Historic Kentucky

The University of Kentucky Press has recently published a new book of James Archambeault’s photographs, Historic Kentucky, the fifth in his catalog of Kentucky photo volumes. The images therein are among Archambeault’s most evocative and moving, and are, to the credit of all, accompanied by a Wendell Berry forward and an introduction by the artist, both of which place the images in their contemporary context. Namely (and crudely): the places seen in this book are history, in the vernacular sense of the phrase, or are rapidly becoming it.

In his preface, Berry (the greatest living Kentuckian thinker and writer) quotes the late Guy Davenport (one of the greatest, living or dead, Kentuckian thinkers and writers): “every building in the United States is an offense to invested capital. It occupies space which, as greed acknowledges no limits, can be better utilized.” And: “Money has no ears, no eyes, no respect; it’s all gut, mouth, and ass.” Every other page reveals a homestead, a general store, a meeting house that, as the photographer wryly notes in caption after caption, is no more, having either been left to rot into neglected ground or torn down to make way for some whim of invested capital, be it one of agribusiness, energy concern, or pork-barrel politic. A gorgeous view of the Wildnerness Road that brought pioneer families across the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky is included here – hike that trail now and where once our frontiering ancestors saw the ridges, hollers, and creeks of the Kentucke promised land you’ll find mountaintops ripped off for the coal underneath.

Most Kentuckians have a weakness for waxing rhapsodic about the natural riches of our state and the romantic lives we have lived in, on, and among them – horse farms in the Bluegrass; steamboats down the Ohio into the Mississippi; covered bridges over the countless creeks, streams, and branches; Daniel Boone trekking through the Red River Gorge – but I wonder how many of those with the privilege to wile away their hours in flights of pastoral fancy consider the havoc the market is wreaking on their natural and historical idylls. Kentucky romanticism is a big business; coffee table books, calendars, greeting cards, encyclopedias honoring some stripe of the state’s character or other are legion. Archambeault’s previous books are among the most visible (and beautiful) manifestations of this self-regard, and it’s a vindicating thing that Historic Kentucky has come out, just in time for Christmas, to remind his fellows of the rapacity of gut, mouth, and ass threatening the magnificent sites and sights of the Commonwealth.

Anneke’s mule

This is a letter sent by Anneke, Woody Guthrie’s third and final wife, to Alan Lomax, in June 1953. Folks in Woody’s orbit had a way of adopting his prose style – long, grandiose, playful, freely associative – though never to the same transcendent ends. Lomax was guilty of this in several letters I’ve seen, including one to his young daughter Anna (full disclosure: my boss). But some of Woody’s most beautiful letters were ones that he embellished with his signature cartoons and watercolors. The one that I’m most fond of was typed on the inside of the dust jacket of John Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.,” and then slathered with pink script reading “PEACE.” I’d put that one up, but this is a copyright violation enough as it is, I’m sure. So: Courtesy of the Alan Lomax Archive.

But how about that mule? Regarding its fruit treelet/rose bush? This was one of the first articles I came across when I signed up at the Lomax Archive, and I just couldn’t take my eyes off it. I think it’s utterly charming.

On the radio

First post goes straight into the self-promotion, though we’ll sprinkle some edifying tidbits throughout.

I do some internet radio shows here in New York City of traditional, folk, local, endangered, and/or extinct music – pithily if not succinctly summed up as old-time, hard time, good time music. Field recordings; country, blues, gospel, old-time, &c from the 78 era; “world” music old and new; 50s and 60s R&B; some bluegrass; some folk revivalists from here and from there; classic and outlaw country from the 50s through the present. Etcetera. One is broadcast every Tuesday morning, 10am-12pm EST, from the East Village Radio studio on 1st St. and 1st Ave., and is podcastable too:

Root Hog Or Die:
http://www.eastvillageradio.com/modules.php?name=evrshow&ordinal=28

The other one, put on by unlikely patrons of the rural arts – the MoMA and the PS1 Contemporary Art Center- is moth-balled in mp3 archives for now (perhaps the patrons became aware of their unlikelitude), but is still retrievable and listenable:

Goodbye Dear Old Stepstone:
http://www.wps1.org/include/shows/stepstone.html

Not entirely happy with the Stepstone program, if only because it was not recorded live but meant to sound like it, leaving my hands to sweat and my mind to race and to occasionally say embarassing and incorrect things. I’m hardly Wolfman Jack or, in a different arena, Bob Fass, but the spontanaeity of live radio – even internet radio – makes missteps managable, expected, and, when they’re not too howling, fun.

The names for the shows are taken from two aged tunes, both dating from the 1800s. “Stepstone” was a sentimental tune written by two fellows, A. J. Crider and George Chase, c. 1880, as “Old Door Step” and recorded on several occasions as hillbilly records in the 1920s. Ernest V. (Pop) Stoneman did a version, as did the Floyd County Ramblers. Woody Guthrie later recorded it for Moe Asch’s Folkways, but my favorite – and I think the most moving – version was recorded by the Minstrel of the Appalachians, folksinger, collector and lawyer, Bascom Lamar Lunsford, of South Turkey Creek, North Carolina, c. 1970. (Lunsford had also recorded it commercially in 1928.)

“Root Hog Or Die” refers to a saying used to describe hard times, such as “Back in root-hog-or-die days.” It was sung in all manner of situations: by black and white cowboys on the range, Ozark and Dust Bowl farmers on their parcels; there’s even a maritime application floating around somewhere. Davy Crockett referred to it as an already “old saying” in 1834. A Union soldier uses it thusly in a letter from 1863: “We hear that the Rebel Gen. Price is in Arkansas. How true this is I do not know. But we will make him root hog or die.” The singer and banjo-picker Neal Morris of Timbo, Arkansas, explained it to Alan Lomax in 1959: “There’s been a saying among the mountain people – that means if you don’t work you don’t get anything to eat. The hog has to root if he gets anything to eat.” The version I play as the show’s theme was sung and played on guitar by Jimmy Denoon, originally of Midco, Missouri. He went on to move to Salinas, Calif., become Big Jim Denoone (“The Giant of Western Swing”) and record for the 4 Star Label in the late ‘40 – his version of “Root Hog Or Die” was one of five songs he recorded for folklorist Vance Randolph in 1941.

Up there on top is Estil C. (E.C.) Ball and his wife Orna, late of Rugby, in southwestern Virginia, as seen on the cover of their third album, “Fathers Have A Home Sweet Home.” It’s an incredible record, just like everything else they recorded, and a crime that one has to scour Ebay looking for a copy of it. More on that, and else besides, later.