Cajun is more likely to be a repository of folk culture, it would be unwise to conclude that either group is more or less “Cajun” than the other. Both have been on the scene for two centuries.

Also of special interest to the general reader is Mathe Allain’s “Twentieth Century Acadians.” Allain wisely begins by pointing out the dearth of research materials available on the topic and proceeds to write a perceptive, journalistic piece based largely on her own observations. Allain has an eye for the subtleties of everyday life; she notes the changes that have taken place in flower gardens over the years and the continuing small town practice of listing nicknames in the phone directories. And she is quick to recognize the influence of American popular culture on Cajun life, whether it be via the automobile or “I Love Lucy.” Such observations are rarely the hallmark of the historian or folklorist searching for signs of a “true” folk culture. However, Allain and several other essayists have notably realistic perspectives on the complexities of the relationships between folk culture, popular culture, high culture, and “fakelore” in Acadiana.

A major weakness of The Cajuns is its lack of either an introductory or concluding essay. Such an essay would serve to tie together certain themes running through the book and point out problems of definition that appear repeatedly. The question of “What is a Cajun?” might be partially answered through a synthesis of the definitions that are either implicit or explicit in each of the articles. A summarizing essay might note what may not be obvious to a non-native: the Cajuns described throughout much of the book are the Cajuns of western Acadiana. Although intra-regional variation is discussed in Malcolm Comeaux’ essay “Louisiana’s Acadians: The Environmental Impact,” it is neglected in many of the articles in The Cajuns.

Conrad’s book provides a broad coverage of subjects pertinent to Cajun studies; however, certain topics are conspicuous by their absence. For example, an analysis of the role of the Catholic Church in southern Louisiana is inexplicably missing. This omission is especially glaring in light of the fact that Catholicism provides perhaps the only factor that is a constant for almost all Cajuns, regardless of geographical subregion, economic level, or historical period. Also missing is attention to race relations in Acadiana. There were Blacks in southern Louisiana before there were Cajuns, and each group has influenced the other in varied and complex ways. The Cajuns would be further strengthened by the inclusion of an article on the oil industry and its economic, environmental, political, and social implications for southern Louisiana. Today roustabouting is as much a Cajun occupation as is crawfishing. Cajuns are proud of their worldwide reputation as the best offshore workers in the business, and Cajun communities now exist in North Sea ports of England and Scotland.

Despite these shortcomings, The Cajun is a valuable contribution to the study of Louisiana, the South, and the United States. An understanding of diverse subcultures and regional variation is a prerequisite to the understanding of the South and the nation as a whole. Regionally produced books like The Cajuns accelerate this understanding.

Paige Gutierrez, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at the University of North Carolina, is presently doing field research in Breaux Bridge. Louisiana.

Correction

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 2, No. 2, 1979, pp. 3

There seems to be an item which slipped by all our dutiful proofreading in the July issue of Southern Changes probably because the error had the sound of being grammatically correct — but unfortunately it left an incorrect impression — and I have promised the author, Paige Gutierrez — that we will print the correction. The error comes on page 25, midway through the first column. It should read “The Genteel Acadian is likely to be a speaker of standard French, whereas the “Proud Coonass” is more likely to speak a nonstandard Cajun dialect.”

Figures of Speech–Can a Country Boy Survive?

By Allen Tullos

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, pp. 1-3

You have to stay up awful late in Alabama nowadays to put nostalgia and melancholy under the table. In cahoots, Action News and the jukebox are blowing the null breath of extinction. Some of the good ol’ boys feel the hair rising on the backs of their necks. They even have a tune: “Who’s Going to Sing the Last Country Song?”

But it is the NAACP’s Benjamin Hooks who asks the musical question. Blacks, he says, have lived so long with hard times and thwarted hopes that they know the territory. What will the white folk do? Spook and go off halfcocked, he fears. Realize a common plight? Not likely. Hooks is familiar with the shape and color of banty messiahs and traditional scapegoats.

As I drive a car-full of friends across Birmingham’s Red Mountain one night this May, the signals come clear. Vulcan, the iron man, holds high a red torch to show a death on the highway. The familiar cracks about his near-nakedness are more biting: how the Vulcan forgot to cover his ass, how Birmingham is mooning the affluent, over the-mountain community of Homewood for its failed merger vote. Looking down upon miles of city lights, we hear the car radio offering Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Sweet Home Alabama. Down home this song is always in revival but tonight I hear, in a new way, the line “In Birmingham they love the Governor . . .” For the last twenty years, Alabama has really had only one Governor.

The news in Birmingham, bad for months, got worse in May and June. Magic City unemployment hung around twelve percent even before word came that U.S. Steel (a major employer for three-quarters of a century) was closing its Fairfield Works and even before local schools turned out for the summer. As a state, Alabama s jobless rate is second only to that of Michigan. The Governor, who carried Michigan in the 1972 Presidential primary, insists that he left the Heart of Dixie a different legacy. “When I was Governor the last eight years,” he proclaims, “we were first in the Southeast in new and expanded industries.”

On the radio, some Fairfield workers are interviewed.

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Twelve thousand steelworkers punched in at Fairfield just five years ago. Now, their numbers cut to nothing, their feelings are variously strong and resigned. Almost all of them resent the secrecy and hard-heartedness of U.S. Steel. Some blame the Japanese, some the “business cycle.” The district’s Congressman, Republican Albert Lee Smith, audaciously blames the workers themselves.

“I’d be willing to take a cut in pay,” says one veteran, “if we could keep the plant open. But the big man has to do some giving back too.” The Big Mules at U.S. Steel refuse comment. They check their digital watches and have their secretaries dust decades of fly ash and tailings off of ancient carpetbags.

Such were the Steel City’s ironies this May that among all the layoffs and rumors of layoffs, the AFLCIO was holding its Southeastern labor conference. Union officials heard the growing rank and file anger, noted the increasing toll that Reagonomics was taking on industrial membership and speculated. that momentum, continuing to build from Solidarity Day, would bring some election results this fall. The Southern union leaders pledged stronger organizing campaigns among service workers. Black and white women working in hospital, office and food service jobs may help shape labor’s direction in the l980s.

Meanwhile, a quarter gets you only two plays: Merle Haggard ringing the jingo bell with his latest “Okie From Muskogee” spinoff, one called “Are the Good Times Really Over For Good?” and George Jones singing “It’s the Same Ole Me” as he fails to show for a performance at Boutwell Auditorium.

Birmingham’s Post-Herald observes that as of January 1982, more than 45,000 people, about seven percent of the Jefferson County population, take their guns to town. Thousands more keep them handy at work or at play.

Guns take the worry out of being close. “Knowing what’s going on in this town,” says one citizen, “you need a gun.”

No matter how early you wake up in Alabama nowadays, a mean taste whispers in your mouth. A whisper that sometimes rises to a scream. Lately, it has found voice in Hank Williams, Jr., providing an unauthorized campaign anthem for a re-tuned George Wallace, The Governor:

I live back in the woods, you see,
My woman and the kids and the dogs and me.
I got a shotgun, rifle, and a four-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive.*



* A Country Boy Can Survive,” copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.

It hurts that Hank Jr. has chosen this tact that country boys will be boys. For several years his considerable musical gifts and poignant Iyricism have shadowboxed his father’s awesome legacy and struggled against country music cliche. But his toughest opponents remain the sexism and the half-snarling, half-plaintive, go-it-alone stance which plagues the genre, the culture and the family tradition of which he sings. On his recent album, The Pressure Is On, Hank Jr.’s antagonisms too often invoke the emotions of reaction. Codewords are just a shot away. He sings in his powerful solo voice, while the electric guitar drives in dead earnest:

I had a good friend in New York City
He never called me by my name, just “Hillbilly.’
My grandpa taught me how to live off the land
And his taught him to he a businessman.

He used to send me pictures of the Broadway nights
And I’d send him some homemade wine.
But he was killed by a man with a switchblade knife
For forty-three dollars my friend lost his life.

I’d love to spit some Beech Nut in that dude’s eyes
And shoot him with my ol’, forty-five.
Cause a country boy can survive.
Country folks can survive.*



* A Country Boy Can Survive,” copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.

Hank Jr. turned thirty-three in May and allowed the photographers to snap him hunkering at his daddy’s graveside in Montgomery. Yet along with the new confidence that he gives off, it is as if at the entrance to his country-rock domain in Cullman, Ala., Bocephus has thrown up a guardhouse and razor wire fence. Here, the passwords–“We say grace and we say ma’am”–give clues to the same fierce anger which, in part, propels the Wallace candidacy–“if you ain’t into that, we don’t give a damn.”*

* A Country Boy Can Survive,” copyright, Bocephus Music, 1981.

Behind the swagger, and despite the worthy call to more self-sufficiency, the message is one of romantic retreat and retrenchment. And this in a state where country boys’ farm debts now total more than two billion dollars, a rise of eighty-four percent since 1977. What happens when the bank comes to repossess the four-wheel drive? The romance of outlawry is thin solipsism to pour over the hard biscuits of attrition. Perhaps country boys can survive. Can they grow up?

For George Wallace, May brought another sort of commemoration and a resurrection–that most miraculous of survival tactics. First elected Governor in 1962, Wallace has served three terms, four really, if you count

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the time his late wife Lurleen sat in for him until her death by cancer. Now, after a self-imposed four-year “retirement,” and with a new wife, Lisa, who once sang country songs with her sister (Mona and Lisa) in the 1968 Wallace For President campaign, The Governor is ready to honor the state again with his service. Ten years to the month after he had been shot and partially paralyzed, he made the announcement. As of today, his chances for election seem excellent. Much depends on whether he can maintain the appearances of strength, stamina and coherence. It’s hard for anyone to campaign against a man come back from the grave with an electorate desperate to prevail with ah’ its myths intact.

“So hell,” The Governor told a Post-Herald interviewer, “I nearly died ten times after I was shot. I’d get well and peritonitis would develop. I would never do anything that would injure my health because I have a God-given instinct to want to survive as long as I can.”

In June, as he hops about the state from barbecue fundraiser to television studio, it is not George Wallace who appears immobilized, but many of Alabama’s voters and politicos. The spectrum of opposition appears ideologically narrow, tentative and uninspired. A few black leaders, most prominently Montgomery’s E. D. Nixon (the bus boycott leader) and Tuskegee Mayor-Johnny Ford, have even made horse trades with The Governor and are willing to swallow their history lessons in exchange for the promise of small leverages and front seats on the early-rolling bandwagon.

So back to the jukebox and one more play. This time however, it’s Tammy Wynette singing, not “Stand By Your Man,” or “Take Me To Your World,” but a different story. In it, a woman begins to find herself only after her man has moved out. She is glad to be rid of his hang-ups, gives his favorite chair to charity, wears her jeans a little tighter, changes her hair style and learns how to dance. Then, when her used-to-be wants to do her the favor of moving back in, Tammy sings, “Maybe you better wait a little bit longer, before you come back and give me another chance.” It is a promising tune which Alabamians ought to consider in this season of survival.

The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music

By David E. Whisnant

Vol. 5, No. 1, 1983, pp. 20-24

The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Country Music, selected and annotated by Bill Malone (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1981). Eight LP or cassette set, boxed, with 55 pp. illustrated brochure. $54.95.

