Laura Marling’s ambitious musical journey “I Once was an Eagle,” earned a Top Ten Culture Currents ranking for 2013. Courtesy theguardian.com

The Best Roots Music Albums of 2013

I continued to be amazed by the strong quality and artfulness in vernaculars presumed to be mere “folk” musics.

These rankings make some fine distinctions between albums but the points stick, for me. Tedeschi-Trucks’ extraordinary blues-R&B-jazz-rock collective tops the list for all its musical artistry and exuberance, to bolster the high level of lyric writing one expects of today’s roots purveyors. Vocalist Susan Tedeschi’s clarion calls to the spirit and Derek Trucks’ charged guitar emissions send them driving past safety and sometimes high to the sky.

By contrast, among the honorable mentions, Jason’s Isbell’s widely and justly admired Southeastern, for all its painful poetry, felt too claustrophobic and personal to be universal.

Actually, well-known troubadour Steve Earle deserves a Top Ten slot. He’s the Russell Banks of roots music, a storyteller of dispossessed, working class, suicidal, even homicidal lost souls — and The Low Highway stands as an indictment of our economic and political system.

And John Mellencamp and Stephen King’s Southern Gothic melodrama Ghost Brothers of Darkland County worked brilliantly onstage, and is well worth the star-studded recording.

But for the final Top Ten, I opted for a few still-underappreciated veterans like Rory Block, Mary Gauthier and Robbie Fulks, and to acknowledge the extraordinarily realized promise of Holly Williams and the 23-year-old Laura Marling.

The mighty Tedeschi-Trucks Band live at the Highline Ballroom in New York.

1. Made Up Mind – Tedeschi-Trucks Band (Sony Masterworks) This naturally great live band became savvier in their second studio recording. Does it meet the song and musical peaks of Revelator? The lyric content and musical arrangements seem better contrasted and more deftly woven, no more so than in the dizzying neo-Motown chorus of “Part of Me.” This, razor-sharp, vocals-and-horns wiggle is The Musical Buzz of the Year. Yet in “Sweet and Low” Susan Tedeschi’s agonizingly tender testimony of a naked heart almost dares not disturb its intensifying poignancy, yet it feels exquisitely and piercingly true. The whole album’s top notch, but on “The Storm,” the heart on the song’s sleeve never gets blown off of this Florida hurricane evocation. Rather, the driving Allmans-meet-Hendrix ride-out jam only steels spiritual resolve. In sum, well-crafted songs – including guest co-writers Doyle Bramlett II, Gary Louris and Eric Krasno — adorn a musical monster digesting the souls of eight multi-hued folk, an astounding guitarist and a gifted, heart-busting woman. Hear them roar, and whisper.

2. The Highway — Holly Williams (Georgiana) Is she the best singer in the storied Williams clan? That’s heresy to Hank Williams Sr. lovers. But Holly’s so good a singer because she never bends her powerful pipes beyond the emotional/storytelling point. She’s learned from grandpa Hank and probably Emmylou and Lucinda, but she’s her own dang songwriter: She can push a country trope hard while easing the reins with a taut, heart-lacerating lyric. There’s vocal harmony help from Jakob Dylan, Jackson Browne, a slightly sweet Gwyneth Paltrow and perfect-match Dierks Bentley.

3. My Favorite Picture of You — Guy Clark (Duotone) It’s hard to imagine another performer handling the death of his longtime spouse with more gritty grace than Guy Clark has. He took his favorite snapshot of Susanna and wove a hallowed musical grave for her in the form of melancholy memories with a small flickering light, reflecting the color of her eyes. More than deep sentiments on this date, there’s also shrewd political comment in the immigrant saga “El Coyote.”

4. Honky Tonk — Son Volt (Rounder) Jay Farrar’s singing carries a heft that sometimes feels like a tragic lifetime, but it still strives for the sunlight hiding just outside his soul. Oft-played on my box, this CD personalizes a tribute to Bakersfield honky-tonk, with Son Volt nailing the style’s deft curves and tart accents. Yet forlorn Farrar lures you to follow him, like a beleaguered scout who’s lost his way, but not your faith.

5. Live At Blue Rock – Mary Gauthier (In the Black) Hearing this woman live (which I have) is like experiencing a woman rip off the hinges of the doorway with the force of her storytelling. And when she gets into the room she can lay all the chatter still with the well struck metaphor and guitar chord, plumbing the pain caught out in the rain.

6. Gone Away Backward – Robbie Fulks (Bloodshot). Fulks displays unprecedented musical and emotional range, even given the ironic fatefulness that seems to pervade, from the album’s title to the lyric:It’s a short life and a long time underground, I’ll trade you money for wine. Fulks’ bracing voice, by turns tough and tender, rides music by ace string players like Jenny Scheinman and Robbie Gjersoe. Neo-traditional bluegrass at its best.

Former Hot Band mate Rodney Crowell reunited with Emmylou Harris for an album and a tour including this gig at Atone’s at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Courtesy artistspicturesblog.com

7. Old Yellow Moon — Emmylou Harris & Rodney Crowell (Nonesuch) This musical match made just west of heaven pairs two voices that entwine and blend gloriously, exposing the wounds of love and life, but with a salve of humor in some extraordinarily rich storytelling, such as Crowell’s masterful “Open Season on my Heart.”

8. Memories And Moments – Tim O’Brien and Darrell Scott (Full Skies) This sounds like the year’s best Appalachian-style front-porch pickin’ and singin’. But there’s no homey self-satisfaction — from the yearning three-part harmony with John Prine on “Paradise” to the restless wayfarer refrain of O’Brien’s “Brother Wind”:He knows me, my brother wind/he’s lonely too/and he takes me away. And you know brother wind’s path is to hell and back; to hear their version of Hank Williams’ “Alone and Forsaken,” worth comparing to Townes Van Zandt’s harrowing live version (from In Pain). But then, hear “Free Again” and “it’s a brand new day.”

9. Once I was an Eagle — Laura Marling (Ribbon Music) British-born Marling channels Joni Mitchell and Pentangle while dwelling deep in her own hypnotic vision. She can imagine being an eagle, while capturing life’s vagaries and specific scenes with that creature’s sharp eye: “Thank you naiveté for failing me again.” From the stunning five-part opening suite onward, the listener moves in and out of simmering eddies. Yet her resourceful band provides vivid contrasts of color and mood that never upend the delicate balance of her ethereal pursuit.

Rory Block added to her impressive series of recorded tributes to country blues greats with “Avalon.” Courtesy musicradar.com

10. Avalon: A Tribute to Mississippi John Hurt — Rory Block (Stony Plain) Part of her country blues masters series, few albums begin with such glowing and heartfelt ode to an inspiring giant. And just as few find pathways to truth like those forged by Mississippi John Hurt.  Ms. Block delivers the thrumming bounce of his guitar and his spirit, thumbing a ride on down the road.

