Dem Bones: On Musical Nostalgia.

I’ve been busy lately with my record label Paradise of Bachelors, so I haven’t had time for much writing, but Shuffle Magazine recently published this piece about futures past. The formidable music critic Simon Reynolds, whom I quote herein, had some kind words for the essay on his Retromania blog.

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Dem Bones: On Musical Nostalgia.

Our age is retrospective… Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? –Ralph Waldo Emerson

On the eve of el Día de los Muertos, not coincidentally also the release date of Hiss Golden Messenger’s autumnal and spectral Poor Moon LP, I’m thinking about ghosts. Poor Moon, as informed by its cosmic country and wah-wah cowboy ancestors as it is conversant with new horizons in Southern songcraft, is just the second album on Paradise of Bachelors—not counting our distribution of the remaining back stock of the 1984 North Carolina garage comp Tobacco A-Go-Go—but the first comprised of new music. From the outset, we’ve broadly defined Paradise of Bachelors as a label, a soundsystem, and an archive dedicated to documenting, curating, and releasing under-recognized musics of the Southern American vernacular, regardless of vintage. As musicians, curators, and folklorists, everyone involved in the album’s production senses a common lineage with the workaday poetics of both Tobacco and our inaugural record Said I Had a Vision: Songs & Labels of David Lee, 1960-1988, a reissue of North and South Carolina soul and gospel. But it has been fascinating to note and circumnavigate the more hesitant, even suspicious, reactions of press and market alike to music recorded in 2011 as opposed to 1971. Audiences today seem to crave the patina of authenticity imputed to unheard or heretofore obscured history, sometimes regardless of quality. Hence the rabid hunger for archeological reissues of out of print and private press records of dubious musical or cultural value beyond their previous scarcity.

Who wants yesterday’s papers?/ Nobody in the world. –The Rolling Stones

In his 2011 book Retromania, music critic Simon Reynolds argues strenuously against what he sees as a pervasive, self-consuming recycling impulse in contemporary pop music, provocatively claiming that “the world economy was brought down by derivatives and bad debt, [and] music has been depleted of meaning through derivativeness and indebtedness.” It’s ostensibly easy to sympathize with this anti-nostalgic position. Today we can stockpile, compile, and catalog our music ad infinitum, because the things we collect are not exclusively physical artifacts with an actual dimensional scale, but increasingly they are digital files of simulacra, binary data that we can cram into and electronically catapult between steadily shrinking plastic consumer containers: mp3s, jpegs, avis, and other mediated acronyms, even digital avatars of human artists in the form of our “friends” on social media platforms. Hard drives are not so hard to fill up with bullshit of any era, cheaply scored or pirated. Access is effectively immediate, and the archive is among us, on our bodies and in the ether, in the thickly wired and wireless interstices between our homes.

I understand, but I don’t see it/ I understand, but I don’t read it/ Futures and Pasts/ You can cry for your lost childhood/ Will you cry for our lost childhoods?/ Futures and Pasts –The Fall

Collecting music today is arguably easier, more ubiquitous, and more banal than ever before. Our digital collections are particularly rampant, containing more data than we can experience in a lifetime. Oddly, oldness imparts realness—it’s one index, however arbitrary, to help us wade through and order the chaotic glut of sound—and through the digital archive, there is suddenly much more old music easily available to explore (and cannibalize) than there is new music. (And anyway, the new is constantly in retreat.) The act of collecting, and the process of achieving record head status, involves much less temporal investment in research and less spatial ranging than ever before, and so devotees seek artifacts that can incorporate a more corporeal devotion, such as vinyl. (As I write, some righteous crate-diggers are already refusing to digitize and share their analog excavations.) Music is mechanically and physically inscribed in vinyl, so the data is tangible, concretized; the impending digital apocalypse may render much contemporary audio media obsolete, but enterprising folks can still build a record player with a wheel, a needle, and a horn. I find that idea appealing, and beyond fidelity, it’s one reason Paradise of Bachelors concentrates on producing vinyl artifacts. (Wax cylinders are probably rather expensive to produce these days, though my artist friend Jina Valentine has cut her own player-piano rolls.)

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. –Paul Valery, appropriated in song by Mickey Newbury, among others

It can make you grumpy, for sure, and so I recognize Mr. Reynold’s worries. But personally, I don’t see a cause for real concern. Musical nostalgia is not an intrinsic problem with our culture, but simply a reflection of exponentially increased access to music, which is ultimately a positive, democratic development. Not only is there nothing new about nostalgia, but there’s also nothing new about bemoaning a contemporary rut of self-reflexive nostalgia. (In 1733, on their brutal march into Germany, the Russian infantry was so overwhelmed by nostalgia that military doctors and officers invented and enforced a terrible, but highly effective cure for this unmanning brain disease: burying the afflicted, the nostalgic, alive.) Historically speaking, our cultural obsession with originality—as epitomized by Ezra Pound’s contagious dictum “make it new!”—is a relatively recent one. For thousands of years, musicians primarily aspired to achieve mature mastery, tempered by subtle innovations, within an ongoing, stable tradition by effacing traces of the personal or original. Recorded music and radio (and now the internet) changed that radically, but the traditional impulse continues unabated in the worlds of folk and vernacular musics. Those worlds, and those histories, are as worthy of documentation and presentation as the more rarefied milieus of the avant-garde frontiers, and the boundaries between the two are highly porous.

The past is the new future. –John Crowley

So what to do? As a record label conjuring both old and new dreams, the challenge of Paradise of Bachelors is how to render this inexorably waxing musical nostalgia productive rather than reductive. I’m a fan of many contemporary reissue labels, and there are hundreds—Mississippi Records and Light in the Attic, two of the finest, both helped distribute Said I Had a Vision for us. But we’d like to position Paradise of Bachelors as more than a reissue label—introspective, rather than retrospective, and opposed to the fetishized nostalgia peddled by lesser labels than those excellent examples. We hope to release music, historical or futuristic or otherwise, with contemporary relevance and resonance—the music’s rarity matters far less than strong curatorial and aesthetic coherence, compelling narratives, and our ability to articulate untold histories through engagement with the artists, through interviews, oral histories, photography, and friendships. For us, that means looking backwards, to heavy American Indian psych, to Vietnam vet laments, to Carolina soul and gospel, to coastal honky-conch, to Communist disco (some of our intended future subjects), but also to the contemporary iterations of the infinitely mutable, mercurial traditions of Southern vernacular music. It’s the dialogue between those modes, and through those years and artifacts, that we find interesting.

Make it new? No, just make it good. Don’t sweat those ghosts, because they aren’t going anywhere, and without them, there’s nothing new anyway. These are the days of the dead.

Bare Wires: Transmissions for the Philadelphia Wireman.

Things have been busy over at Paradise of Bachelors, but writing persists regardless. I just sent this to Sweden for publication in the catalogue of the upcoming Philadelphia Wireman exhibition at the Konsthallen in Södertälje (Bjorn Borg’s hometown.)

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Bare Wires: Transmissions for the Philadelphia Wireman.

These are bare wires of my life…

All my bare wires are alive.

Who untangles bare wires?

– From Bare Wires, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, London PS 537 (1968)

Who is the Philadelphia Wireman?

He greets me by proxy every time I drop the needle onto a record in my living room, because his talisman—one of more than a thousand such mysterious objects known—stands silent sentry on the left rear corner of the turntable there. The odd, inscrutable lump (itself a wireman) appears vaguely anthropomorphic, and although barely four inches tall, art critics, curators, and dealers have imputed to this figure a powerful, even magical, presence, and a certain monetary value. The Wireman proper is the anonymous person who, likely sometime in the 1970s in Philadelphia, tightly wound three gauges of bare wire, accentuated by a thin strip of green adhesive tape, around what appears to be a vintage lipstick tube, crowned with a medicinal cork and a red, scalloped sticker proclaiming in bold text: “HOOK HOLDER.” He is, we are told, an artist, a lumpen bricoleur whose (mostly) miniature assemblages reconfigure urban flotsam into fist-sized, fossil-like sculptural forms constructed according to a singularly obsessive formula. Trash of every conceivable variety—castoff printed media, plastic, food packaging, reflectors, glasses, hardware, tape, rubber bands, combs, buttons, electrical parts, even the odd umbrella—is enclosed securely within, and threaded through, a densely wrapped wire armature or exoskeleton.

The needle drops, the record spins, and “Bare Wires” blares, a loose-limbed, atmospheric overture by English blues-rock band John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. My wireman listens, in sympathy. Because we have so little else to guide us into the obscure whorl of these (im)mortal coils of wire and waste transfigured, let’s start with a song. Why not, since he stares there from the stereo? The lyrics to this particular song inform poetically—“who untangles bare wiiiires?”—and the technology by which we perceive it offers a less incidental cultural context. When we listen to recorded music, or live music electronically amplified, our brains process the sound as it hits our eardrums only after an electrical signal has hummed through a web of wires (world-wide or otherwise) to hammer a speaker diaphragm, which displaces the interstitial air with vibrating molecules. We hear.

As John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers undoubtedly knew, Bo Diddley and many other African American blues musicians who came of age in and around the pre-WWII Mississippi Delta learned how to play guitar by stringing an uncoiled broom-wire—a kind of wireman unwound—along an exterior wall of their homes, which served as a sound box.  And so in field recordings we hear a very different sort of spectral wire-sound, produced by the material’s innate acoustic properties, its resonant, ramshackle overtones, rather than its electrical properties. The so-called “one-strand on the wall,” or “diddy bow,” often fretted with a bottleneck slide or another piece of appropriated glass or metal, shares possible West African antecedents and a bricolage aesthetic with the Wireman’s perplexing artwork.

Wire, whether manufactured specifically for electrical or musical uses or not, registers as a symbolically freighted material of modernity and technological perception. Wiring hogties our homes and offices, trusses our cities, traces our roads, cleaves our forests, burrows beneath our soil, and traverses our seas, hungrily. Even as we rapidly retire the surfeit of wires which has strung us up (and perhaps strung us out) and which has governed much of our communication for a century—as we transition from a wired to a “wireless” lifestyle—we recognize the material for its literal and metaphorical status as a conduit of energy, power, immediate meaning. We speak of information and voices passing over “the wire,” of thrumming wires, hot and bothersome and even menacing with the threat of pain: barbed wire, bare wires. (John Ashbery writes in his 1979 poem “Pyrography” of “America calling:/ The mirroring of state to state/ Of voice to voice on the wires.”) Wire is not a material of comfort, but rather a material of technological contingency and the relatively recent human dependence on electrical communication, the transmission of signals both banal and beautiful over vast, unhollerable distances.