Classic Country Music, prepared by Bill C. Malone for the Smithsonian Institution, takes one back to the clear headwaters: the first commercial hillbilly recording (Eck Robertson’s “Sally Gooden” for Victor in 1922); the first big sellers (Vernon Dalhart’s “Wreck of the Ole 97” of 1924, Carl T. Sprague’s “When the Work’s All Done This Fall” of 1925, Jimmie Rodgers’ “Waiting For a Train” of 1928); one of the earliest recorded examples of steel guitar playing (Derby and Tarlton’s “Birmingham Jail” of 1927); the first big hit by a woman performer (Patsy Montana’s “I Want to Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” of 1935); Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys performing the Jimmie Rodgers hit (and later bluegrass standard) “Muleskinner Blues” in October, 1940 (with Monroe on guitar); the first recorded example of mandolin cross-picking (Jim and Jesse’s “Are You Missing Me” of 1952), and so on. Altogether a hundred and forty-three tunes, from Fiddlin’ John Carson and the Stonemans to Tammy, Willie, Merle and Dolly. “Funny,” as Willie sings, “How Time Slips Away.”

So friends, don’t delay. This offer is good for a limited time only. Send your check or money order for $54.95 TODAY to “Smithsonian, Washington, D.C. 20560.” That’s S-M-I-T-H-S-O-N-I-A-N, Washington, D.C., two oh five, six oh. The first one hundred orders will receive, in addition to these eight fine records or cassettes packaged in a beautiful fold-out box you will be proud to display, an autographed eight by ten glossy photograph of your favorite country singer, suitable for framing. You’ll hear the inimitable Carter Family’s “Wildwood Flower,” so beloved by many a parking lot picker; the Delmores’ “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” made famous later by Merle Travis, the Louvin Brothers, and Doc Watson; the original “Orange Blossom Special” by the Rouse Brothers; and the incomparable Roy scuff’s “Great Speckled Bird.” You’ll thrill to Cliff Carlisle’s wailing dobro, Lulu Belle and Scotty’s “Remember Me (When the Candle Lights Are Gleaming),” and many, many more. It’s an opportunity you can’t afford to miss. So send today. If you are not completely satisfied, your money will be cheerfully refunded.

Well, I “sent away,” as they used to say in the days of boxtops, and I am indeed (almost) completely satisfied. Bill Malone has done, on the whole, an excellent job; it would be folly to expect that his (or anyone’s) 143 choices

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(from a few tens of thousands) could ever satisfy everyone. Someone could always ask why this tune and not that one? So the task here is not to quibble about individual tunes, but to ask how well the eight records reflect the complicated and dynamic history of country music.

One the whole, very well indeed. Malone’s strong and sensitive commentary, arising from his recollections of growing up with country music as a poor boy in east Texas, is written with the grace and depth and gentleness that come from knowing–as most country songs tell us–that life is both very hard and very beautiful. Malone divides the history of country music roughly into five periods: the birth of the industry in the 1920s (Dalhart, Uncle Dave, Gid Tanner and others); national dissemination and popularization in the 1930s (southeasterners such as the Delmores, Monroes, Bolicks, and Mainers; and southwesterners such as Bob Wills, Gene Autry and the Sons of the Pioneers); the “honky tonk” period, ;94153 (Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, Hank Williams); rockabilly and country pop, 1953-63 (Cash, Ray Price, Chet Atkins, Lefty Frizzell and others); and the current scene since 1960. An additional category–bluegrass and the urban folk revival–cuts across several of the latter chronological periods. Malone’s historical essay is supplemented by extensive discographical, historical and interpretative notes on each selection.

In his essay and notes, Malone surveys some of the major social, political and economic factors that have shaped the music: developments in the radio, recording and television industries; the Depression and World War II; the urban folk revival; the movement of country people to the city; the proliferation of small record companies in recent years; the fusion of southeastern and southwestern styles; the responses of individual performs to social pressure and dramatic social change. He also explicates some of the major internal dynamics of the music: the movement from personally modest solo performers and small permanent ensembles to high-priced, self-conscious stars “backed” by large aggregations of anonymous session musicians; the shift from simple to complex, virtuoso instrumental styles; the replacement of traditional, public domain tunes by copyrighted material; the gradual evolution from fiddle, banjo and guitar to drums, dobro, and pedal steel; and the technological drift from single takes on wax to twenty-four track taping, mixing, and overdubbing.

By selecting carefully from Malone’s 143 tunes, one can also assemble some interesting “sub-histories” of country music. One can follow to some extent the emergence of women performers, from the Coon Creek Girls through Patsy Montana and Molly O’Day to Patsy Cline and Dolly Parton. One can observe the seemingly perennial ambivalence of the country music audience with respect to rough vs. smooth or cultivated vocal styles: Uncle Dave, Martha Carson, Molly O’Day and Wilma Lee Cooper on the one hand, and a rather surprising array of smooth singers on the other–Bradley Kincaid, Buell Kazee, Vernon Dalhart (a Texas-born light opera tenor who tried to sound rough again, but couldn’t), Jimmie Rodgers, Red Foley, Eddie Arnold, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Jim Reeves, and others. Or one can line up the brother duets (Callahans, Bolicks, Sheltons, Delmores, Monroes, Kershaws, Louvins, Everlys, Stanleys, MacReynoldses, Osbornes, Lillys) and wonder whether such duets were, developmentally, a way-station between the older family-based groups and the newer luxury bus-owning stars–the last remnant of the close rural family before its final atomization, the archetypal (Jacob and Esau) binary pair struggling for unity and harmony against the fragmenting forces of a culture.

A fine collection, then, and a fine job of selection and presentation, terms of both and order Malone brings to it, and the other interpretative orderings it invites. Still, there are some problems that go beyond quibbling about “significant” (read favorite) tunes excluded. Malone writes at length, for example, about rockabilly and country pop, but we get recorded examples of only the latter. There is no tune by Elvis, Carl Perkins, or Jerry Lee Lewis (a problem with permissions from Sun Records, perhaps?). And from my perspective, there are altogether too many bluegrass tunes (two complete sides; eighteen tunes; nearly thirteen percent of the total, including three by Bill Monroe; more than twice the number of gospel tunes–almost half in bluegrass versions). Could that have resulted from the Smithsonian’s exaggerated sensitivity to its local middle-class audience in Washington–rightly known as the bluegrass capital of the east coast? As for gospel itself, it seem rather seriously under-represented in view of its prominence among those people who gave birth to and sustained country music. Virtually every country music radio or television show ever broadcast, after all, included at least one gospel song.

One also wonders why there is not a single example of country blues, which admittedly was not featured on the major country music radio stations or barn dances, but which was every bit as important a part of the country music scene after 1920–both as separate idiom as influence on white performers–as were southern mountain string bands. Indeed, Malone himself treats these performers in his Southern Music American Music (1979).

But finally the larger questions beckon: why, toward what ends, and with what effect has the Smithsonian at long last ventured to dip its elite toe into the waters of commercial country music? The institution has been

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there since 1846, after all, and could well have documented at first hand most of the now long lost traditions from which country music draws its styles and idioms.

Why didn’t it? Partly because its directors have almost always been natural scientists with at best a limited interest in humanistic or artistic matters. The Smithsonian’s most significant foray into cultural work (prior to the 1960s, anyway) was the Bureau of Ethnology, formed by Major John Wesley Powell in 1879, and even that enterprise proceeded under the flag of scientific anthropology and archaeology. Nevertheless, for more than a half-century the BAE carried out extensive studies of American Indian history and life: language and literature; material culture; myth, ritual, and ceremonial life; music and dance. But the Bureau was never able to take what would appear to have been the logical step of moving from studying Indian life and culture to studying the rich and diverse culture of the country’s many immigrant and enclaved cultural groups.

That did not mean that such studies fared poorly within federal institutions supposedly concerned with culture. The Library of Congress established its Archive of Folk Song in 1928, but it was (and remains to this day) small and poorly funded, particularly in comparison with analogous European efforts. The cultural projects of the New Deal for the most part did not survive more than a decade. The National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, established in 1965, were initially oriented exclusively toward high culture, and more than a decade later had to be forced to begin to pay modest (rather grudging, as it turned out) attention to traditional, non-elite culture. The first major policy affirmation of federal commitment to the recognition of traditional culture (the American Folklife Preservation Act) was signed into law at the opening of the nation’s two hundredth year.

Meanwhile, since the mid-1960s, the Smithsonian has been inching toward a rather tentative involvement with non-elite culture. It staged its first Festival of American Folklife in 1967, and opened a neighborhood museum in the mostly black District of Columbia suburb of Anacostia in 1968. Those stirrings, hesitant as they were, came in response to both the social upheavals of the sixties (Resurrection City was set up virtually in the front yard of the Smithsonian) and the urgings of a few individuals who had become infatuated by traditional music during the “folk revival” of the preceding decade.

If one looks closely at the institution’s tentative gestures toward the culturally unwashed, however, they generally prove to have substantial ties to the old elitism. The Smithsonian’s first major phonograph record issuing project was its six-record Classic Jazz package of 1973, aimed at–and bought mainly by, I would guess–middle class whites, who form the bulk of the jazz listening audience. (The Smithsonian’s jazz recording series now totals about three dozen discs.) Not until country music–historically the music of lower and working class whites, primarily in the South–began to be accorded status by a growing national (and upscale) audience did the Smithsonian draw it within the institutional pale. Not, indeed, until country music became chic, and designer-jeaned and powder blue cowboy-hatted Junior Leaguers began to listen to bluegrass and pump quarters into mechanical broncos at scores of Gilley’s replicas all across the country.

Even at that, there are signs that the Smithsonian released Classic Country Music with some sense of peril. Consider, for example, the preface to the fifty-six page brochure, supplied by the Smithsonian’s Division of Performing Arts, which issued the set. It is the only official institutional statement in the entire package, and therefore presumably an index to the attitudes of at least some Smithsonian policy makers toward the project and its subject matter. In the main, the preface attempts to apply to country music concepts and analytical categories developed to analyze and interpret elite (“classical”) music. Thus we learn that most country songs are in “AABA form,” are “atrophic,” and have a “melodic sequence” that moves from tonic to subdominant and back to tonic. So far, so good. There certainly is a need to comprehend country music in terms more precise and analytically useful than those employed by disc jockeys and fans, most of whom couldn’t care less whether Freddie Fender’s “I’ll Be There (Before the Next Teardrop Falls)” is atrophic or not.

As in so many cases, however, the technical terminology quickly proves to be something of a mask for value judgments. The preface in fact uses musicological terminology partly to dignify music which someone et the Smithsonian apparently still judges to lack its own intrinsic dignity. Thus country songs, the preface continues, cannot be expected to display the “cultivated charm or sophisticated wit of the standard popular song.” The accompanying instruments are not played in a. “classical style,” but are “struck,” “twanged,” “scraped,” or “flailed,” and voices are “rough-edged,” without “artificial refinement.” Subject matter leans toward “cynicism and wish-fulfillment” (rather like Don Juan or Madame Butterfly, one supposes).

The most obvious problem with such evaluations is that they simply will not wash–unless one can reasonably describe Don Reno as “twanging,” Vassar Clements and Clark Kessinger as “scraping,” Jim Reeves’ voice as “rough-edged,” and Tom T. Hall’s songs as lacking wit. Any reasonably sympathetic hearing of the full range of country music would confirm that it is characterized by great breadth of subject, variety of form, and subtlety of theme. And for an untutored bunch of strikers, twangers, scrapers, and flailers, Eck Robertson, Lilly Mae Ledford, Bill Monroe, Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, Earl Scruggs, Vassar Clements and their like manage to achieve a rather dazzling level of instrumental virtuosity.