Honorable Mention: The Low Highway — Steve Earle, The Worst Things Get…The More I Love You — Neko Case, Ghost Brothers of Darkland County – John Mellencamp, Stephen King, T-Bone Burnett and others, Southeastern — Jason Isbell, Big Sur — Bill Frisell, The Fall And Further Decline Of The Mighty King Of Love — Phil Lee, Ride – Wayne Hancock

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Milwaukee guitarist Manty Ellis, Arts Midwest Jazz Master and founder of the new Jazz Foundation of Milwaukee, will lead his quintet at the Jazz Gallery on Dec. 14.  Courtesy vimeo.com

If there’s a hunk of granite — a man who embodies the foundation of jazz in Milwaukee — it’s guitarist-bandleader-educator Manty Ellis. He’s payed a lifetime’s dues and earned vast respect from, influenced and taught several generations of musicians. His style is deeply grounded in Wes Montgomery and John Coltrane, yet his muscular, rhythmically charged inventiveness draws parallels to James “Blood” Ulmer and  legendary Canadian guitarist Sonny Greenwich.

He co-founded the Wisconsin Conservatory of Music’s renowned jazz program with Tony King and has performed with numerous jazz greats, including Sonny Stitt, Eddie Harris, Stanley Turrentine, Frank Morgan and Richard Davis and taught such celebrated Milwaukee natives as Brian Lynch, Carl Allen, Sonya Robinson and Jeff Chambers. He’s been a recipient of Arts Midwest’s jazz master award and, at 80, remains very active on the local scene.

So it makes sense to see Ellis trying to lay groundwork for the Jazz Foundation of Milwaukee. The fledgling organization will debut with a fund-raising concert by his quintet at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts, the community-oriented non-profit arts facility at 932 E. Center St. at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 14. Admission is free with a $5 suggested donation. The foundation and the Jazz Gallery are functioning in close symbiosis, with proceeds going to the non-profit Riverwest Artists Association, which operates the arts center. This too, seems a good fit, being a multi-arts venue that has evolved into a serious listening space without a bar and with the addition of a baby grand piano. Plus, the venue’s visual arts exhibits might help contribute to fundraising efforts.

Grammy-winning trumpeter  Brian Lynch (left) led this quartet featuring his former teacher Manty Ellis (center, lower) bassist Jeff Hamann (right) and drummer Sam Belton.

Ellis hopes to draw on the deep historical cachet of this venue’s previous musical incarnation as the Milwaukee Jazz Gallery, a nightclub which presented a galaxy of national and local talent in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. Vintage photographs of famous musicians who performed at the original Jazz Gallery will be on display for the JFM concert. Yet Ellis values the fact that liquor is no longer served here.

“We wanted a place that provides serious listening rather than a bar because we’re dealing with a musical art,” Ellis says. “These are artists we’re talking about, artists worthy of support as well as attention. This group could play at any festival, with any other group.”

Ellis’ quintet blends established and fast-rising talent, including trumpeter-flugelhornist Jamie Breiwick, bassist Jeff Hamann, pianist Ken Kosut, saxophonist Sam Fettig and drummer Romarcus Jones.

Hamann, a musician possessing impeccable swing and technique, is perhaps the city’s pre-eminent jazz bassist, an in-demand clinician and a judge at numerous jazz competitions. He’s has worked with Frank Morgan, Eric Alexander, Marlena Shaw and Steve Allen and in the Wisconsin Conservatory faculty ensemble We Six. He may be best known as the bassist on Michael Feldman’s popular NPR program Whad y’ Know?

The Manty Ellis Quintet at the Jazz Gallery on Dec. 14 will include in-demand bassist Jeff Hamann (far right), here accompanying vocalist Cassandra McShepard at the Blu nightclub in Milwaukee. Courtesy youtube.com.

Breiwick is one of the most gifted and ambitious young musicians on the scene, as leader of several groups, including the jazz/alt-rock band Choir Fight, a Thelonious Monk repertoire band called Dreamland, and the more exploratory Lower Lakes Trio. The Jamie Breiwick Quartet’s critically acclaimed recent Blujazz label CD Spirits was recorded live at the Jazz Estate. He’s also a co-founder of Milwaukee Jazz Vision, the musicians’ organization which promotes jazz citywide with concerts and a sophisticated website.

Trumpeter-flugelhornist and Blujazz recording artist Jamie Breiwick will be featured in the Manty Ellis Quintet at the Jazz Foundation of Milwaukee concert on Dec. 14 at the Jazz Gallery in Milwaukee. Courtesy onmilwaukee.com

Fettig is a middle-school band director in Fort Atkinson, and a UW-Whitewater alumnus who’s worked with Gerald Clayton, Roy Hargrove, Steve Einerson and at the Thelonious Monk Institute. Kosut is the other longtime veteran in the group, and currently plays piano for the All-Star Superband, Milwaukee’s leading big band. Drummer Jones is an up-and-comer who gigs frequently at The Jazz Estate and The Highlander with Breiwick, Russ Johnson, Neil Davis and others.

Ellis envisions foundation performances extending into nursing homes and schools through the Jazz in the Schools program and drawing from the city’s burgeoning young youth talent, particularly from Milwaukee Youth Symphony Orchestra jazz program.

Ellis has been literally instrumental in the development of the Jazz Gallery by overseeing the Tuesday night jam sessions which are built round musicians in the WYSO program and which steadily has gained artistic and popular momentum.

“Last night we had about 40 people there for the jam session and we had several artists doing drawings of the musicians,” says Jazz Gallery director Mark Lawson, who curates the center’s monthly art exhibits and is also gallery curator at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design.

The Ellis-led jam sessions have begun to foster professional  advancement, Lawson says. “Some of the young players we’ve had here now have regular gigs, such as guitarist Cody Steinman, who is now performing Thursday nights at the Riverwest Filling Station.”

“If Manty gets this foundation off the ground it will help to facilitate a lot of what we’re try to do, including designating portions of our schedule to particular regular performers,” Lawson says. “We’re ranging from music that is loosely call jazz to a group called Three. Stacks. Eliot, which is a live hip-hop-related jazz band, or experimental improv groups like the Once Now Ensemble, led by Hal Rammel.”

The successful model for the foundation is the The Jazz Foundation of America. Incorporated in 1990, the organization formed due to address the urgency of helping elder jazz musicians in need. This is pertinent in light of our troubled economy and the fact that most jazz musicians go without adequate health insurance or job security through most of their careers. The art form exists in a sort of economic limbo between the far more subsidized classical performing arts and more commercially viable pop musics.

Time-honored jazz musicians have been dying off increasingly in recent years, and the need for support persists in a city like Milwaukee, where most jazz veterans have served as valuable educators to new generations of musicians capable in varying genres of music. The east-coast based JFA has given Ellis, one of its few Midwest representatives, the project of helping revive the Jazz Gallery.

What’s still missing from the hybrid of the new JFM and the Jazz Gallery is sustainable funding.  Lawson knows there are financial “angels” in the community. “It’s a matter of gaining visibility,” he says. “But I’m confident we’ll get this happening.”  He’s encouraged by recent gigs like singer Jackie Allen’s SRO crowd and trumpeter Philip Dizack.

A Jazz Gallery Christmas show featuring singer Donna Woodall, The Jeno Somali Quartet and guest performers from 2 to 5 p.m. on Dec. 21 should help the cause. “Still, it’s a challenge financially without paid staff and when you don’t serve alcohol,” Lawson says. “We haven’t found the economic formula yet.”

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The title of this photo essay quotes the chanting of the three witches in the opening scene of Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Their incantations seem uncannily prescient of our times, of our topsy-turvy cultural and political conundrums and especially our overwhelmingly inexorable environmental malaise which, when you think about it, is a very creepy poisoning of the living planet we live on.