Similarly, the roughly 1200 artworks attributed to the Philadelphia Wireman provide no comfort to the viewer as objects of material culture, at least from an art historical perspective. The identity of their maker, this diminutive infantry’s shepherd and general, remains unknown, a snarl of guesses, hearsay, and speculative theory. The Wireman is the rough neighbor, the uninvited, wild-haired guest at the formal dinner party of contemporary art. Who is that? And yet these nuggets, these wiremen, somehow communicate; they divulge, however reluctantly. They contain meaning, just as the generic, labyrinthine wire that comprises their shells, mute with potential charge, contains identifiable artifacts of modern material culture. We see: a cigar label, a metal buckle, a ballpoint pen, a bottle cap, a bolt, yellow tape, aluminum foil, a hair curler, a drafting compass, a plastic bottle, drinking straws, green paper, broken blue glass, all swathed snugly, or crushingly, in bare wire. We buy this stuff, we lose this stuff, we throw it away, on the streets and in dumps. But some of it survives, transmogrified. These three-dimensional drawings in tangled line and scavenged scraps of color activate and gracefully syncretize inelegant junk. (Kids love the Wireman and his wiremen, their awkward toy-soldier angles and playful figuration, their compressed secrets and intimate miniaturism.)

The study of material culture involves the examination of and participation in the dimension of physical artifacts—our world of objects and tangible things collected, curated, created, and consumed. Material culture, often associated with folkloristics, greedily encompasses architecture; foodways; craft; farming; office decor; record collections; fashion; furniture; laptops and smartphones; as well as Art, that thorny and fussy master category of expressive culture. Academic or commercial or fine; vernacular or self-taught or outsider or brut or visionary or folk art—all these tired terms and specious, overdetermined taxa (each representing a distinct concept, none interchangeable and none adequate, but none mutually exclusive either) coexist within the study of material culture. This is a historical tale best told by William Morris, and retold by folklorist Henry Glassie.

Like other contemporaneous artists—like Emery Blagdon, like Felipe Jesus Consalvos, like James Castle—the Philadelphia Wireman belongs to a tradition of American vernacular modernism, specifically the democratic modality of collage. The diffuse condition of American modernity, with its attendant explosion of material culture, presented many of the same sets of circumstances and material glut to all potential artists within range of a highway, postal route, radio, telephone, or television—our wired or wireless networks of commerce. But the loudest response to the call of this cloying materiality, the official system dedicated to sales and exhibition of visual artwork (“dealing”), has long followed axes of established or emergent hegemonic power and privilege, particularly wealth and education. The notion of vernacular modernism subverts those shaky binaries of culture that demand we consider art made by different sorts of people hierarchically: fine vs. folk, academic vs. vernacular, insider vs. outsider, trained vs. self-taught, secular vs. visionary. Regardless of what Foucault would deem the artist’s subject position, it’s all art, my friends; and at a certain level we should regard it as such, celebrating its similar cultural impacts as well as its culturally inscribed differences.

The single most revolutionary aesthetic technology of modernism, the crown jewel of its innovation, is recombinative appropriation, in its multifarious forms: collage, assemblage, photomontage, bricolage, sampling, remixing. It is evident everywhere we look in the United States, from teenagers’ pin-up-plastered walls, to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, to hotrods in Los Angeles, to Lukumi altars in Miami, to Andy Warhol, to Public Enemy, to YouTube, to quilters everywhere. An already ancient technology of expressive culture, appropriation accelerated and thrived in the realms of the domestic and everyday once 19th-century North American mass production and mass media flooded the country with material culture to expend, to sort, to reuse, to worship, to love, to discard. (These days, with the dominance of online culture and commerce, collage has colonized the realm of the virtual, where it has become even more entrenched in the vernacular.) But the vernacular artist has only recently edged herself into the footnotes of art history. You see, there are established disciplinary ghettoes for discussing art that exists outside the rarefied air of the academy, the museum, and the gallery: we call these ghettoes folklore, anthropology, and material culture. With the Södertälje exhibition of more than sixty of his sculptures, the Wireman takes another step out of the (putative) ghetto and into the (purported) light of international art-world acclaim.

But the problem persists. Mired as vernacular art is in the twin ruses of intentionality and authenticity, and in the Western cult of the artist—of the individual genius whose singular authority and (anti)heroic stature imparts value to his work—the Philadelphia Wireman unsettles us with his inherent instability and vexing ambiguity. His anonymity does not permit a patronizing psychological, socioeconomic, educational, or spiritual rationale, as in the cases of Henry Darger, Martín Ramírez, Adolf Wölfli, Sister Gertrude Morgan, and Frank Jones. Despite a few tentative and unreliable anecdotal claims to the contrary—a few Philadelphia residents have shared hazy memories of seeing a wire artist in the vicinity where the work was discovered—no one has any real idea who this guy was. He has no biography, and the work possesses only a dim provenance, and certainly no easy biographical justification.

Who is the Philadelphia Wireman? Does it matter? And why do we care? Perhaps the more salient question is Why is the Wireman, or How?

The discourse of vernacular artistry, much more reliant than the discourse of academic art on ascribing biographical and cultural difference, foregrounds the discovery narrative, often muffled in beguiling myth. (Here, in an admittedly perverse inversion, we’ll end with discovery instead of beginning with it.) As artwork made outside the conventional purview of the contemporary art world follows its often circuitous route into the art market and academia, it achieves a wider audience. It obtains normative economic and intellectual validations that it may resist or to which it may capitulate, but which it (and its maker, if still living, as is tragically seldom the case) does not necessarily seek or require. The Wireman’s artistic practice may well have been secret, sacred, public, or profane. But ultimately we really have no idea, despite the insightful conjecture of various curators and critics.

There does exist a vernacular American tradition of wire sculpture and junkyard assemblage, but nothing comparable to the Wireman oeuvre’s rigid discipline, serialism, and non-objectivity. Some have noticed similarities to Crow medicine bundles and African American memory jugs, North American assemblage practices with spiritual, mnemonic, and funerary functions. Foremost among Wireman commentators is Robert Farris Thompson, a pioneering and influential scholar of African art, who has noticed the persuasive formal correspondences between the Wireman’s work and the Kongo ritual power objects known as nkisi, which he posits may have survived in radically mutated fashion in contemporary African American culture. This surmise stems largely from the geographical fact of discovery, the thin crust of fact that tenuously anchors the Wireman mythos.

Sometime in 1978 or 1979—the date has never been concretely determined—a young designer named Bob Leitch was driving home from a party when his headlights illuminated a curious field of dazzlingly reflective wreckage (stones? car parts? jewelry? plumbing fixtures?) on Juniper Street in Center City Philadelphia. He alit to take a closer look and found hundreds of cockeyed, wire-bound objects piled in and around dozens of sodden cardboard boxes, as if recently and hastily emptied out of one of the nearby derelict houses. (Among the sculptures was also a group of page-sized abstract drawings in colorful marker ink, reminiscent of both Mark Tobey’s and J.B. Murry’s calligraphic images; these lyrical, linear drawings have been much less frequently exhibited, though they bear a revealing two-dimensional kinship to the sculptures.) “Somebody made these things,” Leitch remembers realizing aloud, and he breathlessly packed as many boxes as possible into his car, finder’s keeper’s. He returned to salvage more of the ductile sculptures over the subsequent several days, afraid that they would be sold for scrap or brought to the dump, their presumed final destination. Finally all that remained on that block of Juniper Street was the crushed anatomy of those wiremen massacred by car tires or perhaps never fully assembled in the first place. For years, much of the extraordinary find languished in storage, though Leitch displayed the most impressive pieces in his home and gave others away as gifts, never forgetting his thrilling foray into urban archeology, but unsure what to do with so much ostensibly worthless stuff.

Finally, around 1982, a friend convinced him to bring his enigmatic cabinet of curiosities to Philadelphia’s Janet Fleisher Gallery (now the Fleisher/Ollman Gallery), where director John Ollman, an expert in American self-taught art and African art history alike, immediately recognized something special in these tiny totems or urban fetishes. At the time, the block where Leitch discovered the wiremen was in an historically African American neighborhood undergoing a painful process of what city planners then euphemistically branded “urban renewal.” Because of these seismic demographic dislocations and a perceived relationship to traditions of sacred Central and West African power objects, Ollman ventured that the artist may have been African American, either recently deceased and lacking a sympathetic executor to sort through his belongings, or perhaps uprooted by the recent gentrification and forced suddenly to move, to another street or to the streets. Because of the brute strength required to bend and bind wire so tightly without pliers (there are few apparent pliers marks), he assumed the artist was also male, a Wireman and not a Wirewoman. Both suppositions offer compelling coordinates, but they remain unresolved and definitely open to debate. Despite numerous inquiries and substantial research, no one has ever advanced a convincing answer to the Wireman’s true identity.

To further complicate matters, the discovery narrative of the Philadelphia Wireman has remained even more obscure due to Leitch’s decision to remain anonymous himself during his lifetime. (Sadly, he passed away recently.) That is not an uncommon choice in the world of vernacular art, since those who bring such artwork to the market risk exposing themselves to charges of  fraud, opportunism, or exploitation. Often they prefer for a gallery to deflect such accusations, and indeed, John Ollman has tackled allegations that he himself was the  artist, perpetrating an elaborate hoax. With the artist’s anonymity compounded by the discoverer’s, it is to Ollman’s great credit that he steadfastly maintained that the value of the artwork transcended biography or established provenance. And in a sense, his accusers have a point—his tireless work as curator, dealer, and champion has effectively achieved generative consequences almost tantamount to the Wireman’s artistry.

By recognizing the aesthetic beauty and cultural significance of the work, buttressed only by his intuition and the most threadbare sense of context, he and Leitch together assumed the mantles of artists, tradition-bearers, and folklorists. Since the Wireman’s inaugural exhibition at the Janet Fleisher Gallery in 1985, Ollman has ushered the artwork into exhibitions from Malmo, Sweden to Matthew Marks Gallery in New York, and into the collections of the National Museum of American Art, the American Folk Art Museum, and La Musée de l’Art Brut, among others internationally. By providing an open but culturally specific interpretation of the artifacts, and by encouraging frontal and figurative readings by displaying them on custom wire armature stands—gallerist Randall Morris has suggested that the artist himself may have hung the artwork—Ollman has effectively rendered these unquestionably prickly artworks digestible, appealing, and fascinating to audiences worldwide.

But he has been careful not to defang the Wireman, whose dangerous anonymity and hypothesized link to arcane, alternative American religions still provokes a certain frisson with bourgeois audiences. Because in this case of immediate archeology, we still lack several crucial analytical valences. When we cannot attribute an artifact to a specific maker, we void those insoluble riddles of intentionality and authenticity, without which the spectatorship, connoisseurship, and criticism of Western art founder and gutter. Instead we must speculatively assess either what the culture can tell us about the artifact (rude aim of the art historian and material culture expert) or what the artifact can tell us about the culture (rude aim of the archeologist and anthropologist.) Of course, artifact and culture always inform each other in dialogue, sympathetically and symbiotically, and all these disciplinary approaches are essentially compatible, if seldom pragmatically reconciled in the academy, at least in terms of vernacular art.