A more important matter, however, is that in modern society, public institutions such as the Smithsonian have considerable power to legitimize or de-legitimize certain cultural forms and expressions–to prescribe how and in what terms they shall be understood, and to define the very boundaries within which new legitimacy is to be conferred. In this set of records, it seems to me, the Smithsonian has sent the public a mixed message: country music is a “truly democratic” art form (as they tell us) which by now even the more timid an’ conventional amongst us can safely listen to in public, but

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it is withal a little scrape-y and twangy. And so we must distance ourselves from it, and confine our admiration of it to those aspects which can be described in language I (AABAs, subdominants, and vocal lines decorated with “melismatic effects”) whose very use reminds subliminally that we usually listen to and think about “better” music. At a certain level, the preface reads a bit like a letter one might write to a wealthy and sophisticated friend back home in Boston or Marin County after one’s elegant cruise ship has docked briefly at a funky cultural port. Oh, Millicent, the music of those people was simply so wonderfully primitive and wild!

In such a situation, those of us who can’t afford the cruise would do well to keep at least a couple of things straight. Historically, poor and working people in this country have kept hillbilly, country, Cajun, blues, and gospel music alive in the face of a consensus of condescension and disapproval by virtually every established public cultural institution from the local level on up. At this late date they hardly need any favors or assistance from the Smithsonian. One wonders, in fact, if Classic Country Music would ever have been issued primarily out of concern and respect for the audience which gave the music birth and sustained it. It took an avalanche of designer jeans to do that. The weather vane that tops one of the castellated towers at 1000 Jefferson Drive isn’t there for nothing.

That is one thing to remember. The other is this: country music has not only been nurtured and sustained by poor and working people with precious little assistance or approval from their own tax-supported public institutions, but it has also until recently been studied, archived, written about and reissued in much the same way. Like many a banjo picker or gospel singer, scholars Bill Malone, Bob Pinson, Judith McCulloh, Charles Wolfe, Archie Green, Norman Cohen and many others have kept their “day jobs.” They have done their writing about country music mostly at night and on weekends taken interview trips out of their own pockets, pasted record labels and stapled little newsletters and journals together on dining room tables, and run organizations from post office boxes. The spirit behind the enterprise–one might almost say the political posture that informs it–is a spirit (and posture) of love, of self-affirmation, of resistance, of advocacy, of defiant somebody too-ness. As such, it is invaluable and irreplaceable.

At length, then, it is less important that Classic Country Music was issued (re-issues are plentiful, after all) than that the Smithsonian commissioned Bill Malone to do it. The energy that Malone has poured into country music scholarship for twenty years–the very perspective he brings to it–comes ultimately from the physical, social, and cultural landscape of east Texas. That perspective both informed his choice of tunes and shaped his language:

When my brother came home on his last furlough before going overseas, he, my mother, another brother, and I sat around the Spring Street Bowling Alley watching the bowlers (pleasures were often simple and cheap for the poor) and waiting for the Trailways bus that would take him back to camp. I do not know

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what thoughts ran through his mind, but the possibility of not returning must have been one of them.

The brother keeps feeding nickels into the jukebox, listening over and over to the 1941 hit “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,” which Malone calls “a song of parting and of hoped-for reconciliation.”

If the issuing of Classic Country Music betokens the beginning of a cultural reconciliation between the Smithsonian (indeed the whole federal cultural establishment)and the little people dropping quarters into jukeboxes in bus stations and bowling alleys all across the land, it is an event of not only musical but also profound social significance.

One of the worst sins a reviewer can commit is to judge a piece of work by irrelevant criteria, or to condemn it for not being what it does not pretend to be. Classic Country Music was not designed as a scholarly treatise. If one wants more extensive biographical, historical or discographical information on country music, there are places to get it–including Malone’s own other work. If one wants a fuller reissuing job done on the Carter family, the Blue Sky Boys, or the Sons of the Pioneers, one may turn to the fine albums produced by the tiny private John Edwards Memorial Foundation. If it is more intensive analysis one desires, that also is available.

The only fair question one may finally ask is whether Classic Country Music does what it may reasonably be expected to do to entertain and educate the rather select group who will even know it exists, and who can afford to lay down the fifty-five dollars. And beyond that, whether it is a reliable document to place in the thousands of community and school libraries that will probably acquire it.

My own answer–not in any way intended either to belittle Malone’s work or to underestimate the formidable task he faced–is a qualified yes. The qualification has less to do with any of the objections I raised earlier (too much bluegrass, too little gospel, no country blues) than with Malone’s having stopped short of raising some of the more embarrassing questions–as all of us partisans of country music are want to do upon occasion. Out of many possible examples, I mention two briefly: what about the “dark side” of country music, and what about its utility as a creative and correcting force in American life?

The dark side is almost impossible not to notice. To put it bluntly, a good deal of country music has been (and remains) maudlin, racist, sexist, and jingoistic. Much of bluegrass in particular accepts (even celebrates) demeaning images of women and puerile conceptions of relationships between men and women. (Grand opera does, too, but it is another matter.) The lyrics have been cleaned up a bit (or have disappeared altogether), but “rigger” songs (of minstrel and other origins) linger to this day in fiddle and string band repertoire. And our every domestic or military misadventure produces its musical apologia on the country charts.

If one were to condemn every form of creative expression for its lapses into bad taste, reactionary politics, or inhumane sentiment, no form would survive (not even grand opera). The point is not to condemn or to dismiss, but to understand the dialectic. Merle Haggard wrote both “Okie from Muskogee” and “Mama’s Hungry Eyes.” Johnny Cash has sung for Folsom inmates and for Billy Graham. Loretta Lynn’s coal miner’s daughter memories may live on “in a cabin in Butcher Holler,” but lately she has been doing commercials for Amax coal company. And Dolly doesn’t wear her coat of many colors anymore.

To understand country music, the agonizing dialectic must not only be faced as a feature of particular songs or individual careers; it must become the very foundation for analysis. Much of that task remains before us, and we who have grown up with the music must do it, or relinquish the task to those who know less about our values and perspectives than they need to to understand what happened between Eck Robertson and Willie Nelson.

David E. Whisnant is professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

Long Journey Home

By Bland Simpson and Cece Conway

Vol. 5, No. 4, 1983, pp. 17-19

One of the world’s great collections of Southern and country music has come home, and therein lies a ballad.

Early one morning in late April, a truck from California rolled into Chapel Hill, bringing the John Edwards Memorial Collection–nearly a thousand boxes of old 78-rpm phonograph records, sheet music and faded letters–to its new and permanent home at the University of North Carolina. For this archive, assembled by a young Australian, shipped at his death in 1960 to a fellow collector in New Jersey, then back across America to a long residency at the University of California at Los Angeles, it was journey’s end.

“There’s almost no end to the variety of material in

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those boxes,” said UNC’s Dan Patterson, after the dust had settled in late May. Patterson, the energetic director of the Folklore Curriculum here, was trail boss in the University’s drive to acquire the archive. “We hope we can find a copy of John Edwards’ will in there.”

Edwards’ will directed that the original collection–country music from the early period of its commercial history–be maintained in the United States for research purposes. When recipient Eugene Earle arrived with the archive in southern California in 1962, he and several other scholars and collectors–Archie Green. D.K. Wilgus, Ed Kahn, and Fred Hoeptner–formed the John Edwards Memorial Foundation and found housing for the archive at UCLA’s Center for Comparative Folklore and Mythology.

“We had wanted the collection to be housed in the South originally,” recalls Archie Green, “and we tried several institutions. But in the early 1960s, no Southern university was really committed to the serious study of any Southern vernacular music.”

The founders of the JEMF, like Edwards, understood that the record companies in the 1920’s and 1930’s had captured, in living sound, a host of emerging and evolving musical forms–repertories that did not interest scholars of that day. As documents of the vast impact of new technologies and commercialization on the old homemade music, these recordings in fact constitute a significant contribution to folklife studies.

During the two decades it was at UCLA on loan, the Edwards collection received the combined holdings of all its directors and other collectors and grew to include: fourteen thousand 78s, ten thousand 45s; a thousand LPs; correspondence and taped interviews with performers and other music business figures; six hundred song folios; sheet music; books; posters; photographs, and much more. And the Foundation enlarged its conception of the collection and embraced a wide range of traditional and commercial American music forms: cowboy, western, country western, old time, hillbilly, bluegrass, mountain, Cajun, sacred, gospel, race, blues, rhythm blues, soul, and folk rock.

Even before scholars had become fully aware of the collection’s significance, young musicians of the late 1960s were learning old-time styles and music from cassette tapes and from records pressed out of the Foundation’s collection. Now, the LP albums released by the JEMF have been turned over to Californian Chris Strachwitz, owner of Arhoolie Records and Down Home Music, who intends to keep the JEMF records in print and the label’s name alive and active.

In a recent edition of its Quarterly, JEMF executive secretary Norm Cohen wrote: “There is no denying that the creams of the founders of the JEMF over two decades ago have not been matched by reality . . . On the other hand, we have much to be proud of. We have led the way, in both printed and recorded media, toward the acceptance of country music and its related folk-derived forms as a subject for serious study at American educational institutions.”

Dan Patterson agreed. “Their Quarterly made the JEMF known all over the world.” And photographs from JEMF files, as well as references to materials there, abound in non-fiction works about country music. Cohen himself, in LONG STEEL RAIL, and JEMF president Archie Green, in ONLY A MINER, have used the collection’s riches in writing about railroading and mining songs.

Still, Patterson said, “The JEMF directors seemed to feel the collection was under-staffed and under-utilized at UCLA.” The JEMF’s reputation was firmly established, but the fate of its archive was not; the Foundation ran on grants, gifts and benefit concerts, and on the proceeds from high-quality but slow-selling records and publications. Patterson said he also believes the board in recent years began to think the collection belonged in the South, adding: “I think they decided it was unfair to deprive the South of a resource for the study of its own history.” At the heart of that study is the influence of the machine and technology on the South and the expression of Southern values in changing musical forms.

The first notion Patterson had that the JEMF was considering such a move came in 1979, when Green lectured in Chapel Hill. Patterson recalls: “He remarked, ‘Would UNC be interested in housing this collection?’- something like that. I thought, ‘Now, that wouldn’t happen.”‘ But in April, 1981, when Cohen came to Chapel Hill for a conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Patterson felt, “They were looking us over.” Cohen saw the 2500-LP Folk Music Archive that Patterson and his folklore students had built at UNC, and heard the plans the University had approved for its expansion.

It was Cohen who, in October 1982, suggested to Patterson at the American Folklore Society’s meeting in Minneapolis that, “If UNC is interested in the collection, it should make an offer now.”

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Patterson moved quickly once back in Chapel Hill. With partner Donald Shaw–a former student, now a journalism professor and director of UNC’s Media Center–he interested University Library director James Govan, a former Chattanoogan, in purchasing the l collection. But Govan told Patterson and Shaw: “The library couldn’t staff it now–could you?”

In short order, Patterson and Shaw strung together enough baling wire to fence in the collection: interim storage space from the Undergraduate Library, money to transport the collection from California to North Carolina from the Music and English Departments (including some discretionary funds offered by professor and novelist Doris Betts), assistantships and summer staff from the deans of the graduate and summer schools, and an initial operating budget created with the help of the provost and the chancellor.