It’s the ultimate end game of the Moby-Dick metaphor. The great white whale is Gaia (the planet Earth). As he/she suffers ever more slings and arrows of outrageous man-made fortune gashing her body he/she recoils and lashes back — with gargantuan hurricanes, tsunamis and firestorms. Now it’s a monster typhoon in the Philippines. For me, the horrible/wonderful whale also emerged in the woods — in the photo of the fallen tree I present upside down as a formal and socio-cultural evocation.

The context for these photos begins with my own deep personal haunting for this Halloween. My life plunged into the too-frequent madness of urban existence in October when a driver smashed into the rear of my car and totalled it. I was miraculously uninjured. But I gained a visceral understanding of the irresponsibility and cowardice of a hit-and-run driver.

My car’s life with me ended as nature moved into her death cycle which, for me and many others, is the most beautiful time of year. That’s why annually I try to take a fall colors trip of some sort. But this year, my pathetically mangled vehicle was unable to take me on that trip. So I hung around Milwaukee and gathered some images and thoughts befitting our darkening season. The first image (at top) is the best self-haunting of a house that I encountered his Halloween. It was on the northwest corner of Downer and Newton Avenues in Shorewood and, in fact, a stone’s throw away from the home that I grew up in, which is slightly visible through the trees on the lower right.
The other wooded shots are from Downer Woods, only four blocks from that former family home on Downer. The remarkably evocative and figurative tree in dark silhouette (below) is my new Facebook theme page photo, and illustrates how some dying and denuded trees still go out in a burst of glory.

My old friend Frank Stemper, who lived a mere one block away from the woods, spent most of his young life in them, “mostly playing ‘guns,’ during which I once, when hunting Germans, uttered my famous phrase: ‘Quiet guys – I hear footprints!’

“I also remember once UWM cancelled class because of a huge snowstorm and you and I built a fort in the woods as if we were 8 and not 18.” I’d forgotten that escapade.

The close-up of the tree leaves shows the sorts of environmental diseases our flora and fauna suffer from. It’s the doomed oak tree in front of my current upper flat. The black spots have been showing up every fall since I moved here a few years ago, but the spots seem to get bigger each year.

The penultimate photo offers an image of renewal and beauty…in the little inch-by-incher I encountered in the new Arboretum in Milwaukee, adjacent to the Urban Ecology Center on N. Park St., along the Milwaukee River. It’s a wonderfully promising green space that people have worked hard to revive and sustain. This fuzzy little fellow was soaking up the sun on a gorgeous Saturday.

Finally, I go from my shortest subject to the tallest. The autumn photograph of the Channel 6 TV tower on Capitol Drive was taken from the back balcony of my upper flat in River West. When I was younger and an active mountain climber I once aspired to climb the tower, but I never got it together to pull that off. Still, at certain times, it’s one of the most majestic sights in Milwaukee, our own pared-down version of the Eiffel Tower.

Moby Dick’s ghost haunts Downer Woods.

A “hand-painted” reproduction of “Scipio, The Negro,” oil by Paul Cezanne 1864, from chinaoilpaintinggallery.com. 

Something stirred in me as it doubtlessly did in Eugene Kane — even more profoundly — when he first saw the reproduction of painting of a sinewy yet vulnerable black man, which his sister Edna gave him 30 years ago.

Kane, my former colleague at The Milwaukee Journal, posted a photo of the painting reproduction on his Facebook page on October 18, wanting to know if any FB friends could help identify the unsigned, unmarked piece’s progeny. I glanced at it distractedly and suggested the influence of Van Gogh and, thinking it may be an American artist, of Thomas Hart Benton. I also flashed on Goya. (Another Kane FB friend, Portia Freckle Eye Cobb suggested an “Art road show” estimate for the piece — which I mention mainly for the pleasure of typing Ms. Cobb’s deliciously colorful name.)

A bit of research by Gene’s friend Sharee Davis identified it as Paul Cézanne’s, Scipio, the Negro from 1865. Cézanne is a personal favorite of mine. How could my memory fail so?  In 1977, on a free-lancer’s budget, I pilgrimaged to New York to see his late paintings at the Museum of Modern Art. I should’ve recognized Cezanne’s palette and style immediately, even if he’s best known for his landscapes and still lifes, The Card Players aside.

Cezanne’s card players have been reproduced into endless kitsch and his Scipio risks the same, as he’s now available on a T-shirt, a tie, a clock and a mug. After a certain debatable point, mechanical production dilutes cool into kitsch, partially measured by the relative silliness of the product and the aesthetic compromising of the image. Nevertheless, Gene’s framed, three-decades-old, “hand-painted” reproduction retains a finely-aged cool, and reveals Cézanne’s penetrating ability to probe the virtual DNA of molecular mass, a painterly insight that gave all his work a perpetual inner tension. The painter never let conventional technique obscure this energy.

The force of his shape-shifting abstraction earned him the rightful name of The Father of Modern Art. And in Scipio you see how Cezanne’s painterly grappling with mass touches on the human truth of this African man. Scipio looks almost as solid as a Cezanne mountainside, and yet you sense his palpable human presence in the rough-hewn strokes and highlights. 1  (However the “hand-painted” reproduction above compromises the original and loses aura or authenticity because, to my eye, some brushstrokes are too facile and quick to be Cezanne’s, which typically seem to dig right into the canvas.)

Still you sense that this man, though muscular, carries an unfathomably weighted spirit. It’s the proverbial walk-a-mile-in-this-man’s-shoes image.

His head rests on his left arm, which looks a bit peculiar. But its strangeness is loaded. The limb and the broad white backdrop suggest something emerging from his       consciousness or memory  — the arm of a lynched slave hanging like “strange fruit from a popular tree,” as Billie Holiday once sang with a searingly desolate empathy. (The racist Ku Klux Klan, coincidentally or not, began in 1865, the same year Cezanne painted Cipio. In retrospect, the white backdrop foreshadows the Klan’s adoption of white robes in their early 20th century revival.)

Kane interprets it slightly differently, with the white form as a Sisyphusian stone. “It’s a strong visual presence for me, a strong black man who seems worn down by his challenges, almost like he’s been pushing that rock up a mountain or something, even though he’s seated,” he says. “Chipping away at the stone, perhaps. Many visitors to my home comment on it; it always gets a reaction.”

Now freelancing, Kane still writes a Sunday Crossroads section column for The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, marked by his sardonic-yet-humane wit and cut-to-the-quick insights, especially regarding issues relating to the African-American experience.

However, without having seen his art work in person, I’m 99.9 percent sure that it is a reproduction of the original Cézanne painting, which is part of the collection of The Sao Paulo Museum of Art, Sao Paulo, Brazil. Unless, that is, Gene’s sister was the real-life counterpart to Renée Russo in the art-heist movie The Thomas Crown Affair.