Listen. The art of the Wireman whispers about one person’s experience of Philadelphia in the 1970s, invoking promises of bicentennial freedom and civil rights realized in the City of Brotherly Love and indicting the sad reality of systematic discrimination, urban decay, the dereliction of our built and natural environments, and the forgotten despair of brothers and sisters. Today a crisis of faith in advanced market capitalism, abetted by an impending global environmental crisis, has degraded the world of objects and material culture. Suddenly things are worth less, and it has once again become fashionable to reuse what we already have in our possession. But the Wireman’s work tells a lonesome story of an enduring, tenacious human recycling impulse, a deeply personal economy of accumulation and lack. The Wireman’s artful accretion of waste products through the fundamental modernist technology of appropriation attests to a quiet revolt against a culture of disposability and speculative, abstract wealth. Let’s not misinterpret these objects through the lens of gape-mouthed condescension to magic, animism, or cultural difference. We needn’t allow any more slippage of the fault lines between the artists more regularly enshrined in the white-columned institutions and the unseen millions making in their homes, for their own private reasons and for their own private audiences.

When you view this exhibition—here in Södertälje, as in Philadelphia—when I put a record on my turntable, when we ask who could have made these astonishing objects, so seductive yet so forbiddingly insular, we participate in a collective narrative. We propagate and unfold the Wireman’s hermetic vision and aesthetic through the modest act of wondering, of considering how these objects mean, and telling others what we think and feel about their existence. That is our gauge; that is our reckoning. We are, all of us, implicated in the formation, circulation, and interpretation of the Wireman’s identity, history, and art. Who is the Philadelphia Wireman? We are, all of us. Together we untangle bare wires.

Brendan Greaves

September 2010

Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Blue World Amateurs 1966/1976.

I’m still and all, just otherly engaged. Please check out Paradise of Bachelors, my primary venture these days.

Hiss Country Hai.

This one’s going out by request to my homie Mike… It was a pleasure to tool through his tunes on the occasion of Hiss Golden Messenger’s upcoming long-player, “Country Hai East Cotton.”

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I was that kid on the Georgia line

Jai Lil Diamond did hard time on the farm, and it was blood in the creek how they caught him.

I come from Lexington

Or, Jai Lil Diamond used to tear-ass around the county in a pristine ’57 Chevy Bel-Air lowrider, blasting a Billy Stewart tape and shooting out mailboxes with his juvember.

It’s called Paradise, and I think I’ve seen it once or twice

Or, Jai Lil Diamond dug a hole in the red clay and buried the band’s instruments in a charred canoe down there what belonged to his Uncle Irv, and collards sprouted up thick as you ever seen them sprout.

If we want to stay alive, we better row

I saw Jai Lil Diamond sing a besotted Gary Stewart plaint — it was “Drinkin’ Thing,” not that it matters particularly, and he killed it — in front of a five-hundred-year-old Ayutthaya head of Buddha, a grape-faced bronze androgyne that watched with blissed-out eyes, listened with elongated ears, and perhaps even contemplated Gary’s dipsomaniacal suffering beneath what resembled a ribbed Esther Williams swim cap ablaze with a perfect solitary gilt flame. Some have hearts of gold, and some have hearts of bronze. Jai had a new winter beard on and wore blue jeans. I won’t bullshit you, their aspects didn’t quite jibe then and there, but these two Golden Messengers both held in that moment a jewelled guess at the horror and hilarity of passing hours. As if counting the miles from home, Thailand or California or where-have-you. This was North Carolina, Sunday, not that it matters particularly.

Afterwards Jai Lil Diamond told me a thing. He took a slug, slid his mug of brew back across the bar and told me what it was to be nigh a daddy. She would have me be a ring of bone. I didn’t know it at the time — and he didn’t know it at the time — but when the Diamonds moved South to Eaglewing Farm, they would soon be joined by a young’un. New life, and new ears, waiting to get born! We got woods between us, a handful of acres separate the Farm from our Lodge, and out of those woods hums a dream of barred owls, stunned deer, and swift bats. As with most things, the youngest among us hear the hum clearest and closest. That’s the sound Jai and Hiss crew harnessed from afar, in anticipation of a return to a new original homeplace, early soil and heavy carpet of fallen leaves and the tenderest carnitas. They stole those sylvan scenes, especially the autumnal echoes of quiet rot, conjured them from three thousand or so miles out West, and set them down with incanted urgency on three thousand feet or so of magnetic tape. Most takes were first takes. Instant light.

I guess it’s like when you go to a place and carry some dirt from there and transplant the translated dirt in your own garden. If the music herein sounds more burnished than that, then know that this is the sound of grown folks considering the proper proportions of moving around and staying still, of grown folks saying their goodbyes, gently. If John has gone to the light, and Isobel‘s face in the eponymous film brings some dim light to the past, if I don’t want to talk about my baby, and I always thought you were my friend, and Oh Nathaniel, then maybe time might not exact an unanswered revenge. Not so much ruefully counting our losses as piling on more and more blankets when the mercury drops (it always drops, even here in the Old North State.) There is, if you listen carefully, a dire hint of the inexorable nestled down in the swelling strings and the steel and loping bass and brass, a bramble among the roses. Watch out for the cannonball. In 1733, on their brutal march into Germany, the Russian infantry was so overwhelmed by nostalgia that military doctors and officers were forced to enforce a terrible, but highly effective cure for this unmanning brain inflammation: burying the afflicted, the nostalgic, alive. The record you hold in your hands voices a different strain of nostalgia, but one no less potent. The cure’s just different, is all. Resurrection blues, why don’t you let me die?

“Country Hai East Cotton” means “OK this is where we’re living now, and this growth has choked and clothed our brothers and sisters for hundreds, and now let’s all together raise a glass and raise our voices against the wind.” In North Carolina, we grow our cotton in the coastal plains of the East, on the swamp; we chew it up and process it in the rapidly emptying Piedmont textile mills — they called the workers “lintheads” once, derogatively, those same blessed hardscrabble souls who invented bluegrass — and we wear layers of it in the Blue Ridge Mountains of the West, where winters are coldest, ballads the oldest, and voices the high-lonesomest. But none of that matters particularly. Place is just a passing whisper in our contemporary world of whirring wires. On my way to getting wasted. Here on this recorded document of a brief era we have sturdy bridges between cracklins boogie, cinematic flatland sprawl, and a few fine-tuned international engines (Jamaican certainly, and German, probably.) But what Hiss Golden Messenger pushes is the subversive idea that as much as we might cruise around, chorus to chorus, on the steam of our gathered myths and models — records, stories, recipes, pictures, poems, apocrypha — you’ve ultimately got to choose a place to settle a while and soak in your surroundings. And that matters. That is our gauge. That is our reckoning.

The moon is nothing but an old stone.

Marpessa Dawn

Womble Lodge

January 2008

Look what thoughts will do.

Andrew Witkin and I have known each other since we were twelve years old. I wrote this essay for a catalogue of his work on the happy occasion of two 2008-2009 Boston exhibitions, at the ICA and at LaMontagne Gallery.

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“Look What Thoughts Will Do”:

Reflections on Some Rooms Our Friend Andrew Currently Occupies in Boston

DOOR

It is not the food bought, but the food processed and made into a meal—it is not the shirt bought off the rack that is you, but the shirt as a component in a composition of attire that informs on you. Whole meals, sets of clothing in action (the soft architecture of the environments that go near us), and collections of commodities assembled into domestic settings—these are the key creations of the material culture of industrial civilization. They are our mirrors; we see ourselves in them. They are our lenses; others read us through them.

– Henry Glassie, Material Culture (1999)

Forget, if you will, if only for the span of these pages, the entire tired discourse of “the artist” and “the curator” and “the gallery.” That persistent modern terminology, with all its vaunted (now limping) romantic aspirations and its implicit (now ingrown) class hierarchy, which valorizes some kinds of human labor over other kinds, is a broken animal. Kick out its broken paws, and let it lie! Work is work, and good work is good work, and good works are good works, creative and valid and artful and useful, whether political or culinary or scientific or automotive or cinematic or whatever. If you live in the United States of America, where many folks are becoming increasingly paranoid of what pundits curse as elitism or exclusivity and what others recognize as the essential culture-hex of advanced finance capitalism, I doubt I am the first to ask this kind favor of you. And in fact, if you’ve been looking and listening, Andrew has asked you already––tacitly, politely, patiently––through the images and objects and groupings he has shared. That is his good work, and these are his good works. Look around some. Call things by their names.

Call him a collector.

Instead of the tortured, misunderstood artist, consider the contented, understanding collector. In our contemporary cultural mythos, the former supposedly angles for notice (if not fame), for public recognition and some measure of specialization, exceptionalism, and immortality, whether economic or canonical-historical. On the other hand (so the legend goes), the collector happily putters away in privacy, foraging, amassing, arranging, middle-manning it. That is of course a gross oversimplification of a potentially specious dichotomy—Duchamp and Cornell and many others busted that door wide open many decades ago––but bear with me. Things are different beyond the clean, well-lit white cubes of the art world, folks; let’s talk about the accumulative acts of not-art collectors, or gatherers, as opposed to hunters.

If dichotomies are too messy for you, let’s talk democracy. I’m a collector, as I’m sure you are too. We are all collectors. I collect various things: books, photographs, pickled foods in jars, hats, firewood, records mostly. My collections, like most of those kept and ordered by my generation and subsequent ones, comprise both tangible things and their shadows, information things. And I don’t mean just the synaptic memories and mental feelings that we all accumulate  whether we want to or not. Today we can stockpile, compile, and catalog ad infinitum, because the things we collect are not exclusively physical items with an actual dimensional scale, but also digital files of simulacra, binary data that we can cram into and catapult between steadily shrinking plastic consumer containers: mp3s, jpegs, avis, and other mediated acronyms, even digital avatars of human beings in the form of our “friends” on Facebook and MySpace. Hard drives are not so hard to fill up with bullshit, cheaply scored or pirated.

Access is effectively immediate, and the archive is among us, on our bodies and in the ether, in the thickly wired and wireless interstices between our homes. Collecting today, while arguably more ubiquitous and banal than ever before, is also easier than ever before. Our digital collections—I’m thinking of music in particular—are particularly rampant, containing more data than we can experience in a lifetime. The act of collecting involves much less temporal investment and less spatial ranging than ever before, and as such, the pendulum is bound to swing back to other modes that can incorporate a more corporeal devotion. But you don’t need me to explain any of this stuff––prognostications aside, surely you’re hip to all this already. You’ve opened this book, which is a good sign.