UNC made its offer in January, 1983. The JEMF board accepted the bid in February, generously sending the collection back home at a fraction of its estimated half-million-dollar value. And Patterson, Shaw, and a crew of students and library staffers were singing the final chorus to the Ballad of John Edwards as they rounded up the 929 boxes on a Carolina loading dock the sunny morning of April 21st.

“Negotiations went so fast,” Patterson said, “that the collection came at an awkward time. We can’t open it till we have public facilities. And we have to get staff positions and operating costs into the University budget. We need to educate ourselves–about equipment, so as not to damage the original materials when we make protection copies of the recordings, and about the l copyright laws, so there is no infringement when we make copies for the public. We have to inventory and catalog what we’ve got, and begin efforts to add to the collection.”

When UNC’s main library moves into a new structure, a substantial part of the basement of L.R. Wilson Library will house the media collection- that Shaw is building. Here the JEMF Collection will be the lodestar of the Southern Media Center and Folk Music Archive. But the move that frees up the space will not occur until at least December 1983, and Wilson Library will then undergo two years of renovation. Patterson anticipates the grand opening of the collection will be in 1985.

What we in the South now have–with the Edwards Collection here, and complementary collections at the Library of Congress in Washington and at the Country Music Foundation in Nashville–is the world of American country and ethnic music, from early times and in many forms, in context and within reach of musicians, scholars and listeners. The region owes a debt to an Australian who never set foot in the land whose music he loved. His name will now remain tied to the songs of the American South.

Bland Simpson has co-authored the musicals Diamond Studs, Hot Grog and Life on the Mississippi. He has written the recent novel of country music, Heart of the Country (Putnam, 1983) and its a lecturer in creative writing at UNC. Cece Conway its a lecturer in English at UNC, a folklorist and co-director of the recent film Tommy Jarrell–Sprout Wings and Fly.

Roadside Theater

By Sharon Hatfield

Vol. 6, No. 3, 1984, pp. 14-18

The small room at the Brumley Gap Coon Hunter’s Club in Poor Valley, Virginia was so cold that the slide projector had to warm up before the show could begin. But the coal stove and the rapidly growing crowd soon filled the room with warmth. By the time the first lines of Red Fox/Second Hangin’ were spoken, the chill had long been forgotten.

Framed against the projected photographs of nineteenth-century Appalachia, the actors began spinning a tale of hardship and violence in the early coalfields. They told of Bad Henry Adams, a man who shot and killed his neighbor without rising from the supper table. (The quarrel, they said, was over a dog.)

“There was an old man sitting right up front, and he looked bored as hell,” recalls actor Don Baker. “I was determined to get some kind of response out of him, so I said, ‘You’re Bad Henry Adams, pretend you’re eating.’ I looked real menacing at him and pointed my fingers like a gun. When I did that, he just put his hand in his pocket and whipped out a knife. I jumped back and said, ‘Okay, you don’t have to if you don’t want to.’ After the show I found out he was stone cold deaf.”

Roadside is a folk theater that draws on the heritage of the Cumberland Mountains in southern Appalachia. It takes its art to people who may never have been inside a theater. On that particular night at the Coon Hunter’s Club, Roadside’s benefit performance helped pay lawyers who were representing Brumley Gap citizens in their fight to block a proposed pump-storage electric project in their community. The citizens eventually prevailed and were able to prevent their bottomland farms from being flooded to make way for the project.

“Grassroots art means trying to have people not only be moved aesthetically by the quality of the art presented, but to encourage people to get up and work from their own resources,” says Dudley Cocke, director of Roadside Theater. “Art should encourage people to do something with their lives and communities. That transformation is an important factor in art.”

This sense of possibility that Roadside imparts to its audiences has carried the small theater company far from its home base in the coalfields of Eastern Kentucky and Southwest Virginia to Off-Broadway, Lincoln Center, the

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Midwest, California and rural Nevada, and to a host of settings in the South. They have often found urban populations as receptive to their improvisational storytelling as people who have grown up in the rural, oral tradition.

A region abundant in folkways and myth as well as in coal and timber, Appalachia carries an image of backwardness and ignorance due to what outsiders have written and said about it. In an area where over half the land in many counties is still owned by corporations based elsewhere (some as far away as London), exploitation of natural resources and native people has been an all too common occurrence since the late 1800s. Roadside’s original full-length piece, Red Fox/Second Hangin’, for example, tells the story of the collision of ways of life that led to a legal lynching in Wise, Virginia, during the country’s first coal boom in the 1890s.

When Roadside founder Don Baker returned to his native Wise County from a job as arts counselor in Washington, DC, in 1971, he did not encounter the pristine environment often sentimentalized in novels about Appalachia. Cars, electricity, radio and TV had been present for decades, but a more recent technology–strip mining–was on the verge of an unprecedented and unencumbered heydey. Another coal boom was underway with it would come another alteration of both the social and actual landscape.

Roadside Theater’s director, Cocke, believes that despoilation of the land goes hand in hand with the uprooting of indigenous cultures in southern Appalachia. “It’s a whole process of impersonalization.” Perhaps it was this sense of loss that led Don Baker and his fellow actors to seek out the richness of the past through the oral tradition instead of more contemporary, conventional forms. “We tried to figure out what kind of theater made sense here,” Baker explains. “We had neither the time nor the inclination for costumes, or elaborate staging but we all had storytelling in common.”

The framework for Roadside Theater’s existence was already ID place when Baker returned to the coalfields. Appalshop (The Appalachian Film Workshop) was a collective set up in Whitesburg, Kentucky, by the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1969 to train mountain people for media careers. Paradoxically, there were almost no media jobs available in the region. After OEO funds dried up in 1972, Appalshop secured grants from private foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. Today, Appalshop’s media center in Whitesburg is home to a record company and recording studio, film and video artists, photographers, the theater company, a central administrative corps and a soon-to-be-completed community radio station.

Roadside was formed in 1974 from the Appalachia Actors’ Workshop, which had performed traditional plays like Peter Pan and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Instead of using established scripts, Roadside chose to draw its resources directly from the collective memories of the community. The young theater company acknowledged that conventional theater seldom reaches the hollows, farm communities and mining camps that make up so much of central Appalachia; and when it does, it makes little impression. Roadside chose to build upon the strong theatrical heritage of the mountains–the church services, music and storytelling.

What emerged was a style of storytelling that did not depend on props, costumes or staging effects. The human voice, magnified by two or three storytellers speaking simultaneously, could reach an audience of five-hundred with the same power as when it entertained a few neighbors on a summer evening. “We began by telling traditional tales that we had all grown up hearing,” explains Baker. “We told these tales together, batting lines back and forth, saying some phrases in unison, feeding off each other’s rhythms.”

Roadside’s first show was a collection of stories called Mountain Tales. The stories combines familiar Appalachian settings and music with archetypes found in folk literature throughout the world: Mutsmeg and her two wicked sisters (similar to Snow White and her wicked stepkin); Wicked John and the Devil (a humorous Faustian tale) and the Jack or quest tales — all contain symbols identifiable to many people.

“We were in Zuni three days,” recalls actor and writer Ron Short about a recent Roadside visit to the Zuni pueblo in New Mexico. “There, our stories became real. Many of them deal with hunting, tending sheep, spirits, giants. The Indian kids understood every bit of that. We told the story of the swamp snake, and after the show they calmly showed us a picture of theirs. On the other hand, kids in Arlington, Virginia, for example, would say, ‘That’s impossible, that snake died millions of years ago.”

“Kids in places like Arlington have been deprived of the chance to believe in myth,” agrees Cocke. “That’s why they turn to figures like ET. People like myth and need it. Our mountain tales, like those of the Native Americans, are mythological.”

Roadside’s second project was to script an original fulllength production in the mobile, popular form they had developed with Mountain Tales. The result, Red Fox/Second Hangin’, is a departure from the whimsy of

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Mountain Tales to what might be called revisionist history at its best. Don Baker had long heard tales of M.B. “Doc” Taylor, a preacher and former US marshal! who was the second of seven men hanged in Wise County before 1900. Red Fox, as Taylor was called, was revered by many mountain people but was convicted of murdering an entire family. Baker decided that this was a paradox worth exploring.

In researching the Red Fox story, Baker enlisted the help of Dudley Cocke, a friend from his study days at Washington and Lee University. “We began by reading history books,” says Baker. “It wasn’t until we began interviewing older people who had known Doc Taylor or whose families passed along stories about him, that our research began to differ markedly from the written version. We sensed that in these interviews we were getting closer to the truth.”

Baker and Cocke collected old newspaper clippings, as well as letters and diaries of the period. They spoke with one elderly man who actually witnessed the hanging. The breakthrough came in the attic of the Wise County Courthouse when they found the original transcript of the Red Fox trial. The transcript suggested that the preacher had been framed by powerful men in the burgeoning coal industry.

Using a conversational tone, actors Gary Slemp, Frankie Taylor and Don Baker merge sixty different characters into a gripping detective story. A series of slides made from original photos of Doc Taylor’s life and times gives the story a firm setting, and a ten-minute file segment re-enacts a crucial event.

Like Red Fox/Second Hangin’, the musical Brother Jack also draws from folk memory and old documents. While the title story and several of the songs were written by actor Ron Short, other tales were adapted by Baker from material collected within fifty miles of Roadside’s home by the Federal Writer’s Project in the 1930s. In Brother Jack, storytellers Angelyn DeBord, Tom Bledsoe and Short spin yarns alone and in unison, trade-off lines and sing to banjo and fiddle accompaniment. The mood changes from that of “acting a fool” in a wrestling story to one of quiet drama in the tales of murder and coal mining disasters. A sense of the despair and fatalism that sometimes pervades mountain life is offset by the protagonist Jack (the archetypal Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk), who is always “wishing for something better.”

“The whole concept behind Brother Jack is how we in the mountains got here,” says Baker. “We talk about death, about men and women, about the Civil War–and we’ve tried to deal with them in a lot of different ways.” The play also explores the perpetual question of human purpose. “We use religion, prayer, mystical stuff, even jokes to try to understand it, so we have a good time. But right in the middle of the good times, something taps us on the shoulder and says, ‘Hey, you can’t forget’.”

Roadside’s fourth major production, South of the Mountain, premiered in October 1982 at the Regional Organization of Theatres South (ROOTS) festival in Atlanta and enjoyed a three-week run at the Dance Theatre Workshop in New York City in September 1983. In this musical, author Ron Short depicts his boyhood world in Dickenson County, Virginia, through original songs and the reflections of his family.

A common thread which runs through Roadside’s productions is a search for cultural identity. In the words of Short, the 1980s are “a time of conflict” for many ethnic groups in this country. “Like here in Appalachia, people are asking, ‘Should we mainstream? Should we change the way we talk or think?'”

In South of the Mountain, Short deals with these questions directly as he explores the choices that individuals must make when their society changes from an agriculturally-based one to an industrial, coal-mining community. One New York drama critic complained that questions like these are no longer valid in today’s modern world. In contrast, Short recalls being overwhelmed after the performances by people from the audiences who could relate. “The second generation Italian people were saying to me, ‘This is the story of my life’,” Short says. “the hillbilly thing was less important.”