This is not to extoll the purchase of reproductions over original works of art — especially by affordable local or regional artists. I still abide by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” of, say, an original painting “which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction,” as he wrote in his classic 1936 essay The Work Of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Benjamin compares this aura to the experience of nature, “the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close it may be. If, while resting on a summer afternoon, you follow with your eyes a mountain range on the horizon, or a branch which casts its shadow over you, you experience the aura of those mountains, of that branch. This image makes it easy to comprehend social bases with a contemporary decay of the aura.” One social base is “the desire of contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is just is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction.” 2

Benjamin clearly challenged the value of mass reproduction. I might offer an example of loss of aura by comparing the two art images hanging over my desk:  A print reproduction of Honore Daumier’s Third-Class Carriage from 1864 and an original enamel-on-wood panel portrait Ornette Coleman, of the innovative jazz saxophonist-composer painted around 1997 by Iowa artist Wayne Deutsch.*

An original painting “Ornette Coleman” on left, and a printed reproduction of Daumier’s “Third Class Carriage.” Photo: Kevin Lynch

The enamel painting is such a powerful image that I not-infrequently sense it traversing the distance to my senses – “casting a shadow” over me as I sit at my desk writing. I glance up and the surface of Ornette’s larger-than-life visage glistens in its oily luminescence, pulling me into the depths of his fulsome eyelids and knowing, melancholy eyes, into the creases and asymmetry of his middle-aged face, and the brow marks betraying the burning intelligence of a maverick artist, and the psychic and physical abuse he’s endured  over his controversial career.

“Ornette Coleman” by Wayne Duetsch. enamel on wood board ca. 1997 from Metropolitan Art. photo: Kevin Lynch

(Apologies for the poor photo. [by KL] The light on Ornette’s neck really flattens out the image.)

For all his ostensible sophistication, Coleman is, at root, a Texas bluesman which he started out as, though always in his own idiosyncratic way, as exemplified by the double-jointed cowboy swing of his early classic tune “Ramblin’.” Listen here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN33ULk40a0

This face is a roadmap of a ramblin’ American cultural odyssey.

An odyssey, of course, is a great journey far from home and perhaps eventually back — a Homer, a Huck Finn, an Ishmael. This brings me the famous American Ishmael, Herman Melville, and to the extraordinary 1865 portrait by Elihu Vedder, titled Jayne Jackson: Formerly a Slave, which inspired a remarkable Melville poem. By then, Jayne was a “free woman” yet, as she appears to gaze down into the long road that emancipation presents her — she seems to search for a place she might call home, somewhere, in America? In a post-racial Nirvana? Might she also harbor feelings about the “security” of the plantation, as horrible as that experience likely was? She could likely tell about being more than “Twelve Years a Slave,” the title of the new Steve McQueen film based on a true story of a free black man sold back into slavery. 

Herman Melville saw Vedder’s sketch for the painting in the spring exhibition of the National Academy in 1865 and was inspired to pen his poem “Formerly a Slave.” The sketch is the frontispiece art in the 2001 Prometheus Books edition of his Civil War poems, Battle Pieces and  Aspects of the War. For me and a growing number of readers, this book is one most powerful, insightful and beautiful collections of poetic response to war, and is often compared to Walt Whitman’s Drum-Taps section of Leaves of Grass.

Actually Melville was experiencing the war at somewhat of a distance, not having served in the war as a soldier or as a nurse, as Whitman did. However, he did sneak up to front lines with his Union soldier brother Allan — and accompanied a daring Calvary hunt for the brilliant Confederate guerrilla fighter George Mosby. That resulted in the long narrative poem The Scout Toward Aldie.  Throughout Battle Pieces, one senses a balance of distance and immediacy in Melville’s experience which is a literary extension of Benjamin’s idea of the art aura traversing a distance to reach a viewer.

Here’s the poem he wrote about Jayne Jackson’s image:

Formerly a Slave (An idealized portrait, by E. Vedder, in the spring exhibition of the National Academy, 1865)

By Herman Melville

The sufferance of her race is shown,

And retrospect of life,

Which now too late deliverance dawns upon;

Yet is she not at strife.

Her children’s children they shall know

The good withheld from her;

And so her reverie takes prophetic cheer –

In spirit she sees the stir

Far down the depth of thousand years,

And marks the revel shine;

 Her dusky face is lit with sober light,

Sibylline, yet benign. 3

Melville’s subtitle “an idealized portrait,” suggests his intellectual distance from Jackson’s “aura,” as do his allusions to the historical implications of her private reverie. And yet, such a poem surely bears a powerfully direct experience of that aura, reaching out to Melville, like Ornette Coleman’s face does to me. Phrases like “prophetic cheer” and the striking “marks the revel shine” detect what we might call the resilient blues spirit within Jackson’s melancholy. 4  And neither Ornette’s nor Jayne Jackson’s eyes look at the viewer so we, especially Caucasians like myself, gaze with a certain voyeuristic wonder, so strong is the artist’s exposure of the subject’s being. 5

If this old woman removed her top and exposed her back, one wonders if it might resemble that of Cézanne’s Scipio, who seems to carry a slave’s experience in his body.

And yet, I also return to the Daumier reproduction which, though the lacking the “Ornette” painting’s aura, is beautiful and moving. Daumier’s unsentimental visual storytelling from 1864 highlights the central figure, an elderly woman in the third-class train seating who seems like a kindred spirit to Jayne Jackson. In fact, Vedder’s sketch and painting of Jackson were done a year after the Daumier. So Vedder, a cosmopolitan American who had studied in Paris, had possibly seen Daumier’s image not long before portraying Jackson, the “Sybilline” — a female prophet. They are both masterfully attuned images of humble yet potentially transcendent women (notice the elderly passenger’s private smile and almost serene expression) enduring social systems stacked against them. 6

Today Walter Benjamin may be subject to charges of elitism; his essay bemoans how movies are an experience of a “distracted public” as opposed to one that concentrates on a single painting and its aura. The democratization of art allows multitudes edification, entertainment, inspiration and aesthetic pleasure from living with a great art work’s image, though bereft of its “aura.” Yet cultural democratization comes at a price, which fosters illusion. Reproductions have improved, as has the quality of photography and film, both advanced commercial art forms in their own rite, of course. Sure, HD TV offers a new intensity of apparent clarity. Yet digital pixilation filters out any residual sense of the artwork’s inherent presence.

Plus, Benjamin, a German-Jew writing in 1936, ends his essay by brilliantly forecasting how Fascism would latch onto mass reproduction to disseminate unprecedented amounts of racist, Aryan-suprematist propaganda, which helped instilled the mass mentality that led to World War II and The Holocaust. Today, we have accumulating evidence of the pervasive dangers of Internet media to privacy and civil liberties, even as The Web allows new sorts of freedoms, illusions thereof, and traps.

If only the Nazis (or the KKK or any racist groups) comprehended the implications of a painting like Amos “Ashante” Johnson’s Original Man, a 1968 pastel. It alludes to Africa as the historical motherlode of humanity. The deeply symbolic portrait from the great Paul R. Jones Collection of African-American Art, also addresses “notions of the evolution of man, and alludes to the fundamental relatedness of all people,” writes essayist Amalia Amaki.  “With the background blacked out, the multiethnic head appears to float out of infinity.” 7

Ultimately, a reproduction should inspire us to venture to see the original artwork, to buy original art, to expand and intensify our experience of artistic truth and beauty. Let art’s aura breathe. Feed it like your senses, embrace it like your lifeblood. I think most art of  value is a creative byproduct of our “better angels,” even if it is blasphemous, as Melville’s Moby-Dick sometimes is. As Melville wrote to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, upon finishing his masterpiece: “I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb.”