*

HALL

Standing on the corner
I heard my bulldog bark.
He was barking at the two men
Who were gambling in the dark.
Stagger Lee and Billy,
Just two men who gambled late.
Stagger Lee, he threw a seven.
Billy swore he saw an eight.
Stagger Lee went home,
They say he got that big old forty-four.
Said, “I’m going to that barroom
“I’m gonna pay that debt I owe.”
“Stagger Lee,” cried Billy,
“Oh please don’t take my life,
Cause I got so many children
And a very sickly wife.”
Stagger Lee, he shot poor Billy.
Oh he shot that boy so bad
When those bullets went through Billy
They broke the bartender’s glass.
Should I take it––
Should I take it real slow
Oh Oh Oh
Oh Oh Oh
Oh Stagger Lee
Oh Stagger Lee

– “Stagger Lee,” American traditional (arr. Terry Melcher, 1974)

One thing our friend Andrew does really well is lists. Lists are their own kinds of collections, catalogs of words, which are themselves representations of other collections. Text, both appropriated and authored, appears throughout his archives and artifacts, often in staccato list form, and yet, for as long as I’ve been knowing him—sixty percent of our lives now—he has insisted that he is not “a writer.” OK, so he’s neither “artist” nor “writer,” but let’s stick with “collector.” Of friends’ birthdays, for instance. Of all kinds of books, music, photographs, and artworks, yes, but also of word data, list data, and anecdotal minutiae, some of it quite personal and some of it bluntly public domain. What lies between the lines?

One of his collections is an iTunes playlist of every recording he has been able to find of the archetypal African American badman song and toast “Stagger Lee.” The song is a vernacular transposition probably based on real-life Lee Shelton, a pimp who killed William Lyons on Christmas Eve, 1895, in Bill Curtis’s saloon in St. Louis. Andrew and I share a fascination with this tune, which we’ve both addressed in visual as well as musical terms. Andrew made a sound collage in 2004 called “Stagolee,” which digitally collapsed the entirety of his still growing collection of recordings into a dense, symphonic buzzsaw the length of the longest version of the song. The sustained appeal this blues ballad holds for two thirty-something white men from the Northeast is a subject for another essay, but the legend, in its many articulations, goes roughly like this:

“Cruel cruel” Stagger Lee (aka Stagolee, Stag Lee, Stack O’Lee, Stackalee, Stackerlee, Stack Lee, and other variants) is one bad motherfucker. He and Billy Lyons (aka Lyon or De Lyon) get to gambling late one night, down in a place near the bordello known as the Bucket of Blood. One of them, probably Billy, cheats at cards or dice, and somehow, either through theft or a fraudulent bet, Billy gets a hold of Stag’s brand-new white Stetson hat, which may or may not have magical properties. Enraged, Lee goes home to fetch his gun, and returns to shoot Billy, who pleads for his life on account of his family. Sometimes additional barroom mayhem and violence ensue; sometimes sexual jealousy is a motive; Billy almost always dies. Occasionally, Stag’s woman Stack O’ Dollars shows up. Stag often ends up on trial or in jail, where he insults the court, or even in hell, where he has been known to sodomize the devil. He’s that bad.

The song has slithered through blues, r&b, string band, country, and rock idioms for over a century, always disreputable and always mean, but often difficult to recognize harmonically or melodically. It’s hard to beat Mississippi John Hurt’s gently menacing country blues version—or its opposite, the uptempo boogiefied Youngbloods version—but out of all the worthy, wildly disparate articulations, I’ve always had a special affection for Terry Melcher’s, just for its sheer spitshine artifice and strangely incompatible timbre. His rendering builds from a disconcertingly mellow, chiming guitar introduction to a burnt-moustache beach-weirdo midsection into an abrupt choral fade-out featuring his mom Doris Day’s backing vocals. The narrative and pacing feel truncated and rushed, and the whole tenor of the affair is just slightly off, overproduced and caked in a California cocaine glaze, but it’s somehow irresistible and powerfully affecting anyway. A year or so ago I finally sent Andrew the mp3 to add to his ongoing iTunes playlist. It sits in a good spot, actually—between Taj Mahal (whose band the Rising Sons Melcher was instrumental in signing to a record deal) and Tim Hardin.

Before submitting to his collaborative, omnivorous list, I did not tell Andrew anything about Terry Melcher and his charmed/damaged, spooked/gilt life and its bloody resonances with the Stagger Lee myth. So here’s my own Melcher obit-list, Andrew, an anecdotal dissection of the data already swallowed up by your hungry practice:

• He was born in 1942 to Doris Day and her then husband, trombonist Al Jorden.
• He formed the bands Bruce & Terry and the Rip Chords with future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston, beginning a lifelong interest in hot rod and surf music songwriting and production techniques.
• He produced early Columbia records by the Byrds, Paul Revere & the Raiders, and the Mamas & the Papas, among many others.
• He introduced Brian Wilson to Van Dyke Parks and sang backing vocals on the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds.
• He befriended Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys; together with Gregg Jakobson, they established a blonde gang known as The Golden Penetrators, whose sole charter was to drive around L.A. in their extravagant cars looking to pick up girls for casual sex (Beach Boys groupies were a sure bet).
•  “We’re high-rollin’ studs from L.A.” (“High Rollers,” 1978)
• He was introduced to Charles Manson by Dennis Wilson in 1968. After initial interest in recording Manson’s music, Melcher turned him down after a botched audition and evidence of his erratic violence.
• He rented his house on Cielo Drive in L.A., which he formerly shared with girlfriend Candace Bergen, to Roman Polanski. On August 9, 1969, Charlie Manson’s “family” brutally murdered Abigail Folger, Voytek Frykowski,  Jay Sebring, Steven Parent, and Polanski’s pregnant wife Sharon Tate in the same house.
• “Family” member Susan Atkins claimed in testimony that they intended to target Melcher because of his perceived slight to Manson, though it was soon revealed that Manson knew that Melcher no longer lived in the house.
• Terrified, Melcher hired a bodyguard and underwent psychotherapy.
• He recorded two tepidly received, decadently produced solo records, the slyly ironic L.A.-scape Terry Melcher (1974)—with an all-star band featuring Ry Cooder, Doris Day, Chris Hillman, Sneaky Pete Kleinow, Spooner Oldham, and Clarence White—and the Old Mexico and gambling themed daiquiri-fever-dream Royal Flush (1978).
• He produced the notoriously overdubbed 1971 Byrds record Byrdmaniax, which has been referred to as “Melcher’s Folly.”
• He produced The Doris Day Show.
• He co-wrote the 1988 Beach Boys comeback smash “Kokomo” with Papa John Phillips of the Mamas & the Papas, Scott “If You’re Going to San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” McKenzie, and Beach Boy Mike Love, earning himself a Grammy.
• He produced Summer in Paradise (1992), the final Beach Boys studio record and the first album ever recorded with Pro Tools.
• He died in 2004 at age 62, after a long battle with melanoma.

The archive has already absorbed all of this data. Nested within the Stagger Lee archive is another story of a very different sort of homicidal maniac, Charles Manson. This history, as esoteric and minor as it may appear to the casual viewer of Andrew’s work, resides inside his oeuvre. Andrew’s data, like all collections, is recursive; each unit, each manufactured artifact, contains other anecdotes and narratives, in an endless helix. The fossil record is deep. We are not privy to much of this information—in many cases, images or documents are stacked or bundled to efface or hide their legibility—but the data is there nonetheless, honey in the rock.

Andrew has abiding interests, and he nurtures those interests daily, suturing them to domestic reflections and to the awed archeology of wandering, wondering knowledge. Here the archive (after Foucault, but who cares?) becomes an active organ of discursive meaning-mapping, fodder for a feast of engaged show-and-tell exercises. Above all, our friend Andrew offers dialogue. That is his work––that is what his work yields for mute objects and lonesome letters and faraway friends. He allows no one atomic element to stand on its own as given, but leaves the manifold component conversations to insulated chance. Here Terry and Billy cross paths with Charlie and Stack. Who lives in your collections, the things that sit on your bureau and bedside table? Bring ‘em out! No one should ever be alone or without their own and borrowed memories, and minimalism is a sad fart in a world that produces Stagger Lees and Charlie Mansons.

*

ROOM

On the third night following the arrival of the party in the city, Pierre sat at twilight by a lofty window in the rear building of the Apostles’. The chamber was meager even to meanness. No carpet on the floor, no picture on the wall; nothing but a low, long, and very curious-looking single bedstead, that might possibly serve for an indigent bachelor’s pallet, a large, blue, chintz-covered chest, a rickety, rheumatic, and most ancient mahogany chair, and a wide board of the toughest live-oak, about six feet long, laid upon two upright empty flour-barrels, and loaded with a large bottle of ink, an unfastened bundle of quills, a pen-knife, a folder, and a still unbound ream of foolscap paper, significantly stamped, “Ruled; Blue.”

– Herman Melville, Pierre, or the Ambiguities (1852)

Here’s some history. If horror vacui—a fear of emptiness—characterized the cluttered aesthetic sensibility of the collectors of Victorian industrialism, then the contemporary conjuncture of data-glut and rapidly devoured open spaces suggests the advent of a kind of nostalgia vacui. (By the way, collage is a vernacular tactic, not some magical modernist invention!) This potential nostalgia for spatially arrayed information––for fresh, composed space, for the unabashedly sentimental echo of bare tables and bare beds––is what Andrew proposes with his work. It’s no coincidence that Yves Klein’s notion of “Le Vide” is a perennial touchstone for him, even appearing as an explicit allusion in his own work. But aesthetics in Andrew’s work sound in counterpoint to information compulsively ordered and re-ordered.

Andrew offers an intermediary data system that overlays the deliberate taxonomy of the archive onto the satisfyingly palpable presence of objects found, appropriated, and customized. But the central display objects of his installations feature a bland, generic execution that gestures towards the emptiness of these everywhere data-things and their opposition to objecthood. Metaphorically he reconciles data-things and thing-things, the architectural rigor of the perfect library with the hollow falsity of our more ersatz collections. The simple plywood shelves, tables, beds, boards, dressers, et al. that Andrew constructs are all spartan symbols of more substantial and well-worn home ideals; they are half-things, ghost-things, mock-ups that draw our attention to the collections on and in them or not on and not in them. These furniture framing devices are unique, and built to spec, but they are decidedly contingent, makeshift. They offer neat, blank surfaces and spaces for lived-in and lived-with jackets, socks, shirts, blankets, towels, boxes, photographs, bottles, tools, bones, and other ephemera. Their provisional, prosaic construction is diagrammatic and unsteady at best, spindly and rickety at worst, and plainly unable to support human weight, despite the tidy and often elegant construction. They cannot function as functional furniture, and yet they are the components of his inhabitations that perform the crucial task of scaling the evidence to the human body, toward the humanity and mortality of the artifacts and the whole tradition of gathering and archiving mementoes.

Vanitas!

These stark forms, these wooden keels, have another efficacy as well. They behave as framing indicators––humble stand-ins, surrogates, and synecdoches for presentational and behind-the-desk museological facts like pedestals, vitrines, specimen cases, shelves, desks, work tables, and flat storage. Andrew lives intimately with these kinds of forms—remember that his day job, an intrinsic part of his making, is dealing and curating contemporary art at a prominent Boston gallery. He literally looks at and arranges things for a living, abetting the habits of other collectors. To a great extent, his practice responds to his experience as a gallerist and an archivist––documenting, collecting, arranging for visual and intellectual pleasure––but it is simultaneously antithetical to normative notions of art-world market viability.

(At the moment, those bottom lines have been lamed by what the radio heads call the “global economic crisis,” the result of randy trading in imaginary fiscal products with preposterously abstract names like “futures” and “securities.” Aren’t you glad for Andrew’s old towels, so like your own?)