In April, Roadside toured several predominantly Navajo communities in southern Utah on a Western States Art Foundation tour sponsored by the Utah Rural Arts Consortium. In the West, Cocke and Short were amazed by parallels between the Native American cultures and their own rural Southern one. In the Indian villages the actors found a strong affinity for the land, an oral history tradition, and conflicts between old and new.

In the Native American communities, says Cocke, “There’s a wide deep gulf between the traditional way and the modern way. Two seemingly irreconcilable ways of

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being. The two tracks go parallel but it’s a no-man’s land in between. I was sitting in a house waiting for an ancient religious dance to begin, and ever so often out the door I’d hear bells and see a dancer or two running by to join his group. Directly the drumming started, and in the corner I noticed that Love Boat was on TV. The program never looked so strange.”

The tour was perhaps a learning experience for both visitors and hosts. Some of the Roadside cast members, with their long beards, were objects of curiosity to be sure. Actor Tom Bledsoe, who sports a red beard and long blond hair, was the object of some good-natured teasing from Indian children who thought he looked like a band member of ZZ Top. But beyond that, the Roadside cast may have been quite unlike most Anglo people the Native Americans had seen, an example of a possible bridge between the modern and the traditional. “After all,” notes Cocke, “we were white people doing something between the two extremes.”

In talking with some of the teachers at Montezuma Creek, Short learned a truth about his own art. “They were wondering about the possibility of developing their own kind of Appalshop. The great conflict was how do they cross over from that religious all-sense and tell their story so it still has meaning. I had to ask this question of myself and my work too.”

During the past year Roadside has enjoyed the artistic fellowship of other regional theater companies who are attempting to maintain a sense of cultural identity. Roadside was a part of Tell Me a Story, Sing Me a Song, a touring performance festival which included the Free Southern Theater from New Orleans, A Traveling Jewish Theater from San Francisco and El Theatro Campesino from San Juan Bautista, California. Through their use of indigenous storytelling and music, and by re-examining their people’s history, the four companies have produced some of the past decade’s most exciting original American theater.

In the spring of 1983, the four groups performed simultaneously in the San Franciso Bay area. Last December, the joint tour included a festival at Jacksonville State University in Jacksonville, Alabama, produced by Josephine Ayers, a pest producer of the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The show also traveled to Roadside’s home base in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and the groups will probably collaborate on future tours.

In bringing their art to a large, non-theater-going audience, Roadside has spent nearly ten years on the road. The company maintains a schedule of two hundred performances and workshops annually, as well as a summer tent tour of coal camps and back hollows. Many of these are one-day stands.

For most of its existence, Roadside has had no resident theater, instead rehearsing in church halls, living rooms or even outdoors. According to Cocke, the peripatetic lifestyle has given Roadside an uncanny ability to size up an audience and set the tone accordingly. “You can imagine that some of the groups we run into have no clue who we are,” he says. “But the idea has always been to go with the space we find ourselves in and to meet the audience more than halfway.”

Coupled with the rigors of the traveling life is the need for Even with the opening of the 160-seat Appalshop theater in 1982, the theater-going audience in the Whitesburg area is so small that the company could never hope to survive on ticket sales alone. Government grants play a large part in keeping Roadside afloat.

In Lee County, Virginia, a man auctioned off a cow and used the proceeds to help pay for the performance. Roadside was able to match the cow’s sale price with a state arts grant.

“Theater is losing ground nationally,” observes Roadside’s director, “and some smaller theaters are falling by the way. We just keep trying to hold on. We’re like a company with just one car (in this case a blue Ford van), while other larger companies have a fleet of limos. They may lose their limos because they can’t pay for them, but we keep plugging along with our one car.”

Finances have played a large part in Roadside’s decision to tour beyond Appalachia. The actors reject the notion that one must leave the mountains “to be somebody” but they know the value of media exposure and interaction with other professionals. “Touring outside the region wasn’t necessarily what we wanted to do at first,” explains Cocke, “but we made the decision to do so in 1976 or 1977. We had to get some stamp of approval before we could convince the national funding agencies–and ironically, the even less flexible state agencies–that we did qualify. We’d still like to find a way to travel less.”

Roadside’s five full-time and eight part-time employees form a community that stretches over the three counties and two states in which they live. Touring is sometimes a family affair. Eight-month-old Jubel Slone has been traveling with actress-mother Angelyn De Bord since he was eight weeks old. A full-time staff at Roadside’s Whitesburg office handles bookings, mailings and fundraising. For the most part, the company is traditionally taught. Roadside tries to keep a reservoir of trained talent that can be called upon for various productions. Writers Short and Baker are both currently working on new plays.

A criticism of Roadside’s work voiced by some political activists is the charge that the shows aren’t political enought.

“There are a lot of ways to get at politics,” responds Cocke. “Some would say a Zuni dance isn’t political. Much of Roadside’s work comes from the perspective of a whole culture, way of life.”

Adds Short, “Our work takes something as fragile as cultural identity and places it in a public forum.” Short says his work has been termed apolitical because it does not openly advocate social change. “I feel that a political statement, like life, is a whole lot broader than that,” he says: “It’s an exploration of human values that I’m most interested in. In watching a play which explores these values, people are free to get their own ideas.”

One way in which the theater company is exerting considerable influence is through their work in the nation’s school systems. “Taking it to the schools is just like taking it to the streets,” observes Jack Wright, an early Roadside member.

The actors are committed to the idea that a good performance doesn’t end with the applause. Cocke notes: “One criticism of arts programs in general is that they don’t have a conception of the more basic values they’re trying to promote beyond the immediate performance. I’m interested

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in things that go beyond immediate aesthetic value. We hope the people who see our shows will gain a sense of possibility about their own lives and communities.”

In many of the school tours, the ability of the actors to ignite this sense of worth in one’s own heritage is evident. A teacher from Chincoteague, an island off the coast of Virginia that was isolated from the mainland until 1930, wrote to say that she hoped Roadside could return to “help the students appreciate and develop the marvelous supply of tales and remembrances in their own area. Our area is very rich in this valuable resources, but there have been only isolated efforts to explore and appreciate what we have. It would be a wonderful experience for our entire community to have someone direct efforts to explore our own folk history.”

According to Cocke, Roadside would like to develop the financial resources to be able to embark on these community treasure hunts for two or three weeks at a time in different localities. He notes that funding sources generally lean more toward the twenty-shows-in-twenty-four days tour than to supporting a long term residency in one community.

A climate of uncertain financial support places pressure on the company to come up with consistently good productions. While this may explain Roadside’s good track record, Cocke says it “doesn’t encourage chance taking with new writing. We know some things we’d like to try, like a summer works-in-progress festival to encourage local people to write for us, but we just are not in a financial position to do so.”

One indication of an outreach toward new writers is a play opening in May at the Appalshop theater in Whitesburg. Drama students at Whitesburg High School will present In Ya Blood, which is based on a film by the same name which was produced by Appalshop in 1973. Under the direction of Roadside’s Jeff Hawkins, the students wrote an original script about the choices young people must make in deciding whether to leave the mountains or stay and face the limited opportunities for employment.

After a decade of writing and production, another challenge facing Roadside is one which confronts many independent artists across the country: how does one gain access to the media? While the company has succeeded in keeping a busy touring schedule, it has yet to reach a wide radio and TV audience. Both Red Fox and Brother Jack have been recorded as radio serials, but both have yet to find a buyer. Similarly, a video presentation of Red Fox was completed in 1983, but is still awaiting nationwide distribution.

“What we’re facing with TV–I mean all of Appalshop’s work–is that the PBS system is not responding to independent artists,” says Roadside’s director. “It’s very difficult for film and video people to get their work on PBS and get paid for it. It’s a political problem because our message generally is contrary to the message that has been selected for viewing. Also, there is a certain style that producers getting the money have figured out. But what PBS is forgetting is that audiences will respond to content.”

“The gulf between traditional and modern life is not just a concern of a particular ethnic group like the Native Americans,” Cocke maintains. “Appalachian people are struggling with the same things as people in other parts of the country. More than anything, it’s a question of finding a path through life.”

Sharon Hatfield is a free lance writer who lives in Virginia.

The Politics of Culture in an American Region

Reviewed by J.W. Williamson

Vol. 6, No. 6, 1984, pp. 23-24

All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region by David E. Whisnant. University of North Carolina Press, 1983. 340 pp.

The first time I ever laid eyes on David Whisnant was at a big conference in the mountains called “Toward 1984: The Future of Appalachia,” and he was making like the Prophet Amos even then. That was in 1974. He stood up in the concluding plenary session, conducted by “the Goals and Objectives Committee” of the conference, and told all those industry and government and think-tank types what he thought of their agenda for Appalachia. He didn’d want nothing those guys had to offer, no way they could preach it or talk it. Well, he slowed them down, but he didn’t stop .hem. They went ahead and adopted their “Goals and Objectives” for Southern Appalachia, one of which read–

3. Educational institutions in Appalachia must relate more consciously to the mountain experience. They must include a concern for the rich historical and cultural heritage of the region, an awareness of the relationship between human beings and their land, and of the alternatives for the future and for the human values involved.

Nice liberal-sounding words. So what’s so wrong with pasting this humanistic veneer of culture-salvation on top of your run-of-the-mill three-day conference?

One of the things wrong with it was that the people writing this agenda for saving mountain culture were also simultaneously in the service of the coal industry, the power industry, the petroleum industry, the land-development industry, the railroading industry, the steel industry, and the-ahem–higher education industry–all in their way and in their time exploitive of the place and the people. This iron y is also at the core of Whisnant’s new book, All That Is Native and Fine. What happens when agents of the dominant American, mainstream, middle-class, industrial society get it in their heads that they ought to help mountain people? What happened at Hindman Settlement School from the 1890’s on? What happened at the White Top Folk Festival in Virginia during the 1930’s? What happened, even, when as intelligent and wise a woman as Olive Dame Campbell decided to start a folk school in the North Carolina mountains? All basically liberal, benevolent “interventions” for the sake of doing good. But Whisnant’s attitude toward them is the attitude the Prophet Amos toward hypocrites of his own day–“Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.”

In other words, All That Is Native and Fine is a tough book. It needles the reader with a profoundly disturbing vision of do-gooders doing mainly harm (or “young ladies with weak eyes and young men with weak chins. . . offering cocoa and sponge cakes as a sort of dessert to the factory system,” as one critic of settlement workers called them). Ironies and paradoxes breed in this book like mayflies on a humid night. For example. Olive Dame Campbell founded the John C. Campbell Folk School (named for her dead husband) on a rather naive and romantic notion that Appalachia in the early 1920’s was still an “isolated, preindustrial, premercantile society,” but Whisnant sets that notion against some sobering reality:

By 1925, however, even rural Cherokee and Clay counties were neither preindustrial nor premercantile. The local weekly newspaper regularly cataloged the arrival of mass culture in the late 1920’s: a traveling tent show was competing for an audience with “The

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Thief of Baghdad” (starring Douglas Fairbanks) at the Bonita Theater; an eight-story hotel was rising on Murphy’s main street; Parker’s Drug Store was installing a jukebox; private power companies were damming the Hiwasee River to run the electric refrigerators advertised alongside Fords, Whippets, and Hupmobiles. At the time the folk school opened, the other big news stories locally were the opening of the Appalachia Scenic High way from Atlanta to Asheville (via Murphy) and early plans for the formation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Fly the spring of 1927 an automobile raced to Asheville in two hours, thirty-nine minutes–nearly fifty miles an hour. The annual Cherokee County Singing Convention, organized in 1894, was still drawing as many as fifteen hundred people in 1925, but the old ways were clearly dying

That paragraph alone is worth the price of the book.