* “Ornette Coleman” by Wayne Deutsch was a gift from my ex-wife, Beth Bartoszek, purchased at Jeb Prazak’s Metropolitan Art in Dodgeville WI, which is no longer open.

1. Cezanne may have titled painting for his subject’s actual name, or he may have chosen to give the man historic resonance. Scipio Africanus was the name of an African general and statesman in the Roman Empire, which clearly lends symbolic power to his identity, burdened as he may appear.

2. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, Schocken Books, 1969, 222-223

3. The excellent Prometheus edition of Melville’s Battle Pieces corrects some egregious omissions and printing mistakes in the University of Massachusetts Press edition 1972. Prometheus also includes a forward by Civil War historian James McPherson, an invaluable interpretive essay by the great poetry critic and scholar Helen Vendler, as well as essays by Rosanna Warren, Richard Cox, and Paul Dowling.

4. The cultural historian and critic Albert Murray and novelist-essayist Ralph Ellison (The Invisible Man) are two writers who explicated the concept of “the blues spirit” as an aspect of the African-American experience and perhaps character long predating the formulation of the blues as a musical genre in the 20th century.

5. In Vedder’s finished painting of Jayne Jackson she seems to exist in a murky cloud of existential uncertainty. One wonders if Melville’s poem would’ve been as hopeful had he seen this painting, part of the Frick collection:http://images.frick.org/PORTAL/IMAGEINFO.php?file=/Volumes/digitallab_xinet_5/NEH_grant/acetate/POST/folder/50130_POST.tif

6. The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, the current PBS series on Tuesday nights, hosted by cultural historian and critic Henry Louis Gates Jr., offers a great opportunity to understand how our social systems have historically dealt with the African-American. The series also seems to be employing many storytelling visual art images. One wonders what Benjamin might have made of such ambitious and high-minded cultural democratization.  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/

7. A Century of African American Art: The Paul R Jones Collection, ed. Amalia K. Amaki, The University Museum, University of Delaware and Rutgers University Press, 2006, 9

“Rain on the scarecrow, blood on the plow.” The image from 1985 shows John Mellencamp’s knack for literary horror, 15 years before he began writing a musical with iconic horror writer Stephen King. The song about a dying Heartland farm was one of the singer-songwriter’s first indelible artistic statements. Some years ago, Mellencamp bought a lake cabin which turned out to be allegedly haunted — by accidental deaths and restless spirits — the inspiration for Ghost Brothers of Darkland County, the ambitious stage production that will come to Fort Wayne (Embassy Theatre) Oct. 24, Madison (Overture Center)  Oct. 25. Rockford Oct. 26 (Coronado Theatre), Milwaukee (Riverside Theatre) on October 29 and Minneapolis (State Theatre)  Oct, 31, then on to Iowa.

Not surprisingly Mellencamp is a Stephen King fan and he approached King with the idea of doing a libretto for what became a “live radio musical,” says Ghost Brothers director Susan Booth. The story’s key dynamic is two mirroring male relationships — dead brothers who haunt their living nephews in a Southern Gothic atmosphere of poisoned character entanglement.

The story of jealousy, murder and suicide is set in a Mississippi cabin “haunted by the ghosts of people that had a terrible thing happen,” King said. “Because it is so awful, their spirits stayed there, and then the whole chain of events starts to repeat itself.”

This all grew from a working relationship of two symbolic blood brothers. King’s prolific literary sensibility rises relentlessly like a specter from the darkest shadows of the American experience. King’s also an amateur musician, and a roots music aficionado.

“The greatest thing about Ghost Brothers is my friendship with Steve King,” Mellencamp said in an interview with The Tennessean in Nashville. “He and I are like brothers. In 15 years, I don’t think we’ve had a cross word. We laugh at each other and teased each other quite a lot, but never has there been any kind of, I’m really mad about this.”

The project also marked the reunion of two estranged brothers, Dave and Phil Alvin who perform on the recording. However, the biography John Mellencamp: Born in a Small Town details his problematic issues with collaboration.

“I don’t play well with the other kids, and neither did Steve,” Mellencamp admits. “Steve lives in Maine by himself. I live in Indiana by myself so the idea of him and I working together doesn’t sound like it would work very well, both of us are very respectful of each other, and it’s worked fantastically.”

That almost ominous isolation belies the charisma and strong connections of their individual talents, which attracted an all-star cast recording. That includes Mellencamp’s current girlfriend, Meg Ryan, as Monique, the mother of the living brothers.

The third member of the dead uncle’s love triangle is Anna sung by the silver-throated Neko Case. One of the first really gripping songs is “Wrong Wrong Wrong About Me” by “The Shape” a ghostly figure sung by Elvis Costello with Marc Ribot’s far-eastern psychedelic guitar backwash.

Frank and Drake argue in roles by actors Matthew McConaughey and Hamish Linklater. The ironic “Brotherly Love” moves with the shambling funkiness characteristic of Mellencamp’s recent work, with  singer-songwriter Ryan Bingham (Oscar-winner for Crazy Heart) and Will Daily, as the brothers.

A spectral aura deepens when Kris Kristofferson, as the father Joe, sings “How Many Days.” Joe’s the younger brother of the two dead uncles and the father of Frank and Drake,. “Home Again” quivers with a winsome lyrical soulfulness in a four-part harmony among Sheryl Crow, Taj Mahal and the Alvin brothers.

On “You are Blind” gravel-throated Ryan Bingham as Drake reflects on his love for the woman he shares with his brother.

Kristofferson’s father Frank begins to tell his story and Taj Mahal invokes chaos in “Tear This Cabin Down,” to convey the horror of the murder site.

Joe continues story about brothers “who couldn’t get along.” in 1967 when it happened.

A brotherly heart to heart may not deter tragic fate. Courtesy mediagalleryusatoday.com  

Sung by young Clyde Mulroney, “My Name is Joe,” is a touchingly plainitive flashback ode about the father as a boy and “the runt to the family,” whose big brothers “will take care of me.” Later Roseanne Cash sing Monique’s song “You Don’t Know Me” which reveals how love is ravaged by tragedy and misunderstand, yet a forgiveness persists.

And yet  the dead brothers’ mother Jenna can only ponder, “It all goes so fast and it’s all so rich, life I mean, and love. It slips away from this world, like silk.” She calls out for Andy and Jack, “where did you go?” a sentiment superbly expressed by Sheryl Crow in “Away From This World.”

Finally the song “Truth” is a stirring, swelling ensemble song with Mellencamp having the final musical word.

Taken as a whole, the recording sprawls but it hangs together like a dark, engulfing cloud of inevitability, with committed performances and excellent music.

____

The touring cast has some of its own star-power but promises proven acting and musical chops. Ghost Brothers should be more compelling as a dramatic story line on stage. The show stars actor Bruce Greenwood as the father Joe McCandless. Greenwood is perhaps best known for his roles as JFK in the film Thirteen Days, in Flight as Denzel Washington’s friend and union rep, and as Captain Christopher Pike in the 2009 Star Trek film and its sequel, Star Trek Into Darkness. Broadway actress Emily Skinner, who plays Monique, received a Tony Award nomination for Side Show, and has had leading roles in Jekyll & Hyde, James Joyce’s The Dead, The Full Monty and Billy Elliot.