Is it finally time then for the obligatory art-historical fingering? His installations read as fundamentally unassuming sketches of functionality, neither as fussily and self-consciously museological as Mark Dion’s displays, nor as theatrical, untamed, and scavenged as Dieter Roth’s archives. And why should they be? Andrew plumbs another sort of home order, playing with systems that chart the phenomenology of domestic everydayness and its interlocking rhythms—that’s philosopher Henri  LeFebvre’s notion—rather than flaunting knowledge or exhibitionism or chaos. No flagrante delicto moments here, just stringent plainness, or “normalism,” as Andrew himself once deemed his own methodology. The most radical thing about the work is this: it’s somehow essentially banal, quotidian, buttoned-down, boring, ordinary… and therein resides its true-gotten beauty. What is real, what is really there, what is important, what is the distinguishable difference between these objects and arrangements as they appear here—say at the ICA—or in Andrew’s bedroom? These are the ripest of Ambiguities.

My friend Will—he’s Andrew’s friend too—recently drew my attention to a remarkable 1965 sculpture by Michelangelo Pistoletto, one of his so-called “Minus Objects.” Entitled “Lunch Painting,” it’s a minimalist plywood frame-box that sits against the wall, with a table and two chairs built into its radically simple geometry of eleven plain plywood planks. Here we have a certain kinship of Ambiguities and Invitations-to-Stay-Awhile. Come in, these two makers say, here is something familiar.

Andrew’s rooms, immaculate, antiseptic voids when the well-meaning gallery or museum presents them, rely on their adopted frame architecture, indicating a thorough contextualism, a desire to showcase and to share and to sit-in. That is not the case in his own home, or the homes of others in which he has shown; those spaces already enjoy a human-scaled sense of space. They already have the decidedly comfier furniture that his plywood objects reference, so much the better to serve as ready, site-specific surfaces for his collections. And until recently, Andrew’s collecting practice remained largely inside his own home, available to all friends and visitors but inherently private nonetheless. These important sharings in public venues represent an extension of a home life that is deliberately aestheticized, but wholly welcoming.

Andrew inhabits spaces, rather than exhibiting in them, and that I believe is a crucial distinction between an artist and a collector, or between an artist and a human being.

DOOR

“GOAT COAT! GOAT COAT!”

– Andrew Witkin, from the 1996 poem “Against Fabrication”

Chapel Hill
December 22, 2008

Drinkin’ thing.

This here’s a quickie. My man M. through the forest sent out a call for some ruminations on the late, great Gary Stewart–Snoc threw him an inspired poem on the subject–so I tossed this off today trying to distract myself from the task at hand. Stay tuned for M.’s essay, which is  guaranteed to delight.

********

Uncle Hammy turned me on to Gary a year or two back, but it was already too late—the man whose voice punched me in the chest had already ridden his keening laments into the inexorable dirt. It’s not exactly healthy fandom, but Gary’s still here with us now, some of us, anyway. It’s mostly white dudes in their thirties who pull up round this particular circle of emptiness—that’s a technical term describing a domestic session of bonded, group-listening catatonia usually following massive alcohol and Class C drug consumption—which speaks to the dumb gender rift of country music fans and late-classic era country music record collectors.

But then there are the folks elsewhere, the fans on YouTube from Gary’s hometown in Jenkins, Kentucky, or the ones who saw him rock some hairball, biker-vest central Florida dive—I picture the kind of spot I’ve visited with a live gator in a cage in the back—who offer a kind of ephemeral interwebbed prayer: “We miss this down around Lake Okeechobee. I will drink a beer in his honor,” writes kwedgworth2000. I will drink another. What do kwedgeworth2000 and I share? Why does the man’s music still appeal now, five years after his suicide?

Maybe it’s the easy economy and the carefully scaled ache of his inimitable practice, something born of years of fame-eluding songwriting and session work (he played piano in Charley Pride’s Pridemen for a solid spell.) The songs themselves are devastating in their melancholy insistence, but honest and humble in scope. There’s that raise-hell-raise-another-bottle-but-don’t-be-ashamed-to-leak-tears quotient, which keeps pace with David Coe’s more tender moments or Johnny Paycheck’s overbrimming darkness. But there’s something far different too, an abiding grace and diffidence in Gary’s lilting delivery and his rather sentimental songwriting and modest arranging strategies.

The goofy wordplay pushes potential hackney and cliché into the realm of punning poetry, by slyly one-upping your best and lamest idea for a parenthetical, instant punch-line country lyric and singing it with a kind of palpably wounded dignity: “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)”; “She’s Got a Drinkin’ Problem (And It’s Me); “I’ve got this drinkin’ thing/ to keep from thinkin’ things.” Gary kept his whole operation within what was becoming an increasingly quaint and fenced-in honky-tonk formula, but he managed to edge Hank and Lefty and Ray Price into a much darker, contemporary discourse that dug deeper and flew higher than your Moe Bandy or George Strait (and that’s no mean feat.)

The songs are perfect, unfussy miniatures, masterpieces that transcend the decadent era of the limping honky-tonk genre. There is a sense, when you listen to Out of Hand, that the recording, through its elegant, workmanlike craftsmanship, taps and tamps down some roiling, heaving hurt. The whiskey flowed in excess, yes, but the booze only coated the sea of black bile like an oil slick. Play on, Little Junior.

The Library of Babel.

More James Castle. This one was recently published in “James Castle: A Retrospective” (Philadelphia Museum of Art/Yale Press.) The kind folks at the PMA invited me to speak at their “Alternate American Art Worlds” symposium on Nov. 15. I did a thing for the UPenn Humanities forum too. Anyway, enjoy (link to full essay below–it’s a big’un.)

*****

“Characters More Comely to the Eye”: Text and Intention in the Art of James Castle

One book . . . consisted of the letters MCV perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another . . . is a mere labyrinth of letters whose penultimate page contains the phrase O Time thy pyramids. . . . There is no combination of characters one can make—dhcmrlchtdj, for example—that the divine Library has not foreseen and that in one or more of its secret tongues does not hide a terrible significance.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” (1941)

Sequoyah and His Talking Leaves: A Way In
Among those ancient scribes variously ascribed the invention of writing—the Egyptian deity Thoth; the legendary Chinese emperor Fu Xi; the Phoenician prince Cadmus, founder of the city of Thebes in Greek mythology; the Scythian king of Irish folklore, Fenius Farsa, who synthesized Gaelic and its Ogham alphabet from the Tower of Babel’s linguistic ruins; and the one-eyed Norse god Odin, to name just a few—few are available for historical verification and analysis through primary sources. However, certain culture heroes of premodernity and modernity alike emerge from mythological abstraction into the realms of contemporaneously recorded history to offer more tangible accounts of the actual process of visualizing language.  The Byzantine monk Saint Cyril (Constantine, 827–869) and King Sejong the Great of Korea (1397–1450), like the Roman deity and Greek language guide Evander before them, adapted other systems—Greek and Hebrew for the former and Chinese Hanja, Mongol, and Tibetan Buddhist writing for the latter—to forge the foundations of the Cyrillic and the Hangul (Korean) alphabets, respectively.  In fact, apart from the generally accepted independent development of scripts in Sumer and Mesoamerica, and also arguably in China, Egypt, and Easter Island, all written languages have followed similar diffusionist models.
Around 1820, in present-day Polk County, Arkansas, the Cherokee silversmith, veteran of the War of 1812, and visionary linguist Sequoyah (c. 1770–1843),  despite his illiteracy in English, successfully modified that language’s Roman alphabet to arrive at a Cherokee syllabary.  The first Cherokee writing system of any kind and the result of almost a decade’s work, his syllabary employs directly appropriated and graphically ornamented Roman letters alongside additional expressly designed characters, eighty-five in all, each of which corresponds to a specific speech sound, or phoneme (fig. G1). After initially accusing Sequoyah, his daughter, and his “talking leaves” of witchcraft, Cherokees quickly recognized the value of adopting the system, and they still use a nearly identical script today. Sequoyah provides a particularly dramatic example of a relatively rare, and recent, originator of a writing system—a grammatogenist—whose life and work were adequately recorded by contemporaries. His story is not unique. Modern missionaries, colonial authorities, authors, artists, and enterprising dreamers have occasionally invented so-called constructed or artificial scripts from positions of altruistic (or invasive) literacy, cryptographic stealth, literary world-making (in the cases of fictional scripts and languages), or monolingual illiteracy (like Sequoyah). But Sequoyah remains rightly renowned for his impressive independent achievement, an especially aesthetic innovation almost out of thin air and with a widespread impact. Described as an “American Cadmus and modern Moses,”  Sequoyah attained celebrity at home and abroad, even granting interviews. A report of an interview by a Captain John Stuart of the U.S. Army in 1837 states that

being one day on a public road, [Sequoyah] found a piece of newspaper, which had been thrown aside by a traveler, which he took up, and, on examining it, found characters on it that would be more easily made than his own, and consequently picked out for that purpose the largest of them, which happened to be the Roman letters, and adopted [some] in lieu of so many of his own characters—and that, too, without knowing the English name or meaning of a single one of them.

Whether true or apocryphal, this tidy little account illustrates a possible appropriative derivation of the Cherokee syllabary, one couched in the condition of modernity’s proliferation of mechanically printed matter.  To continue the story for us, we are lucky enough to have the firsthand 1829 testimony of an American man of letters, Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, who claims that, after drafting an efficient and suitable set of symbols, Sequoyah “then set to work to make these characters more comely to the eye, and succeeded” (italics mine).  And therein resides a wonderful and exciting detail. At some point—and this is key—Sequoyah consciously transcended the practical bounds of linguistics to consider visual verbal aesthetics, a move doubtlessly made by numerous grammatogenists—not to mention calligraphers, typeface designers, and handwriting standardizers—long before his time, but rarely so explicitly described. By first appropriating and reshaping the linguistic refuse—a discarded newspaper—of the dominant culture, and then evaluating the “artistic” nature of the text and implementing substantial aesthetic alterations, a monolingual Cherokee speaker customized a preexisting alphabet to suit his own language’s needs as well as his personal and cultural aesthetic criteria. Beyond the obvious total disjuncture in sound, grammar, and syntax (and even in semiotic purpose, since used in a syllabary, not in an alphabet) between Roman letters as they function in English and in Cherokee, in purely visual terms Sequoyah thereby activated an appropriative transformation, a shift in the contextual meanings of the same signs.
Not so transparent are the runic inscriptions of the later American artist James Castle (1899–1977), which lack a legible lexicon. And yet a kinship, a kindred aesthetic aptitude, is clear. Both men devised their “comely characters” intuitively, regardless of their imputed illiteracy, and neither ever learned to speak English, though for different reasons. Both necessity and difference compelled them in their craft. As an unspeaking, profoundly deaf artist, Castle shared a marginal status with Sequoyah (the name literally means “Pig’s Foot”), whose reported “lameness”—a “white swelling” of the knee —prevented him from physically demanding labor. Perhaps both these “disabilities” have been overstated or distorted by most historians. And yet these two men independently achieved remarkable feats of linguistic artistry, in a sense performing their otherness through the appropriation and manipulation of the hegemonic language.