Whisnant’s most concise statement of doctrine is this: intervention in a “culture” for whatever reasons is usually wrongheaded because “the ‘culture’ that is perceived by the intervenor (even before the act of intervention) is rarely congruent with the culture that is actually there. It is a selection, an arrangement, an accommodation to preconceptions–whether of mountaineers, or Indians, or Georgia blacks, or Scotch Highlanders. Thus the culture that is ‘preserved’ or ‘revived’ is a hybrid at best”–mountain people taught crafts and songs and dances that they ought to know and which they would have known if only they had had the good sense to be educated at, say, Vassar.

So what about the nice little ladies and the kindly gentlemen with big box cameras in their portmanteaus, all the ones who are unaware of the larger ironies of their undertakings–their interventions–in the mountains? Can’t we give them a break and say it’s all right what they did, so long as they thought they were doing good? Well, no. Whisnant is a stern judge; “Rescuing” or ‘preserving’ or ‘reviving’ a sanitized version of culture frequently makes for rather shallow liberal commitment: it allows a prepared consensus on the ‘value’ of preservation or revival, its affirmations lie comfortably within the bounds of conventional secular piety; it makes minimal demands upon financial (or other) resources; and it involves little risk of opposition from vested economic or political interests. It is, in a word, the cheapest and safest way to go.” Woe to them that are at ease in Zion!

Whisnant is careful not to offer comments on other culture-saving ventures of more recent vintage. On his three case studies, his research is exhaustive, and he doesn’t gallop beyond his research to phenomena like Foxfire, for example. But the message seems pretty clear if implicit: what they did then they’re still doing now, only their technology is better and sometimes their funding. People still come to the mountains and see what they want to see: cabins in the laurel and all that stuff. They don’t notice the plain truth–for instance, that the most ubiquitous feature on the Appalachian landscape right now is the satellite dish–and they certainly haven’t begun to deal with the reality of what that means. Whisnant says that the cultural objects, styles, and practices introduced by the little ladies and kindly gentlemen–the “intervenors”–have a nasty habit of taking on a life of their own, get imbedded in too many people’s minds as examples of what life in this region is all about, and then those false notions become the basis for public policy–governments at all levels deciding to do for and do to mountain people on the basis of a profoundly warped understanding of who those people are and what motivates them. That is the evil that comes from trying to save someone else’s “culture,” and those are the dangerous “politics” of Whisnant’s sub-title.

This is a sobering book. It needs study by a great host of “culture workers,” inside these mountains and out.

J.W. Williamson is editor of the Appalachian Journal.

Consorting with the Enemy

By Elise Witt

Vol. 7, No. 2, 1985, pp. 15-21

February 3. Miami, the cultural intermediary. Tropical vegetation, flowering bushes in February. Sultry air and a heavy, full moon. Spanish signs on Cuban stores, Spanish being spoken. We share a Cuban seafood meal by the Miami River.

In the bilingual airport we try out the Spanish we have studied the last few months. The Aeronica gate and our flight are filled mostly with Nicaraguans. Three North Americans are aboard to meet a cotton brigade. There are two students from Boston and California and an older Mexican American woman who tells us she grew up picking cotton. “Going to Nicaragua to help with their harvest is the least I can do to lend support,” she says.

After two hours of flight, someone spots land. At the moment of arrival in Managua a huge space within me lights up.

February 4. We get to know our hosts at the Managua Center for Popular Culture (CPC). The country wide CPC’s are community arts centers which will serve as our sponsors in each town we visit on our sixteen-day tour. We meet with Arelhy Suarez, head of International Cultural Exchange, and Cleopatra and Janet, staff members at the CPC National Office.

With Cleopatra, we eat our first Nicaraguan lunch. Tortillas, salad, including pickled cucumbers, carrots and squash, plantains, beans with cream–my two favorites–and a huge pile of queso fresco–fresh, white cheese, similar to that my father makes out of goat’s milk in North Carolina.

After lunch, we decide on a walking tour of Managua. Straight out from the Hotel Intercontinental–the center for visiting foreign “dignitaries”–we wander through blocks of empty grass and concrete, vestiges of the 1972 earthquake and Somoza’s bombs. Skeletons of buildings are everywhere. Populated neighborhoods ring a vast, empty, city center. Somoza pocketed most of the world-donated relief funds after the earthquake.

The Palacio Nacional is now the Palacio de La Revolucion. At the Plaza Carlos Fonseca Amador the stone reads, “His body is dead, but his spirit lives on in every Nicarguan.” Fonseca, a hero of the revolution, founded the Sandinsta party.

The city of Managua is quiet on this first day of our visit. People have gone to the countryside to pick coffee. The Ministry of Culture is in the mountains, lending a hand.

We walk to the Plaza Park, an outdoor amphitheater. On Election Day, November 2, 1984, all of Managua gathered here for a fiesta. The great cathedral in the middle of Managua was also ruined by the tremor of the earthquake, but the frame still stands and we climb to look over the sanctuary and catch another view of the city.

From the cathedral we ride the bus. It is as crowded as everyone told us buses would be. We lose Mary, Rick and Steve when we get off. They have to ride a stop further before they can make their way to the back door and step out.

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Walls are covered with folk art and graffiti. And there are the billboards: “In Construction Is the Solution.” “In Five Years We Have Built 1500 New Schools. This Is What We Are Defending.” “After the First Step We Will Never Stop Walking.”

February 5. We leave Managua for the countryside in a minibus driven by the CPC’s Don Felix. In sight of a large lake and volcanos, one still smoking, we head northwest toward Leon. Beside the road, trees hang with coconuts, mangos, grapefruit.

We are met in the university town of Leon by Carlos Sanchez, the city’s CPC director. The Leon CPC is the former home of a rich somocista who has fled the country. A huge garden is surrounded by terraces. Much of the house is roofless and unused but the core of the CPC is comfortable and well kept. In the library I notice technical books for workers and a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Spanish. Children come every afternoon for folk dancing lessons. Many people use the center for rehearsing, playing music, painting, and as a gathering place.

CPC worker Enrique Sandoval takes my guitar and shows me a new song: “La Consigna,” which tells about the struggles the Nicaraguans have gone through before and since the triumph in 1979. It’s a singable song that everybody in the country seems to know.

Enrique says he has a guitar but no strings. I had heard that there was a shortage of strings-indeed of almost any kind of musical supplies. Before leaving Atlanta I had gotten a donation from GHS Guitar String Company in Michigan, and now Enrique has a new set. Together, we play and sing “Guantanamera” by the Cuban, Jose Marti, and “Flor de Pino,” a Nicaraguan song about Sandino.

Late in the afternoon we walk over to a Leon bank where the workers are sitting in class listening to a professor of literature from the University. At first I don’t understand a word. Slowly, the Spanish starts making sense. The professor is telling of Ruben Dario, the poet laureate of Nicaragua who gave a new identity to Nicaraguan literature and thought. “Hispanic culture must not be swallowed up by English culture. The two must live side by side in the Americas.”

The bank employees have been at work all day and, afterwards, like Nicaraguans throughout the country, they’ve sat through a class. Nonetheless, they receive us enthusiastically.

We start with “Yo Solo Quiero” which is upbeat and carries a message of international solidarity.

At last we are making music and our sense of purpose and belonging seem clearer. This is our first concert in Nicaragua. The introduction of the songs, in Spanish, begins to flow. The audience, at first quiet, becomes warm and responsive.

The program is balanced between our North American songs–particularly lively jazz tunes–and our international repertoire: “Bella Ciao,” a revolutionary Italian song which is understandable in Spanish, and “Paidu Vyidu,” a Russian acapella love ballad. We end with “Flor de Pino” which we don’t know well yet, but which we know means much to our audience.

The best part of the concert comes afterward. People step up to talk, at first shyly, hesitantly, then more enthusias-

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tically. A half-dozen conversations jumble together. A group of five bank workers take up where Enrique had left off in leaching me “La Consigna.”

Afterwards, we walk out of town to the University where we share the women’s dorm with students who are there. They rise at four in the morning to pick cotton until noon, then return for school work all afternoon.

February 6. George King has the video equipment out today and is shooting a walking tour of Leon led by Enrique. Since George asks him to repeat explanations and descriptions several times, I’m really understanding most of what Enrique is saying about Leon’s history and its importance during the revolution as the center of the student movement. He shows us the Cathedral, the Virgin of Guadalupe, the prison of the Somoza guards.

We walk in the cells where barbed wire hangs in vines through the open roof. Here, prisoners were packed a hundred to a cell. Tomas Borge, now one of the leaders of the government, was held in such a cell for six and a half years.

That afternoon, aboard a truck used for hauling crops, Small Family Orchestra and a group of young folk dancers ride to where the students are picking cotton. Along the way we see parakeets and small, bright yellow birds called gorriones sitting in orange, flowering trees. “Zopilotes” (turkey buzzards) float over us for several minutes, following the truck. We pass chacara seca (dry banana), a small group of houses that belonged to a somocista, but is now a state farm.

Oscar, the leader of the student volunteers, asks me if I know “El Arado” (“The Plow”) by Victor Jara. We begin to sing it together on the bumpy, dirt road to the cotton plantation at Miramar.

At Miramar young students who have come from the fields sit around us as we rehearse. Five lie in a hammock–which later breaks with their weight. Others stretch out on the ground. They clap and sing along.

We try out “El Arado,” then “Quincho Barrilete,” a song about a ten-year-old boy, killed in the revolution. Sitting in front of me is a boy who knows all the words.

At the evening concert, we share the stage with the wide-skirted folk dance group who came with us from Leon. We sing a Carter Family song and “Save the Bones for Henry Jones,” the sound echoing over the audience and against a volcano up into the starry sky.

February 7 . Before we leave the dorm this morning, Maribel, one of the students gives me a red and black Sandinista scarf which she sewed herself, then ironed carefully. I trade her a Photosouth baseball cap from Atlanta.

We drive from Leon to Granada.

At an evening concert at Estado Mayor we are proceeded by a solo singer who sings in a rich full voice the new songs of Nicaragua. Two folk dancers and a comedian, Jose Senteno, follow. Then we sing. At the end we are given a copy of The Living Thoughts of Sandino and a kiss from the companero who presents it to us. Before the bus takes us home we sit around and share American songs–North, South and Central.

February 8. We practice an Appalachian spiritual, “Bright Morning Star.” An Indian word in the Nahualt language calls the morning star Nixtayolero, after the corn (nixtayol) tortillas are made from. So we have translated “Bright Morning Star” into Spanish. The harmonies fill up the huge room, the high ceilings, the balcony of the Granada CPC-a former social club for the rich.

Walking down the street in Granada, we hear that a young doctor from that city at work in the north of the country has been killed by contras only hours before. Flags in the city go to half mast.

In the afternoon we ride by open jeep to Jinotepe, to celebrate the return of brigades of coffee and cotton pickers. Nearly four thousand student-aged brigadistas, just arrived, are gathered on the town square. Each brigade has its own name and group spirit and there are prizes for the best pickers. There is a parade and fireworks, and children everywhere.