Both the ghostly uncles and the nephews vie for the hearts of a woman: One is Anna, played by Kylie Brown, who has recently appeared in Atlanta productions of Hello Dolly and Hair. The other, Jenna, is played by Kate Ferber, whose recent credits include the one-woman show One Child Born: The Music of Laura Nyro.
The Shape, a devil-like character, is played by Jake LaBotz, who is a blues singer-songwriter and has acted in films by Sylvester Stallone and Steve Buscemi. LaBotz has released six of his own albums.

The Shape casts a bluesy spell over the people of Darkland County.

The company’s music ensemble is Mellencamp’s longtime band, led by bandleader Andy York on guitar, percussionist Dane Clark, Troye Kinnett on Keyboards and harmonica and upright bassist Jon Gunnell.

Producer T-Bone Burnett (in suit, front left)  takes a bow with co-authors John Mellencamp and Stephen King in an early production of Ghost Brothers. www.lijas-library.com

The libretto’s shades of Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner and perhaps Carson McCullers underscore that King is a more subtle psychological writer than often given credit for. Typically penetrating lyrics and memorable refrains by Mellencamp reflect a theme of suffering, resilience and self-acceptance in the face of fate.

Booth says the gritty, low production values “allows us to sit and listen to Stephen’s words and plug our imagination in, rather than having the work done for us by a fully stage production.”

__________________________

The photos in this blog are from a previous production of “Ghost Brothers.”

A version of this story was published in The Shepherd Express.

Maggie in (relatively) more courageous days, living in Madison. 

Authors note: I actually wrote this before Maggie began clearly showing her fatal illness, liver cancer, when she stopped eating for the last two weeks of her life. I now wonder whether her predatory lull, evidenced in the picture below, betrayed her affliction. I still find myself habitually addressing Maggie when I’m at home — and blaming her for things (she was a truly heroic all-purpose scapegoat!) — then realizing she’s gone, a heart pang every time.

By Sir Kevin Edward Lynch a.k.a. Kevernacular

Milwaukee no longer brooded like a Scottish moor. Mists cleared for the city’s too-fleeting zephyrs of summer. A disarmingly intoxicating aura filled the air — lilacs and guttered ephemerals.

Sherlock Holmes lit his pipe and puffed, but without contentment. A question lingered. Had his intrepid feline Maggie reached advanced middle age? The photo composite below may suggest as much. This supposedly tense face-off transpired for nearly five minutes, with the bird on the TV dish gleefully taunting and mocking Holmes’ dear cat, perched six feet away, safely under his lawn chair.

The entire nerve-wracking time, she twitched hardly a muscle except to peer at her master, through the window.

“Mind-boggling,” whispered Watson.

But appearances were deceiving. Maggie is so intelligent that she knew it was a waste of her precious energy and calories to pursue an antagonist she cannot catch. Good thing, Watson, the bird was no Iago, and Maggie shan’t fall prey to weaknesses of the flesh or romance (though she may love Holmes — in her furry way — but details are unnecessary). Perhaps, as Watson theorizes, she’s now completely embodied her desultory impersonation of Marlene Dietrich as “The Laziest Gal in Town.”

Frankly, as a kitten, she survived horrors — being abandoned at a truck stop, and then being hounded by her next owners’ tail-twiddling toddler. Sherlock’s Magpie has also survived his divorce, a trauma for her as if she were his child. She’s a convicted ex-biter but still hopelessly addicted to Cool Whip, not a pretty picture. You, dear reader, may deduce her supplier. Better to see is her as an adorable, near-Siamese attachment to Holmes’ hip in his easy chair.

So, this tale stands to extol and honor her for remarkable valor and heroism, which wears the deft guise of cowardice, to the eyes of pooh-poohers. Yet I know first-hand, Maggie can pooh-pooh with the best of them. (Her prime aliases: Poopface, Super-Duper Pooper) Clumping litter may cramp her style, at times, but we both appreciate it.

I digress.

“Oh yes, yes,” Watson sputtered, removing his finger from an idle orifice.  Holmes worried the man suffers from what they now call ADHD.

To the tale: At the slightest sound, this knowing Margaret perks her ears and — with supercomputer speed — comprehends danger, even if it be a mouse, or me loudly cracking open a can of food that she instantaneously realizes is not for her. She runs like the wind to the nearest, or best, hiding place, in that order.

On a seemingly innocuous day, she reveled noisily amidst her delectable squishy-food meal — when the call for action arose. What had startled her? Holmes quickly theorized that only the Murderers of the Rue Morgue knew, and that they were afoot again. Linger over food? Not our heroine.

She faced the gauntlet. With dazzlingly athletic shake-and-bake jukes, she sidestepped Holmes’ feet, and a suddenly ominous catnip toy or two, and careened past the cat grass – which bent to her swift wind — at the doorway from kitchen to dining room. Newspapers and magazines jumped and fluttered from the parlor rug.

She penetrated her safe haven – a space behind a radiator and bookshelf. Ah, she now had ample time to lick her whiskers clean of precious morsel bits, even if her still-hot path had claimed some droppings. Breathless, she peered out from between the radiator rungs, with a vigilant eye.

Now that’s setting your priorities pragmatically. Safety before savoring. To quote a famous philosopher, I am not making this up.

“Extraordinary, Holmes!” Watson cried.

“Elementary, my dear fellow.”

After her adventure, Maggie inspects the fur-raising gauntlet  — killer cat grass, insidious toys — she had to pass through to reach safety, to Watson’s astonishment.

You see, Maggie the cat educates even Holmes on Safety First. He knows that, in times of threat, that there’s plenty of room for him, too, under the dining room table, or better, deep in the nearby closet, or in her best locale of subterfuge: behind the entertainment center.

This is quite brilliant strategy, because she is nearly hiding in plain view (well, OK, not really). But Holmes can sit looking right in her direction — as can far more threatening TV-watching humanoids — and detect nary a whisker of her,  nor her tell-tale tail.

Holmes sometimes thinks he hears her snickering back there. But he grants Maggie her smugness, because she must sacrifice at times. And during this emergency, he confessed to panic — the sheer existential dread of seeing the cat’s canniest survival instincts under seige. So Holmes unceremoniously squeezed in beside her behind the telly, and she curled her tail out of the way — with a frown and attendant complaint — and he scrunched knees to chin. Thus, they hid in that triangular cavity with reasonable discomfort, amid myriad component cords. Of course, he bravely jettisoned his pipe, to make breathing room.

Then, the famous detective’s infallible nose detected a clue. He’d discovered a missing item back there. But Maggie had already taken a fancy to it — a forgotten but fragrant underthingy. Elastic is chewably animated, at least for a short duration.

“Zounds Holmes! Brilliant deduction, finding the underwear, in such dire conditions! Better than Monk!”

“Who’s this, pray tell man?” Holmes retorted. “Monk? Such an obvious pseudonym!  And holier than thou, no doubt.”

“Yes, he’s a crackerjack detective I’ve seen on the telly.”

“Irrelevancies!” Holmes thundered. “Here’s what I am told: ‘Holmes, you need to get a hound.’”

“It would keep you active,” his well-meaning former sister-in-law recently counseled. “And she advised, I could meet women while walking a canine, ‘as long as the dog is good-looking.'”

“Pure poppycock! She may have certain points, I concede, clients being scarce lately. But to the latter point: Neither Maggie nor I are deceived by pretty outward appearances. She knows well a bloodthirsty wolf in in sheep’s clothing.”