Click here to read the whole thing.

The Curtains of Night

Just returned from double-headed Philadelphia art-world shenanigans revolving around James Castle, a PMA retrospective, and a Felsiher/Ollman show. I wrote essays for both, and I got to thinking about the advantages of shorter pieces, and ones about friends. The Curtains of Night are my friends. They just released a new record called Lost Houses, and I wrote this about it.

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When the curtains of night are pinned back by the stars… (The Carter Family)

Then what? An aperture opens, and we see through the transom of night into something blacker, less star-spun, another night somehow twice removed? The opening line sets a stagy scene that doesn’t make much dimensional sense, but then, neither does the impossible depth of the night sky. Stargazing poses the inscrutable question of scale, which is also the fundamental question of heavy metal music. The Curtains of Night, a guitar and drums duo from the North Carolina Piedmont, take their name from the eponymous cosmic Carter Family song. But they earn their telescopic sense of scale from more terrestrial concerns, a dismantling of heavy metal’s macho  mythology and a distillation of the form’s traditional bloat to the leanest architecture of pummeling rhythm and patiently unfolding riff.

The living forest is behind glass, the fauna moth-eaten. (The Curtains of Night)

The magnitude of their sound, and its miniature origins in the focused dialogue between two musicians, trumps biography. Here’s what you need to know: the music committed to this debut disc was written and performed by two women, Nora and Lauren. That swelling, seismic guitar tone was constructed as well as conjured from the instrument––Nora built her own amp, a bespoke creature with vacuum tubes like sprouting mushrooms. Onstage it assumes a third presence and a personality; on record its spinal drone serves as a clarion call heralding the onslaught of Lauren’s colossal drumming and as a ubiquitous connective tissue that binds and buttresses the songs. The open tunings and spiraling guitar lines betray the banjos Nora also makes and plays outside the Curtains, and the keening banshee dread of her vocals, behind its metallic veneer, may owe something to the grim fire of mountain music. But if it’s the South we think we hear, Lauren further confounds cartography and scale with Lost Houses’ woozy interludes, which migrate to distant sonic spaces amid the atmospheric clatter and funereal chug of subterranean drums.

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. (William Blake)

No ghoulish horror-film theatrics here, either. “Total Domination” delivers exactly what it posits. At once thuggish and elegant, brutal and sexy, earthbound and phantasmagoric, Lost Houses rejects testicular metal’s face-paint pagan clowning as well as its porny Argento and Alucarda axis of female evil. The Curtains’ avatars live elsewhere, in anonymous heroines who “sleep in armor,” armed to the teeth; in the anxious residents of “ice palaces” and “stagnant seas”; in the tangled wood and in the overripe soil. Listen closely, and loudly––these six dreams dilate and contract, as dreams do, revealing the Lovecraftian landscapes beneath the snarling storm. “Gather the horses,” indeed.

– Brendan Greaves, Chapel Hill, October 2008

“The Tangled Wood”
by Velimir Khlebnikov

Panting horses always closer
Branching antlers always lower
Twangling bowstrings over and over
Nor hart nor help, from hurt and hazard.

…

A herd of horses shod with Hours
Jangling like thunder, wheel in a field.
Their rugged bodies are rank with Time,
Their flashing eyes ablaze with Days.

JUGGZ.

An essay for Fleisher/Ollman Gallery’s exhibition of memory jugs.

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I’m going back home to Georgia in a jug
By Brendan Greaves
Philadelphia, December 27th, 2007

Some additional text by William Pym
Words and images copyright the authors and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery

I’m coming back home to Georgia in a jug.
– Johnny Paycheck

Side One. “Or thinke this ragged bony name to bee/ My ruinous Anatomie”: worried words from John Donne, 17th-century metaphysical poet and graffiti artist. Here he has etched his “scratch’d name” on a “through-shine” window, in valediction to a lover. With inscription, names last a little longer, and so may we. (Or so we may fool ourselves.) But the closer we look, the more our written words melt away into reedy––or for Donne, skeletal––obscurity. Stare on, and those strange shapes might start to swim. What do the snarled skeins on this page––or on Donne’s glass––really signify, if anything? The lined-out letters may seem familiar, ordered in some abstruse, threadbare sense, but how and why do they hold sway over the things, people, and places named? Might we figure our memories––of ourselves, of others, of those pristine, transmogrified moments that memory marks as different, discrete, our own––without clumsy words or deceptive photographs? Frustrated writers and photographers are not alone, I think, in seeking other modes of remembering, modes beyond the pale reach of literacy’s tyranny and photography’s overripe ambiguities.

Flip the record to Side Two. “Georgia in a Jug,” as performed by Mr. Johnny Paycheck. Give us a song, Johnny, and a strong drink too. Vault that honeyed voice higher and spin us a witty elegy from a shitty memory––for what else is a good country song?––and then plug that memory up in an old whiskey jug. Stopper yourself up in there too while you’re at it, genie-like, since that one lousy memory feels like all you’ve got, and head on home alone. A cork can keep it contained. But without memory, Johnny, what are we? And what is the opposite of memory, anyway? Oblivion? Lies? History, in its subjective, selective collectivity? Forgettery? (My friend Pablo prefers the simple “forget,” an aptly awkward immobilization of the verb into a noun.) We lack the proper word for that lack (at least in English), and also the proper means to stave it off or seal it up, whatever it’s called. So we make do with other things.

Memory jugs raise more questions than they answer. Their enigmatic presence in our homes, in the gallery or museum, or (possibly) in our cemeteries complicates without offering any tidy conclusions. Maybe meditation is more fruitful than undue speculation. First, the facts. The term “Memory jugs” is a convenient shorthand for a range of mosaic-collaged objects––not just jugs, but containers of all sorts: bottles, boxes (cigar and otherwise), vases, pots, teapots, kettles, urns, pitchers, plates, glasses, jars, lamps, salt shakers, picture frames, mirrors, dollhouses, and even clocks (containers for time.) Makers, almost all of whom remain anonymous, cover a vessel in putty or a similar substance, pushing objects of remembrance, possessions and symbols alike, into the putty. Perhaps these objects––a favorite pipe, a clutch of seashells, marbles, ceramic figurines, keys––commemorate their dearly departed owner, as oral tradition maintains. Perhaps they commemorate the artist herself, her own vision of beauty or self-identity. Most likely, both scenarios ring true.

What we’ve got here is a domestic tradition, long-lived, persistent, and mysterious. It’s a tradition largely unknown and unmapped despite, or perhaps because of, its deep embeddedness within the vernacular imagination and the everyday remembering of things and people past. Memory jugs provide evidence of the ordinary practice of mnemonic rehearsal and assemblage, as yanked into tangible, and tangled, three-dimensionality. They are, in fact, mnemonic devices, humble and homegrown answers to Duchamp’s notion of “delay” (which he trapped in glass rather than in a ceramic jug.) So many personal(ized) memory objects assembled together in the context of this exhibition constitute a kind of choir, a polyphony of contained memories in conversation and contestation. The tradition itself appears to be a polyphonic one as well, a syncretic form embraced by Americans of diverse backgrounds and communities for as long as two centuries.

Many scholars, collectors, and curious pickers have pointed toward a potential relationship with West and Central African funerary practice, suggesting that memory jugs represent a possible transmutation in African American diasporic tradition. Kongo mortuary customs in particular (as described by Robert Ferris Thompson, John Vlach, and others) provide an interesting antecedent to some African American grave decoration. Broken pottery and other objects symbolizing the watery river-realm of death––mirrors, conch shells, gourds, et al.––adorned the graves of the Kongo dead. During funerary rites in Haiti, Vodou faithful pass the po-tèt, the “head” pot or jug containing a deceased person’s soul (and often their hair and fingernail clippings), through fire to warm and cleanse it in preparation for its journey beyond the waters. The ritual is known as boule-zen. During the early 20th century, in the rural American South especially––where of course, African American populations were largest during much of this country’s vexed history––white folks sometimes mistook African American grave sites for middens, so scattered and layered were they with busted crockery and other household goods (including, significantly, seashells.) Might portable memory jugs represent a similar practice on a smaller, less diffuse and site-specific scale? In a word, maybe. But grave decoration or burial with items of sentimental or economic value is hardly unique to African or African diasporic tradition, even in the Americas. Certain ancient Southwestern Native American tribes commonly placed pots with knocked-out bottoms––so-called “kill holes”––over corpses’ faces. White communities with strong pottery traditions, such as those in North Carolina, also have used ceramic vessels as grave markers. For some professional potters, perhaps clay was a more affordable and metaphorically apposite material than stone. Honoring the dead with tokens of their livelihood or material symbols of respect for their tracks in this world is a grieving expression belonging to no one group—it’s a  pan-cultural gesture of mourning. You can’t take it with you, all your clay. The link to African American funerary traditions fascinates, but without any proof––for instance, reliable documentation of memory jugs placed on graves––any robust articulation to African diasporic funerary ritual smacks of an overdetermined attribution.

The reality probably lies in hybridity, as is so often the case with widespread artifacts of material culture. Traces of 19th century European American cultural activity can tell us just as much about memory jugs as invoking spectral African ancestors. The production of memory jugs is not limited to African Americans, and there are indications that the tradition was remarkably prevalent. Folklorist Glenn Hinson recalls making a memory jug as a child as an elementary school assignment, and indeed, the practice is largely associated with women and children. Memory jugs are, after all, just three-dimensional collages, a useful pedagogical tool. It’s not unlikely that many works presumed to be commemorative funerary objects are in fact the work of children or hobbyist housewives, not shamans, priests, or even the bereaved. The polite roots of Euro-American modernist collage––beyond Picasso and Braque’s papiers collés (“stuck papers”)––may be found in Victorian parlors. Ladies of leisure collected ephemera and souvenirs like calling cards, advertisements, and pictures, arranging them in scrapbook “albums,” diaristic compilations that both marked the passage of days and concretized identity through amassing memories (literally, “mementos.”) We can locate male equivalents too, like the cigar band collage fad of the late 19th and early 20th century. These vernacular and domestic artistic traditions of appropriation informed revolutionary modernist reconfigurations; sometimes extrapolated vernacular traditions even paralleled or penetrated modernist aesthetic realms in a recognizable form. Over the past centuries, multiple waves of modernities have swelled across the American landscape, catalyzing vernacular modernisms that rival and reflect the capital-M textbook variety, and vice versa. Collage, the master practice within which we can locate memory jugs, is a major mode of American vernacular modernism.