Knapsacks are piled on the sidewalks and coffee beans are being tossed into the air. A truck passes by decorated

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with stalks of cotton. Between speeches by various brigidistas, we are introduced, the norteamericanos. After we sing and play there are more speeches. We sit and talk with a group of children. These ten and eleven year olds tell us about studying Spanish, English, history, natural science, mathematics, music and drawing in their school. They all have on red and black scarves. One of them, Karen, gives me the button that she earned during the Literacy Campaign. I give her a figurine of a horse that I have from Germany in my guitar case.

On the way back to Granada we stop at a fiesta where a band from the Atlantic Coast, Dimencion Costena is playing. An eight man group, they play music from the black-Creole, Atlantic Coast culture of Nicaragua–a mix of reggae and calypso. This is a band that we hope to bring to the US as the other half of our cultural exchange.

February 9. As we drive to the mountain town of Boaco, we are joined by our new guide, Cruz, from Rivas in the south of Nicaragua. Even in the mountains, we are traveling through palm trees and tropical vegetation.

The microbus is having problems carrying a fifty-five gallon drum of gas, five musicians with instruments, a video producer with three packs of gear and from three to fifteen Nicaraguans. On several of the hills, we get out and push.

our evening performance is at the movie theater of Boaco, where we’ve replaced the evening’s feature film. It’s the first full length concert we’ve done since the one for the bank workers. We include many Spanish songs as well as our new Southern songs. The faces in the audience give back a lot and many mouths are singing the Spanish words. At the end, after “Flor de Pino,” we invite the audience to come and talk, ask questions, offer criticism. We are quickly surrounded.

A man with a sleeping daughter draped across his shoulder asks many questions. He is a schoolteacher who, with his students, is collecting regional history and folklore.

“What do the people in the United States think of Nicaragua?,” he asks. “What news do they receive?” “Upon your return, you must speak at every concert you play, with every person you talk with, about what we are trying to do here. We want peace and the freedom to develop our lives and our own history. We feel a kinship with the people of the US and want to maintain bonds of friendship, not be separated by misunderstanding.”

February 10. Norman, a twenty-three year old architecture student who speaks beautiful English that he learned in Nicaraguan schools tells me, “Someday I would like to travel to visit the United States and many other countries. But who knows when that will be possible. Who knows if that will ever be possible.”

Norman is in the middle of his university studies. But he has to wait a year, two years. For now, he must pick cotton and coffee and go to the mountains to protect schools, hospitals and towns from contra attacks. “Please tell your people, ” he says, “that we want to continue our development as a young country.”

By the time we left Nicaragua, it felt like everyone we met had lost a relative or a best friend, either during the revolution or fighting the contras.

“At least one student from every classroom has fallen,” says Norman. “When you hear that the three most promising students in your class have been killed, what else can you do but step forward and take their place? When a child sees his parents killed by the contras, what else can he do but join the fight himself, even though he is ‘too young.’ They put these children in service as cooks or other non-combatant duties, but they usually wind up in combat by choice.”

February 11. We have breakfast with Eunice, Nelly, Roberto and the other CPC workers who have been traveling with us. My sister Mary is giving Mateo a crash course in reading music. Conversations buzz around the table.

Abel, the regional director of the CPC’s in the mountains, thanks us for our visit with a brief speech and presents each of us with a copy of a book by Ahmed Campos, a young poet, a friend who was killed in the early 1980s by the contras. With a heartfelt speech, I thank them for the three days that we have shared.

A long bus drive takes us to Matagalpa, into the northern coffee-growing mountains of Nicaragua, near the combat zone.

At the Matagalpa CPC we meet Jose Manuel Chamorro Rios. Forty-eight years old, Chamorro has six children. In our presence, he rarely speaks without guitar accompaniment. It seems there is no music he cannot play. He begins with a beautiful Nicaraguan folk melody, then blithely changes to an intricate “As Time Goes By,” followed by a B.

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B. King tune, then punctuates his last sentence with a Flamenco hot lick. Students are coming in and out, asking advice, playing duets with Chamorro.

Although he is one of the best players I’ve met anywhere, he is playing a beat-up guitar. Many of his students come in with instruments missing strings, machine heads, screws and other parts. We promise to send parts and art supplies to the CPC’s we visit.

We sleep at the National Training School for Theater Instructors. There were supposed to be twenty-three people in this, the first, class, but only twelve are here now. The others are away in the military.

February 12. In the evening we play a concert at a small art gallery where there is a show of Nicaraguan paintings. People wander in from the streets, look at the paintings and hear some of our quieter songs.

We return to the theater school and stay up talking with the students. “Every night I dream of a white devil who flies over and swoops down attacking me,” begins Oscar, who is studying to be a theater instructor. “I have a lot of trouble sleeping. I was on the front for a year. It has made me very nervous. For that year I could not eat hot food because that would have required a fire. We lived on canned milk and had to be on our guard every minute. You would enter a home or school that had been attacked by the contras . . . young children killed and mutilated. You were there, but you really didn’t see, you couldn’t bear it.”

We trade songs with the students. Beth and I sing Joyce Brookshire’s “Whatever Became of Me?: Ballad of Cabbage town,” and Tim Krekel’s Kentucky love song “In My Heart.” A Bolivian student sings a ballad from his country, then one of the wilder students cranks up the favorite “All the Nations Like Bananas.” Soon, we’re all singing and dancing.

February 13. We spend the day at the farm of the theater collective, Nixtayolero, outside Matagalpa. Alan Bolt, the director of Nixtayolero, is also the director of the Nicaraguan national theater. “People come to this farm,” he says, “from all over the country to participate in theater workshops. We make plays with them which deal with community problems. And while they are here, they learn to eat vegetables.”

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The rice, beans and corn which make up much of the Nicaraguan diet are full of protein but lack necessary vitamins and minerals. Bolt’s collective uses theater to teach nutrition. Nixtayolero’s farm, besides growing grapefruit, oranges, bananas and coffee, has introduced many new vegetables into the familiar agriculture.

That night we play a concert in town on the recreation square. People are lined up on the edges at first, but as we play, they move in closer. Afterwards I sit and talk with three girls named Maria. They sing a song they’ve learned in school. It’s one I learned in German as a child, “Ach du lieber Augustin.” My friends are your friends. Cuando somos juntas me sientofeliz.

February 14. The Matagalpa CPC is organizing the festivities for the town’s 123rd birthday party. This evening there is to be a street dance. Claudia and Cruz have spent the afternoon teaching us several Nicaraguan folk dance steps and showing us how to salsa.

At the dance two bands play on opposite ends of the main street. We wander between the bands and the waves of dancers.

I’m dancing with Chamorro’s son Ernesto and Orfilia, one of the workers from the Managua CPC who has come up to pick coffee. As we approach, each band seems to be playing “Acarizieme,” a Latin pop song that we have heard often on the radio.

As a slight drizzle falls we move to sit on the steps under the roof of a little house that looks out onto the festival. The door is wide open and we can see several generations of a family inside. They invite us in for coffee and bring out their photos. Their grandmother has 120 grandchildren.

February 15. We go to San Ramon to pick coffee. As we arrive, food is being prepared to take to the pickers. We ride in a truck piled high with tortillas, enormous pots of beans, coffee and milk.

The coffee bushes grow on steep slopes and I feel I could fall straight down. I wear the basket tied around my waist and peel the beans off the branches. I prop my feet against the trunk of the tree and lean against the slope of the mountain. Usually only the red beans are picked, which means going through the trees on several different days.

“Today we’ve started picking every bean-from the greenest to the most rotten,” explains Marcia, a volunteer worker from Canada. “A coffee picker was killed by contras five kilometers away last week,” she says, “and then, day before yesterday, a Honduran cigarette package was found just two kilometers away. So we’re getting everything we can.”

Three days later we read in the newspaper that workers and children had been killed three kilometers from that farm. It was now a war zone.

February 16. We return to Managua, Nicaragua’s city, and feel the trip almost over.

That evening Beth and I attend the Misa Campesina at the church of Santa Maria de los Angeles. The church was destroyed in the earthquake and rebuilt by the community. Every panel of its octagonal shape is painted with a mural expressive of Nicaragua’s history. The mural in the front arches up over the altar set up in the middle of the church. The people sit all the way around.

The priest wears a black cassock with a brightly colored, woven, Latin American band around his neck. He directs a small group of musicians near the altar and leads the singing, moving easily around the church. Over six hundred people are here tonight.

The Misa Campesina was written by Carlos Mejia Godoy. It contains some of Godoy’s own songs as well as traditional Nicaraguan melodies. The mass is interspersed with speaking and celebrants’ rising to talk.

This evening the mass is also a funeral service for a young boy killed by the contras only two days earlier. The mother of the boy gets up to speak. In tears her words flow forth. Someone plays a tape of the son before he went to combat. He speaks of his dedication to the church, to the

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cause of Nicaragua, to the people of his family and his neighborhood.

Beth and I are asked to sing. We choose John McCutcheon’s “No Mas, No More,” a song that insists that the people of the world can no longer be separated by our governments’ economic and political interests. As I sing, I look around the church and see faces from Scandinavia, Europe, from the Orient, from Africa and all the Americas.

It is our last night in Nicaragua.

“I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, find that the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States and hereby declare a national emergency to deal with that threat.”-From the executive order of May 1, 1985.

Editor’s note:

The Reagan Administration’s Mayday embargo on US-Nicaraguan trade was accompanied by an even more belligerent action: an ordered end to direct travel between the two nations.

By closing US ports and airfields to Nicaraguan ships and planes, the Administration diminishes the opportunities and makes the means more difficult for US citizens and Nicaraguans to visit each other. Reagan’s executive order seeks to control and shape public perceptions, knowledge and discussion about Nicaraguan life and the Sandinista government. Beyond this, the Administration’s unilateral actions take us a step backward from any ideal of unrestricted travel across international borders. In this instance, Nicaragua becomes the more open, welcoming society.

Prior to Reagan’s measures of May 1, many North Americans of varying political persuasions had traveled to Nicaragua and returned with views and interpretations of everyday life and national spirit in that country which consistently contradicted official US pronouncements. Among the passengers aboard an Aeronica Airlines flight from Miami to Managua one day in February were the five members of an Atlanta musical troupe–Elise Witt and the Small Family Orchestra, on their way for two weeks of performances throughout Nicaragua. Accompanying the group, camera-ready, was independent video producer George King. Excerpts from Elise Witt’s journal of the trip (printed below) suggest the sort of personal cultural exchange that the embargo has now taken away–as have other, related, actions such as the recent denial of a US entry visa to Nicaragua’s Minister of Culture, the poet Ernesto Cardenal.–AT

Steve Earle’s Hope on the Highway

By Jay Orr

Vol. 8, No. 3, 1986, pp. 19-21

Steve Earle has caused a stir in the Nashville music industry with the release of his debut album, Guitar Town, on MCA records. In February 1985, I first saw Earle and his rock ‘n’ roll band, the Dukes, in the basement of a high-rise residence hall at Vanderbilt University. On that Friday night he played to a disappointing turnout. Despite the small draw-fifty or seventy-five at most – Earle appeared shy and retreating, but engaging all the same. His four single releases on the Epic label had not achieved any commercial success, and Earle’s performance had a devil-may-care quality. Now he has signed with the Nashville (read “country”) office of another major label, and Guitar Town, with its fetching combination of rock rhythms, socially-conscious themes, and pedal steel and twangin’ guitars, has won the attentive ear of this town and the nation.