“Indubitably,” Waston huffed.

“Maggie is ‘good looking’ enough for me, even if for years she’s never ventured outside, beyond the balcony,” Holmes muttered. Let your mind not stray to the gutter, dear reader. T’is not a fit place for man nor beast to do anything — smashed together behind the entertainment center — but breathe and glower at each other in increasing disaffection. There they waited, once again, for the inscrutable terror to pass.

Sitting back he had time for reflection. You see, this cat is our hero, especially in dire times. At least mine. Ergo, Margaret, I forgive you for no longer exhibiting brave – indeed, macho — aggression towards threatening, arrogant birds within reach.

Thus, I will soon solicit on her behalf for a document of certification as:

MADAME MARGARET “MAGGIE” HOLMES, PROFESSIONAL SCARDYCAT, PhD.*

“She will then join us, Watson, in private investigation partnership.”

“Um, her? Partnership?” he fretted. “What’s all this?”

“Elementary…” His swagger rekindled, Holmes finally shouted from the cramped depths: “Cobwebs be damned!”

As he began to climbed out, cruel fate intervened. Suddenly somewhere, in the growing mist beyond, rose the sound of a great hound’s horrendous howl! And I’m told I need a hound! he thought, quaking.

“Heart-stopping!” Watson ejaculated, gripping his chest.

Maggie shuddered at the hound’s accursed wail, but she bravely recovered.

“Meow,” she said sagely.

Hers is the last word. The tale’s told. Almost.

“Hark! To the hideaways!” Holmes boldly commanded.

“You’re in there already, old mate.”

“Good man, Watson! You’re on your own.”

“AAAAAAAOOOUUUUUUUUUUU!!!!”

THE  END

*Perpendicular hairs (and run from) Dogs.

Dedicated to the late Maggie Lynch and Sharon J. Lynch, Sherlock Holmes aficionado extraordinaire.

Maggie’s final visit to the balcony, on her last day, August 16, 2013. R.I.P.

Kevernacular’s note:

 I interviewed Bill Monroe — born 98 years ago today — between his sets at Summerfest in 1981 for The Milwaukee Journal (published July, 5, 1981). He is credited for inventing bluegrass in 1939 when his Bluegrass Boys auditioned at the Grand Old Opry and caused a high, lonesome stir that has never quite died down, rather coming and going through American culture like the wandering winds of the Appalachian Mountains.

In 2000, it rose into a singing cyclone. The Coen Brothers movie O Brother, Where Art Thou? starring George Clooney — and its soundtrack of authentic hill country music — helped make bluegrass a pop phenom which hasn’t really abated, with the growth in American roots music and its increased popularity. 1

The soundtrack to a popular Coen Brothers film helped spur a bluegrass and roots music movement. Courtesy www.last.film.

Today the British popularizers Mumford & Sons are admittedly influenced by the American groups The Avett Brothers and Old Crow Medicine Show, whose instrumentation and vocal harmonies draw deeply on bluegrass.

The article helps to backdrop the impulses of today’s roots music. It was a close to the dawn of the mid-80s-to-early 90s roots music breakout but it speaks well of Monroe’s sense of cultural truth and inevitability at age 70.

 Monroe was diagnosed with cancer in 1981, the year I interviewed him. I didn’t know it at the time and now wonder how it might have affected him during the interview. Feeling more vulnerable or more mortal? More reflective, accepting?
The interview is very important to me as I mark it as the first important step in my quest to get a foothold into the depths of American root music, before that term was really used.  2

I think the interview is all the more extraordinary because Monroe was legendarily resistant to interviews, even for annotators of his own albums. He had once threatened to break his mandolin over the head of a writer if he ever mentioned Monroe’s name in a book. Me, I guess I just got lucky, and because he’s now dead, his threats are history. 

But Bill was lucky, too. After radiation treatment he survived for years. On April 7, 1990, Monroe performed for Farm Aid IV in Indianapolis, Indiana along with Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and with many other artists. He died September 9, 1996 — after suffering a stroke in April of that year — just short of his 85th birthday, which was September 11, 1911. 

Monroe felt his place in history had been abused and distorted too many times. Now I wonder if perhaps the cancer and his the sense of mortality led him to speak his mind, to set the record straight.

Bill Monroe (second from left) at the 1968 Newport Folk Festival. Newport’s seaside winds may have blown off his trademark Stetson. Courtesy Robert Corwin/PhotoArts. 

Today his legacy is solidifying even if his still-surviving competitor Ralph Stanley is perceived by many as the father of bluegrass. But modern bluegrass singer and mandolin player Ricky Skaggs was one of many influenced by Monroe. Skaggs was only six years old when he first got to perform on stage with Monroe and his band. He stated, “I think Bill Monroe’s importance to American music is as important as someone like Robert Johnson was to blues, or Louis Armstrong. He was so influential: I think he’s probably the only musician that had a whole style of music named after his band.” 3

Bill Monroe and his mandolin. Courtesy www.popmatters.com

The following interview story, slightly edited by me, was headlined “Bluegrass Bill Springs A Surprise,” In the story, he sprung a surprise on singer Tom T. Hall, but the surprise is also that — despite his famously ornery reputation — he opens up the way he does, and shows he cares about the music and about communicating it to people of all ages. 

THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL July 5, 1981   

BIll Monroe Springs a Surprise

Bill Monroe stands centrally within the mythology of bluegrass music. Besides being “The Father of Bluegrass;’ he’s a legendary personality whose famously inpenetrable reticence may have partially reflected the desire of an originator to keep things pure and simple. Monroe harbors a profound distaste of such modern conveniences as a telephone, which his farm home near Nashville still lacks.

Country star Tom T. Hall recounts the shock of even a call from his old friend in response to Hall’s request to record a tune on Monroe’s famous mandolin. His wife answered the phone and whispered, “Good Lord! It’s Bill Monroe on the phone!”

But the sight of Monroe performing on the Summerfest Schlitz Country stage a week ago didn’t detract from the myth. Watching him stand there, workmanlike and stone-faced, I wondered how much he was enjoying himself. His Bluegrass Boys shuffled about and gathered around the almost stationary Monroe for harmony singing.

But there was no mistaking emotional grip of Monroe’s unearthly tenor wail and the propulsive rush of his mandolin. It was a curious thing to see the joyous, hand-clapping crowd reveling in this dour-looking old man. But the power of music works in mysterious ways.

I prudently eschewed such a newfangled contraption as a tape recorder in preparing for a backstage interview.
“He’s an ornery old fella,” Schlitz stage manager Bill Gorman told me, with an assuring smile. He introduced us and, with a trace of trepidation, I shook Monroe’s hand.

“It’s a pleasure to know you, sir,” he said immediately. Monroe was now wearing thick glasses (possibly for cataracts) and they softened his stoic demeanor. He munched on cold cuts and sipped coffee and I hoped refreshment had softened his attitude. We both stood there for several long seconds until I asked, “Uh, shall we sit down?”

“Oh, please have a seat,” he said. I sat down. The white-Stetsoned Monroe towered over me, still chomping silently on the cold cuts. Clearly, he had no intention of taking a seat.