Demanding steadfast, lucid origins for our multivalent expressive culture is an understandable urge, but that innocent curiosity can lead to vanity or essentialism. We needn’t always seek ultimate causal primacy and purity or explain our everyday artifacts as vestigial, fossilized remains of fuller expressions locked away by miles and millennia. We can call––or curse––the tradition of making memory jugs “folk” or “vernacular” or “bricolage” or whatever, but that’s evading and segregating the accumulative act itself, the actual process of pressing into putty, the footprints of remembering. Maybe the salient question is not what memory jugs mean, but how they mean. The impulse to memorialize and commemorate is close with us, ingrown. We carry words into the grave. We engrave stones in memoriam, solidifying the gauzy screen of memory on silent slabs in hushed fields and gardens. We hold bones in ossuaries, ashes in urns on mantles. Forget, for a moment, the Kongo graveyard and the Victorian parlor––you need only to drive into North Philly to see poignant assemblages of stuffed animals and toys commemorating the site of a child’s death, often by violence. When tragedy strikes, on a private or public scale, the lonesome and left-behind manage to gather the jetsam surrounding their loved ones in life to construct improvisatory memorials; who can forget the impromptu collaged memorials in the wake of September 11th, 2001 and Hurricane Katrina? In Manhattan, near St. Vincent’s Hospital, there’s still a vast tile collage to the World Trade Center on a chain-link fence; it’s ceramic, and now crumbling. The mute eloquence of trinkets, bric-a-brac, and things that sparkle are audible above the ugly din of jingoist fury. This collective collecting urge may echo a function of modernity, but it probably long predates anything we can discuss in those lumbering terms.

So too is it with memory jugs, metonymic accumulations of things chosen to represent identity and time, much like Victorian albums and African American gravesite ornamentation. The objects are presumably selected according to both aesthetics and affect. Memory jugs are loosely defined, but densely constructed; they accrue meaning, they mean, through affective accumulation around an empty core. In a perverse cloaking of the ceramic aim itself, the hard-won smoothness of form and consistency of glaze, the artist culls small remembered objects from the garage, the bureau, the coffee table, to cover an open vessel. Memories veil that emptiness like lava, literally damming the void of forget if stoppered or sealed, as they often are. The vessel designed for transporting and delivering liquid is thereby rendered functionless through aestheticization––that’s one (Western, modern) definition of art––like those Native American and African pots, smashed or defaced, usually through the base, to prevent theft and to break the chain of death. The accreted surface becomes caked and encrusted with sedimented memories, coming to resemble barnacles or coral. Sometimes the artist will gild the entire vessel in a patina of paint, obscuring the discrete memory-elements combined to create the whole. (On the topic of coral, gold, and eternity, Carolina Beach salvage diver Skippy Winner claims that there are only two substances that sea life will never grown on or cling to: gold and porcelain. Practically, this means that treasure and latrines are easy to spot in a wreck.) The completed memory jug, at once scarred and adorned with lumpen strata of memories, is transformed into a mini-history, a micro-geology. It offers an inverse archeology, a meta-excavation readymade for a lazy dig, a superficial probing into the past––someone else’s past––no pail or spade necessary. The visitor, or the new owner, can anatomize the very work of remembering.

The tides and fashions of the glossy capitalistic art world are gravitating towards these aesthetics of archaeology. Recent artists have openly incorporated relics of the past in their completed works, from Jim Lambie’s disco cockney tongue, to Cerith Wyn Evans’ plush, library-like scholarship of history, to Dieter Roth’s messy living archives, Cady Noland’s Americana milled from the material of American innovation, and of course Richard Prince, the Grand Puba of this line of thinking. Stylized, ersatz historiography is a hot topic in art criticism, art production, and art collecting. The inherited and refurbished value of much of today’s cutting-edge sculpture, conglomerate objects of appropriated antique history, seems directly descended from the kind of potential energy that memory jugs bear. Gilles Deleuze spoke of a charged field of relationships, with the compositional elements arranged in a position bursting with possibility, and called this dynamism ‘intensity.’ This potential energy remains of the highest interest to contemporary artists.

Today memory jugs survive for sale on the American art and antiques market and on the Internet as well; deliberately aged “fakes” coexist with antiques and instructions on how to make your own jug. You can purchase someone else’s heritage, their memories, for a decent price, or you can manufacture your own. But the strange beauty in homely banality still bewitches, especially in those pieces never intended as commodities. The now traditional, historicized association with death, even if clouded in myth and exaggeration, persists and enchants. Young artists, my friends included, reach into the cluttered rabbit hole of our American pasts for contemporary relevance. A jug can hold many things other than drink, as Mr. Paycheck well knew. It can be a vessel for travel back home, or for memory itself, or commemoration. Many of us are, evidently, looking for a way back home, a way to gather together the broken branches of our “ruinous Anatomie.”

The Big Money

I wrote this overview of occupational folklore a month or two ago in conversation with folklorist and big man Archie Green. It will appear soon in a truncated version in the New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture.

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“Occupational Folklife”

by Brendan Greaves, in conversation with Archie Green

Muscles ache for the knowledge of jobs, for the roadmender’s pick and shovel work, the fisherman’s knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net from the rail of the lurching trawler, the swing of the bridgeman’s arm as he slings down the whitehot rivet, the engineer’s slow grip wise on the throttle, the dirtfarmer’s use of his whole body when, whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow from the furrow… One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough.  – John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (1938)

We all work. Whether by necessity, compulsion, or choice; whether predominantly physical, intellectual, emotional, or even virtual; whether payrolled, privileged by communal compensation, or outside the purview of dominant political economies, labor––broadly defined––is a precondition for survival, an essential category of both private and social behavior. Such is the human condition, whether we live in thrall to a nomadic tribe of hunter-gatherers, a communist bloc politburo, or the privatized markets of advanced finance capitalism. In work––an activity and a context that consumes vast tracts of our time and attention, ornately shaping our political consciousness––culture thrives. Such is the assumption that drives the study of occupational folklife (alternately known as “laborlore.”)
We can characterize “occupational folklife” as a contextual net for catching and analyzing ideas about work and culture, not in terms of political economy exclusively, but likewise at a more intimate scale, in terms of what actually happens on a daily basis between working people and their materials, utterances, and actions. The venues for these expressive forms and exchanges are innumerable, both historical and emergent: in the cotton field or in the fish camp; on the shop floor or ship deck; in factory, laboratory, or gallery; in the union hall and on the picket line; deep in cubicle, kitchen, or coalmine; riding high in truck cab, cockpit, or office armchair; in the studio and onstage; on the street corner or in the state penitentiary; in the boardroom, classroom, courtroom, or hospital operating room; facing the fickle glow of audience, computer monitor, welding torch, forest fire, or dwarf star. Any jobsite represents a site of cultural condensations articulated to work, a nexus of overlapping and telescoping milieus, charged fields of social, economic, artistic, and political action.  Occupational folklife encompasses all the expressive culture that radiates from the workplace in concentric circles––extending from onsite job processes, techniques, materials, verbal art, and common knowledge and experience through sartorial styles, housing conditions, unionism, reform movements, political tactics, and other behaviors, values, and objects that may range far afield of the primary work environment (see Green 1972.) Even in an age of breathless global market territorialization, local cultural and ecological variables still determine much about the species, sites, and styles of work; in the American South, for instance, farming families fight to survive alongside multinational corporations.
As we wander through the many worlds of workers, we discover a map of multivalent meanings made of labor and its lack. In work, we encounter a tangle of cultural forms and formations specific to each occupation, an enacted knot of shared belief, tradition, ritual, speech, song, literature, humor, material culture, performance, and politics. However, not all threads of this knot are constructive or affirmative. In work, in its dignity and degradation, its naked economic and political dimensions, we also encounter an often esoteric psychological and physical world of authority, betrayal, anxiety, pride, shame, surveillance, secrecy, solidarity, skill, and artistry. Cultural negotiations of tradition and innovation, affinity and rejection, acquiescence and resistance, collectivity and individuation, and affect and identity exist as immanent within the economic base itself, not just as some theoretical superstructural spire suspended above the grit of our daily grind (Green 2001.) Occupational folklife entails an abstract suite of elusive tensions and collaborative relations as well as the more tangible slang, songs, or artifacts.
Cultural and economic production interpenetrate in the repetitive rhythms of work, which ripple through our individual and collective identities and ideologies. Those identities may be overdetermined or imposed, like socioeconomic class, or volitional, like the dolly grip’s delight in her chosen profession. Deeply ingrained power relations compass the cartographer’s efforts to track the culture of work over time. After all, most of us are employed by others, whom we might respect or resent (sometimes in turn.) All the prismatic facets of workers’ worldviews and expressive practices are coded according to the vectors of power, whether managerial, gendered, ethnic, racial, classed, or pushed by political party or faith. Wedded to production is the inexorable potential for injustice, oppression, and violence. Work offers both freedom from and imprisonment within hegemonic strictures, access to both communal and contested spaces.