In his first single from Guitar Town, “Hillbilly Highway,” Earle sings in the voice of a character whose lineage has always answered the call of opportunity. Grandfather left home and the mines for a job in Detroit; as a young man, father also goes away-first to college and then to a job in Houston; and the narrator quits school to learn guitar and become a musician.

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Earle himself left school after the eighth grade for the same reasons. From his home near San Antonio, Earle traveled around Texas and Mexico, associating with and learning from older songwriters like Townes Van Zant (for whom his son is named), Richard Dobson, Rodney Crowell, and Guy Clark. He put in a stint as a bassist in Clark’s band.

Earle moved to Nashville in 1974, where he worked at the usual odd jobs (tennis court builder, billboard hanger, carpenter) while he nurtured his musical ability in bars, honky tonks, and coffee houses. He also went through three marriages in pursuit of his elusive dream to become a successful songwriter.

In 1982 a small independent Nashville label, LSI, issued Earle’s premier recording, a four-song disc entitled Pink and Black. He signed with Epic in 1983, and that label released four respectable, rockabilly-style singles over the next two years.

During the lean years Earle did score as a songwriter. His songs were recorded by Carl Perkins and Waylon Jennings, and by younger artists like Vince Gill and Steve Wariner. Johnny Lee had a top ten hit with “When You Fall in Love,” a song from the early LSI ep, with help from vocalist Kim Wilson of Austin’s Fabulous Thunderbirds.

Guitar Town appears when Nashville record offices are scrambling to re-establish an identity that will appeal both to traditional country audiences and to the record-buying youth market. “Urban Cowboy” chic has faded, and country music sales figures show a corresponding decline relative to the years of abnormal prosperity. Country label executives have gone in search of artists like Gill, Wariner, Marty Stewart, Dwight Yoakum (with whom Earle is frequently compared), Randy Travis, Sweethearts of the Rodeo, T. Graham Brown, Rodney Crowell, and Rosanne Cash, in hopes that the more progressive images of those artists will help shed the rural, provincial stereotype associated with country music. Of this crop of new artists only Earle has made an aggressive charge at the problems confronting blue-collar youth in rural communities.

Some of Earle’s compositions have a political and

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social perspective that parallels the recent work of rock musicians Bruce Springsteen and John Cougar Mellencamp. This might surprise some, coming as it does from a Nashville artist who, in his MCA biography, says of his music: “It’s country ’cause I talk like this. And it’s country because I write lyrics, and I tell stories, and I record in Nashville.” Political statements by country artists and on Nashville recordings have often distinguished themselves by their conservative, reactionary attitudes rather than by any progressive urges. Songs like Merle Haggard’s “Okie from Muskogee,” “The Fighting Side of Me,” and “Are the Good Times Really Over,” and, more recently, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U. S. A.,” and Kenny Rogers’s “The Pride is Back,” have extolled the patriotic status quo and made country artists popular visitors to the White House during the Johnson, Carter, Nixon, and Reagan administrations.

Earle maintains a different music tradition, as common as the penchant for jingoistic themes but seldom acknowledged by those who would dismiss all country music as right-wing hayseed warblings. Like recent releases by Hank Williams Jr. (“This ain’t Dallas”), Alabama (~40 Hour Week”), and Dwight Yoakum (“Miner’s Prayer”), Earle champions frustrated working men and women, and disillusioned young people in anthemic couplets like the one in “Good Ol’ Boy (Gettin’ Tough)”: Gettin’ tough /Just My Luck/I was born in the land of plenty now there ain’t enough/Get/in’ cold/I’ve been told/Nowadays it just don’t pay to be a good ol’ boy.

In “Someday,” the interstate highway hides a small town from motorists bound for Memphis, but it also promises a way out for the narrator who frets over the narrative possibilities:

There ain’t a lot that you can do in this town/ You drive down to the lake and then you turn back around/ You go to school and you learn to read and write/ So you can walk into the county bank and sign away your life.

Earle also writes of the personal reverberations of life in a changing and uncertain time. “Goodbye’s All We Got Left,” “My Old Friend the Blues,” “Think It Over,” and “Down the Road,” (Earle’s closing song in live performances) touch emotional places left tender by daily anxieties. “Little Rock ‘n’ Roller” will affect all who have had to communicate over miles with a little loved one.

In an interview with Robert Hilburn of the Los Angeles Times, Earle offered an assessment of the role he hopes his songs can fill:

“In the end, you either cheer people up [with your songs] or help them exorcise some problems they have–and people need a bit of both right now. The mood of the country as a whole is that things aren’t as they are being advertised. Lots of people are going hungry. Even more have had to downscale their expectations. They are confused. They remember everything they heard about this country in school and they wonder what happened to it.”

With the help of a strong band, bright production, and appealing melodies, Earle’s powerful lyrical offerings do cheer and exorcise at once.

Guitar Town has won acclaim from pop music’s critical heavyweights, and Earle has toured nationally with another group of critics’ darlings, the Replacements, a hard-edged rock band from Minneapolis. In his interview with Hilburn, Earle promised that his next album, “will lean more toward social observation and commentary than [Guitar Town].” Good news for those of us who hope Nashville and country musicians can continue to produce music with regional, cultural, and social importance.

Jay Orr works at the library of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville.

Avedon’s West

By Art Ponder

Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 30-31

Richard Avedon is generally known as a fashion photographer, the man who creates the “idealized,” sexist icons for the covers of such magazines as Vogue and Self. Others may know him as a contributor to Rolling Stone or the photographer who turned his large format camera on the influential and powerful, making revealing portraits of numerous “movers and shakers,” George Wallace, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter among the herd. His most recent effort, however, is in sharp contrast to those earlier identities. In “In The American West,” a traveling exhibition recently on view at the High Museum in Atlanta, he takes as his subject not Vogue stereotypes, but the dispossessed, the drifting, the working class, the “ordinary people” of an American region. He does so in such a way as to startle nearly any viewer, and, in the end, make an ambiguous comment about the West, a comment devoid of humanity and thirsting for understanding.

In 1979 Avedon began what developed into a five-year project, in which he attempted to, as he says in the foreword to his book In The American West, photograph “the men and women who work at hard, uncelebrated jobs, the people who are often ignored and overlooked.” Toward this end, Avedon roamed the West, visiting events and places such as county fairs, rodeos, coal mines, and slaughter houses, looking for faces and bodies that would serve his vision of the West. For Avedon, this is a process akin to auditioning actors for a play or film, though here potential actors have no idea they are under consideration. After selecting a person, he and his crew of three or four assistants would erect a piece of large white backdrop paper, always in the shade to give flat, even, light to all his photographs, and position the subject for his or her portrait. Using an 8×10 view camera, capable of rendering the most minute details with clarity, Avedon would make his picture. About these subjects and the subsequent results, Avedon has said: “These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theatre attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photography simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of a photographer.”

Such could not be further from the truth, for all of Avedon’s pictures radiate with the presence of the photographer nearly as much as the subjects themselves. Like the portrait “Gordon Stevenson, drifter, Interstate 90, Butte, Montana, 8/25/79,n all of Avedon’s subjects float in negative white space, rooted to nothing but perhaps the edge of the frame, stripped of place and context, able to speak only through their physical appearance.

In Avedon’s view of the West no one is given the dignity to be viewed in their personal landscape. No one is seen in relation to place. For students of Southern culture, this resonates with exploitation, as Southerners have long been characterized as being dependent upon a relationship to place, or in Eudora Welty’s overused notion, to have “a sense of place.” Who would not look alienated, who would not look dispossessed when asked to stand rootless against seamless white paper? What would we think of Lewis Hine’s photograph of a young spinner in the Roanoke Cotton Mill if Hine pictured her in an empty white space rather than with the spinning machine she saw too much of? When pressed by critics concerned with the perceived exploitative approach, Avedon invariably hides behind the artist’s veil. In a recent interview for Atlanta Art Papers, he quipped: “…let’s assume that it’s correct that I take advantage of people. What has that got to do with the business of an artist? What difference does it make if I am a good or a bad man? We are talking about the works of art which will live long after I’m gone….But are the photographs true to the human condition? And has damage been done?” He asks his own question and his exhibition answers with a profound “yes,” when we understand that he is offering a misinformed, distorted and exploitative vision of an American region that, by the nature of its circulation and hype, influences the views and opinions of many.

ONE OBSERVER OF THE exhibition commented that “many look as though Avedon had stormed their homes and forced them up against the white seamless backdrop paper, their pants unbuttoned, hair disheveled, and their demeanor reflecting utter resignation before this master of control. Others seemed to have been dragged from their jobs…” (Spot, Fall 1985). Avedon, however, contends that with portraiture “the surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface.” This leads him to abstract all his subjects in a white background. In Avedon’s portrait of the West there are no causes for dispossession and despair, simply dispossession and despair.

The show at the High Museum was sponsored in part by Rich’s, Atlanta’s large department store chain; shows in other cities were also underwritten by department stores, reflecting the high regard bestowed upon Avedon by the corporate fashion machine. At the grand gala opening in Atlanta, with Avedon in attendance, the museum patrons and art aficionados wandered amidst the larger-than-life portraits of drifters, miners and such, facing the working class of another region in a way they may never have observed folks of similar plight and occupation in the South. That Avedon’s work forces viewers, some reluctant ones, to look into the eyes of victims in America is one of the powerful triumphs of the exhibition. One Atlanta Journal-Constitution writer overheard a shocked Atlanta matron responding to the show: “I know Jesus says you are supposed to love everyone, but I just can’t. I just can’t. I can’t love dirty people or fat people.”

A VIEW OF THE AVEDON show (or the book) is like viewing the collection of a well-traveled entomologist; we see many types, all recorded by the collector in a similar fashion, but we know nothing of any of them except their name and where they were found. Like a collection of insects, Avedon’s collection of faces and occupations from the West are clear, sharp and well-presented, but without the slightest bit of humanity. In a public lecture in Boston earlier this year, he explained his right to photograph people however he wants: “To say it in the toughest way possible, and the most unpleasant way, what rights do Cezanne’s apples have to tell Cezanne how to paint them.” Avedon knows no difference between the inanimate and the animate. Years of fashion photography have conditioned him to only be interested in the surface and the form, but not the person or the life. In an Avedon session, he and the camera are the animate forms and whoever the subject–factory worker, drifter, rancher–are inanimate forms to be directed, arranged, and “framed” by the heavy black lines of his large film format. Most tragically, his subjects are silenced. Richard Bolton, a critic and an artist in Boston, reflects on Avedon with sharp criticism: “His approach is reminiscent of police photography–in the police photograph, one cannot help but look like a criminal; the format itself communicates guilt.”

Countless viewers of the Avedon show, unaware of exactly how they feel about his work, offer such gut reactions as “powerful,” “moving,” and “disturbing.” The power of Avedon’s work rests with the ability of these large, voyeuristic images to awake horrors in the minds and hearts of viewers. Not unlike the tabloid report of human suffering or catastrophe, Avedon’s work provokes shock and horror. The real tragedy, however, is that the provocation is an end in itself, and his approach never gets beyond the surface he holds so dear, generating not the least bit of understanding. Devoid of understanding and compassion, his subjects are left to drift helplessly and silently, with no voice to offer us their sagas of life and work.

Art Ponder is a drifter and a sometimes contributor to Southern Changes who is currently stationed in Atlanta.