The disciplinary history of occupational folklife research reveals this layered potentiality of work culture. Since it is a nearly universally shared modality, we can consider work as a node––perhaps the preeminent node—of the vernacular, the everyday, the folk. Because of that very fixity in everydayness, labor can accrue a patina of banality, both for the worker and the observer. (But beneath that banality blooms a distinctive, often obscure culture.) As such, many researchers and historians have taken occupational folklife for granted, especially when linked to the labor of modernity, the non-exotic, largely mechanized and bureaucratic-managerial labor of the industrial and postindustrial West. Folklorists have historically defined “the folk” according to class, labor, or occupation––and in opposition to modernity––without always acknowledging the Marxian or post-Marxian implications of that slippery, spectral designation of imagined authenticity. Labor historians and cultural studies scholars, like E.P. Thompson in his influential The Making of the English Working Class (1963), have brilliantly documented sweeping labor-capital struggles at the macrocosmic level, but the often overlooked, ingrown details of daily lived reality also inform broader processes of change and class consciousness. A critical mass of expressive culture––protest songs, pickets, and bloggers’ petitions, for example—might act as a catalyst for securing workers’ rights, clearing fresh paths to equity.
Let us take a few moments here at the trailhead to examine the genealogy of the idiom “occupational folklife,” which suffers from derivations and cultural inflections that result from its awkward marriage of terms.  Although occupational folklife enjoys a certain currency in history, anthropology, sociology, communications studies, cultural studies, American studies, and other disciplines, the term is most closely identified with folkloristics and folklorists, who concern themselves most fully with “folklife,” the accumulation of everyday expressive culture, from breakfast food to funeral rites. But the central problematic of definitional scope has never been adequately answered––how should we define “occupational”? Generously, as in the entire range of human labor, from panhandling to presidency, or narrowly, as wage-earning and salaried jobs with a strong group dimension and an oral tradition? Although initially mired in outdated notions of authentically preindustrial, premodern labor, pioneering researchers have since prized open occupational folklife to allow an expansion of scope beyond the blue-collar, embracing the emergent, the industrial and deindustrialized, the high-tech, and the bourgeois and governmental. Central to this refocus was Dan Ben-Amos’s influential definition of folklore as “artistic communication in small groups” (Ben-Amos 1971). After a few centuries of exploring the frontiers of American worklife, both under the rubric of folklore or otherwise, American thinkers finally unloosed occupational folklife from traditional, agrarian, and craft-based occupations and a preoccupation with music––“John Henry” is of course probably the most famous example of American occupational folksong––toward new horizons.
Although early European examples provide academic precedent––Friedrich Friese documented artisans’ customs in Germany as early as 1705, and William Morris celebrated art as work and work as art during the English Arts and Crafts Movement––the first surveys of coherent, collected occupational folklife in the United States occur in literature, especially fiction and memoirs. Rhapsodizing about work and workers is a trope of American letters in which Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and William James all indulged, and in fact the reader might be most familiar with famous fictionalized and vernacular, rather than academic and folkloristic, accounts of occupational folklife. Sometimes the two strains work in dialogue. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), the most famous of many devastating slave narratives and autobiographies, details the cruelty and horror of the most pernicious form of American labor; folklorist Roger Abrahams later commented on the subversive function of slave corn-shucking songs. Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) explores sperm whaling on technical, historical, and metaphysical levels; folklorist Horace Beck later tackled similar cetacean subjects (William Warner and David Cecelski have also written fascinating studies of Southern maritime folklife.) Other examples abound. Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854) recounts the author’s symbolic escape from market economies into a life of nominal subsistence living; The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1854) exposes some of the “Prince of the Humbug”’s deceptions and triumphs as calculated business ventures; Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) satirizes a young Twain’s peripatetic search for work and his comic failures as a silver miner and journalist, while his Life on the Mississippi (1883) celebrates steamboat captains and roustabouts; John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. (1938) employs modernist textual methods to examine the prewar history of American unionism and the way disparate work experiences forge human consciousness.
The first American folklorists to delve into the culture of workers tended to concentrate on documenting the regional folkways of those professions they perceived as endangered by technology, urbanization, or other socioeconomic shifts. John Lomax’s collection Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910) remains a bellwether, but it excludes even the modest analysis and contextual detail of later efforts like Fannie Eckstorm and Mary Smyth’s Minstrelsy of Maine (1927), which covers the songs of lumberjacks and shanty boys. Beginning with his Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miner (1927), George Korson made a crucial contribution to the field, championing the industrial worker as a skilled artisan and tradition bearer. Still, he abandoned his work with miners once he felt mechanization had entirely superseded the twilight era of human-scale mining. The Depression and the WPA nurtured several South-centered American folklorists with an occupational bent, some of whom embraced social activism and public folklore initiatives as a means of supporting their consultants. Benjamin Botkin, director of the Federal Writers’ Project, sought to topple some of the hierarchies of tradition, collectivity, and authenticity that bridled folklorists; by insisting in the name of cultural pluralism that the modern, the industrial, and the political join the folkloristic discussion, he edged occupational folklife (he coined the term “industrial folklore”) into popular consciousness and toward the Popular Front. In his Palmetto Country (1942), Stetson Kennedy limned the lives of Floridian laborers of all stripes and colors, from Cuban American cigarmakers to Greek spongers to Conch (Key West) fishermen to railroad gandy-dancers; along with Zora Neale Hurston, he also honored the ordeals of African American turpentiners. John Greenway published the exhaustive American Folksongs of Protest in 1953, painting the history of occupational folksong with an explicitly political tinge. Mody Boatright and Américo Paredes furnished two divergent perspectives on Texan work culture—the former through an ethnography of oil workers and cowboys in Texas, the latter explicating Gregorio Cortez, the hero of a tejano border corrido, as a working-class symbol of ethnic and socioeconomic resistance to the marauding Texas Rangers. Similarly, Manuel Peña has examined the tejano conjunto as a musical form specifically articulated to Mexican American working-class identity.
Important occupational folklife research projects and subjects are myriad, but certain influential statements bear some scrutiny. Wayland Hand’s 1969 essay and call-to-arms “American Occupational and Industrial Folklore: The Miner” prefigured Only a Miner (1972), Archie Green’s seminal study of recorded mining songs and their complex web of vernacular, popular, and commercial cultural contexts. An erstwhile shipwright and union activist, Green coined the term “laborlore” in the late 1950’s, and his work as a researcher, archivist, educator, writer, and Congressional lobbyist has helped identify what occupational folklife can be and why it matters. Green has celebrated the culture of work without hierarchical prejudice, whether tracing the arcane etymologies of “wobbly,” “fink,” and “dutchman,” analyzing the visual and sung representations of John Henry and union hero Joe Hill, or engaging the compelling music of Sarah Ogan Gunning, a Kentuckian singer who drew on personal tragedy to interpret traditional Appalachian ballads with grace and nuance and to compose topical anticapitalist protest lyrics of astonishing, gutwrenching power. In 1978, in response to the groundbreakingly varied occupational folklife presentations at the 1976 Festival of American Folklife, Robert Byington curated several theoretically-oriented, forward-looking articles for a special issue of Western Folklore entitled Working Americans: Contemporary Approaches to Occupational Folklife. Drawing from the currents of British cultural studies and his own research with firefighters, Robert McCarl, the author of one of those essays, has buttressed occupational folklife with a rigorous theoretical framework of identity, diversity, and Marxist dialectical materialism. In his serious treatment of visual artists (particularly ceramic and textile artists) as workers, Henry Glassie has reprised William Morris.
More recently, folklorists have contributed a wealth of titles that further the study of occupational folklife, including Doug deNatale’s “The Dissembling Line: Industrial Pranks in a North Carolina Textile Mill” (1990); Patricia Cooper’s Once a Cigarmaker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919 (1992); and Patrick Huber’s Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (2008). Since 1995 the Archie Green Occupational Folklife Fellowship has funded UNC-Chapel Hill scholars to investigate an exciting range of topics: African American lumber workers in the Jim Crow South (William Jones); the business of women’s foundations (Cristina Rosa Nelson); the New Left’s relationship to black liberation and the U.S. labor movement (Kieran Taylor); the 1968 sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis and its position within the contexts of the Civil Rights struggle and local soul music (John Hubbell); and Lumbee sheetrockers and the associated hip-hop scene in southeastern North Carolina (Jefferson Currie). Even in the face of seismic changes, the field of occupational folklife seems inexhaustible, despite its somewhat marginal status within the academy.
Of course, evidence and analysis of occupational folklife need not be academic, or even written; in fact, the most prominent cultural records tend toward other media. We all work, and we all work on work in different ways. Rigid Western cultural dichotomies––vernacular vs. academic, folk vs. fine, low vs. high––might assume strict delineations between cultural insider and outsider, between consultant and critic, but with assiduous cultural work, those specious oppositional poles will continue gradually to melt, giving way to collaborative, holistic evaluations. Today we might view images by professional artists like museum enshrined modernists Thomas Hart Benton and Ben Shahn, which celebrate moments in 20th century American labor, alongside the roughly contemporaneous vernacular art of union organizer and painter Ralph Fasanella and mysterious Cuban American cigarmaker and collage artist Felipe Jesus Consalvos, who created from within and in response to their own work cultures. Today we consume workers’ culture represented in cinema, on television, and (as always) in song, but without always considering what is at stake behind those portrayals, whether nominally fictional or documentary. The songs of Dock Boggs, Leadbelly, and Woody Guthrie—three 20th-century giants of occupational folksong––will continue to inspire subsequent generations of  protest singers, “revivalists,” and workers. But contemporary audiences might feel more kinship to the working-class anthems of Bruce Springsteen or rappers Ghostface Killah and Lil’ Wayne’s surreal descriptions of drug dealing, economic decay, and despair in the urban ghetto.

Classic cinematic accounts of occupational folklife––from the fictional Citizen Kane (1941), On the Waterfront (1954) and Matewan (1987) to documentaries like Harvest of Shame (1960), The Inheritance (1964), African American Work Songs in a Texas Prison (1966), Salesman (1968), Harlan County, U.S.A. (1977), and the luminous films of William Greaves––must make room for equally relevant pop cultural accounts of contemporary labor-capital and labor-government power clashes like Office Space (1999), The Wire (2002-2008), and Michael Moore’s pop-doc movies. We are transfixed by all these depictions of worklife, but the trick is to reconcile sympathetic, artful representation and thoughtful analysis with real-world action in the ongoing battle against economic injustice and the rampant exploitation of workers. Finance capitalism, unprecedented migration, and dizzyingly accelerating scientific and political technologies have revolutionized the international flow of information, capital, products, and workers, transforming the nature of labor and class. The very study of occupational folklife implies a luxury, an overripe responsibility for advocacy and collaborative intervention, outside the academy and in the streets. How might our research and cultural production actually improve the lot of disadvantaged workers? How might workers access our fiery cultural critiques in order to kindle positive, populist change?

References:

Roger Abrahams, Kenneth Goldstein, and Wayland Hand, eds., By Land and by Sea: Studies in the Folklore of Work and Leisure Honoring Horace P. Beck on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (1985); P.T. Barnum, The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1854); Mody Boatright, Folklore of the Oil Industry (1963); Robert Byington, ed., Working Americans: Contemporary Approaches to Occupational Folklife, a special issue of Western Folklore (July 1978); John Caligione, Doris Francis, and Daniel Nugent, eds., Workers’ Expressions: Beyond Accommodation and Resistance (1992); David Cecelski, The Waterman’s Song: Slavery and Freedom in Maritime North Carolina (2001); Norman Cohen, Long Steel Rail: The Railroad in American Folksong (1981); Earl Conrad, Gulf Stream North (1954); Patricia Cooper, Once a Cigarmaker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919 (1992); Doug DeNatale, “The Dissembling Line: Industrial Pranks in a North Carolina Textile Mill” (1990); Michael Denning: The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the 20th Century (1997); John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (1938); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845); Fannie Eckstorm and Mary Smyth, Minstrelsy of Maine (1927); Henry Glassie, Material Culture (1999); Archie Green, Only a Miner (1972), Wobblies, Pile Butts, and Other Heroes: Laborlore Explorations (1993), Calf’s Head and Union Tale: Labor Yarns at Work and Play (1996); and Torching the Fink Books & Other Essays on Vernacular Culture (2001); Archie Green, Utah Phillips, David Roediger, Franklin Rosemont, and Salvatore Salerno, eds., The Big Red Songbook: 250-Plus IWW Songs (2007); Jon Greenway, American Folksongs of Protest (1953); Wayland Hand, “American Occupational and Industrial Folklore: The Miner” (1969); Patrick Huber, Linthead Stomp: The Creation of Country Music in the Piedmont South (2008); Zora Neale Hurston, “Turpentine” (1939); Stetson Kennedy, Palmetto Country (1942); George Korson, Songs and Ballads of the Anthracite Miner (1927); John Lomax, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (1910); Robert McCarl, The District of Columbia Fire Fighters’ Project: A Case Study in Occupational Folklife (1985); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851); Américo Paredes, “With a Pistol in His Hand”: A Border Ballad and Its Hero (1958); Manuel Peña, “From Ranchero to Jaiton: Ethnicity and Class in Texas-American Music (Two Styles in the Form of a Pair)” (1985); Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854); Mark Twain, Roughing It (1872) and Life on the Mississippi (1883); Mark Warner, Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs, and the Chesapeake Bay (1976)