“Just got into town on your bus?” I asked, clutching at the first question that came to mind.
“Yes sir.”
Yes sir. I smiled inside. The grand old man of bluegrass standing in a suit and neat dark tie proffering the term” sir” to a blue-jeaned, tennis-shoed reporter no older than his grandson. What was in your mind when you came up with the idea of bluegrass, I asked him. His answer reflected his notoriously reclusive nature.

“Well, I wanted music of my own to build around myself. I was gonna keep in the things I wanted and keep out the things I didn’t want.”

“Stonewall Jackson plays Bluegrass,” I thought, and tenuously pressed him a bit further.
“I wanted a hard-driving sound,” he said, “Fast work and fast playing keep up the feeling.”

I nodded in agreement and then he seemed to soften. “You know, bluegrass is awful close to gospel music in its sound and tone; you can hear that.”

Do you think your famous high, lonesome sound came out of your life situation at the time?
“There is blues in the music too, that touches a lot of feelings,” Monroe said. He looked away and continued. “I grew up on an old farm in Kentucky and there wasn’t nobody to visit with except the old folks and a few critters.

“I was the youngest one by eight years, the rest were long gone. I was sort of out on my own. It was kind of a sad, hard life. I had to work plenty out in the fields, where I could sing all I wanted…”

He stopped, as if suddenly realizing that he was tipping a hand he normally holds close to his vest. I asked him whether he felt he plays for a particular audience or for anyone who’ll listen.

“I like to play to everyone,” he said. “But I really like to touch good, decent people.” He paused again and the slightly muffled din of Summerfest more than filled the silence as he reflected. “I like to play to people that are sober.”

Bill Monroe (left) on a tour train with Dana Cupp, the last banjo player he ever recruited for The Bluegrass Boys. www. genelowinger.com. Photo courtesy of Gene Lowinger.

Monroe spoke diplomatically about the rise and dissemination of bluegrass music. He indicated a clear preference for the pure form as he created it, but voiced no ill will towards popularizers.

I asked him how a country man dealt with nationwide touring and the ways of city people.
“Well, now, I’ve been in this business a long time,” he said. “Since I invented this music in 1939 I’ve gained the respect of Northern people. They don’t try to outsmart me or put anything over on me. They realize we’ve got to be friends; that’s the only way were going to get together on anything.”

Did he think the rise in popularity of bluegrass and country music indicates any new attitude in Americans about the way they want the world to be?
“Well, the music has changed an awful lot since ‘39 and the world has changed a lot too,” he said. A white-hatted Blue Grass Boy stuck his head in the doorway, beckoning Monroe to come along for the last set.
Bill appeared to want to think about the question a bit longer, but the door was open now, and the buzz of the crowd seemed to draw him like a magnet. The manner quickly turned from reflective to curtly cordial.

“You tell the people here I just want to be their friend and I’ll come any time to play,” he said.” I want you to hear my new album. It’s called Master of Bluegrass, on MCA Records, 4 and it’s talking to the old folks and the young folks. Next time I’m back you tell me what you think of it.”

Monroe warms up with his Bluegrass Boys about the time I interviewed him in Milwaukee at Summerfest. Photo courtesy of Gene Lowinger*

I took the little pitch in stride because I felt that he did care what I thought. He met my eyes once more with a nod, and he struck me as being a shy man far more than a cold, standoffish one.
Heading to the stage, Monroe tucked his glasses in a pocket and his shyness inside the role of “The Father of Bluegrass.” With a strong grip on his mandolin, he can sing all he wants.

__________________

Here’s Monroe in an extraordinary solo performance of the classic “Wayfaring Stranger in 1989, eight years after I interviewed him. Courtesy vintage18lover.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI92oDdXazg&list=TLDOvtqk289uU

________

1.By 2000 Monroe was dead, but the T-Bone Burnett-produced soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? includes, among others, Ralph Stanley, Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, Emmylou Harris, The Stanley Brothers, John Hartford, James Carter & the Prisoners, The Fairfield Four, Norman Blake and singer-guitarist Dan Tyminski, who dubbed for actor George Clooney, who plays an escaped prisoner and a member of the fictional Soggy Bottom Boys.

2. Thanks to Milwaukee Journal editors Dominique Noth and Steve Byers, who sent me a very laudatory note after the article was published.

3. Du Noyer, Paul (2003). The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Music (1st ed.). Fulham, London: Flame Tree Publishing. p. 196. ISBN 1-904041-96-5. via Wikipedia.

4. Master of Bluegrass is available on the Bill Monroe box set My Last Days on Earth 1981-1994 on Bear Family Records.

“Mosa – Mohave” 1903 by Edward Curtis. Courtesy destee.com

I’d like to post two more images of photos from the current show Edward L. Curtis and the Vanishing Race at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend. http://www.wisconsinart.org/exhibitions/current.aspx

These suggest how photographer Curtis, a native of Whitewater, dealt with virtually all aspects of Native American life, not just the Indians we’ve heard of who fought heroic and ultimately doomed battles for their land and tribe. The Indian’s passion for their land was deep and spititual. Black Elk prfoundly express the passion’s wisdom by declaring “The Holyland is everywhere.” The “holyland” begat the verdant and living nature and feed the people and the women and children were the brightest blossoms of the Nature-to-humanity continuum.

Mosa (above) captures the beauty and budding mystery of a Mojave girl fully embracing her native culture. Culture makes us want to understand her choices and values at a time when she is still forming and articulating them for herself. And what lies within her somber aura (disconcerting to see in one so young)? Does the sadness contain age and wisdom beyond her years, gained in hard ways? The stunning image of is also significant because it captivated J.P. Morgan, then perhaps the world’s richest man. Morgan had refused financing of Curtis’ anthropological documentation project The North American Indian — until he saw this photo of lovely Mosa.

“Woman and Child” 1927 by Edward Curtis. Courtesy The Dubuque Museum of Art.

The above photo depicts a woman and child whom Curtis encountered on Nunivak Island in the far north of an Alaskan summer. It also reveals Curtis’ humane and sharp eye for contrasting, layered textures which enhanced the visual storytelling of the man Indians called “The Shadow Catcher.”

Conducted with Curtis’ daughter Beth, this was from the final field trip for The North American Indian. My full review of the exhibit is here:

https://kevernacular.com/?p=2133

The poet and wilderness explorer Antler is a former Milwaukee poet laureate and winner of the Walt Whitman Award. Courtesy www.antlerpoet.net

Touch Each Other (Foothills Publishing) By Antler 

Remember Antler’s celebrated and acerbic protest poem “Factory”? He no longer rails, but his middle age still emits an eagle’s cry for vivid dreams and hope.

The former Milwaukee poet laureate’s often-stunning statistical research skirls into billowing “what ifs.” Then, “The Come Cries of the Unborn Come” brilliantly marries birth to last days, and life’s continuum — disarming tired left-right dualisms.

In another: “The existence of money and having to earn it was made up. No longer where floundering when no wonder is why we’re floundering!”

Antler also can be effortlessly pertinent to the moment as in “Threat to our Community,” where spy satellites orbiting the earth take covert photos of “an amoeba in a drop of rain,” of a 13-year-old boy gaping at his sperm through a microscope and of a virtually penniless poet, “while extraterrestrials in a spaceship/ between Uranus and Neptune/train their telescope/on a bum reading the want ads/on a park bench in Golden Gate Park/to see if there are any jobs/ they can apply for/ when they come to San Francisco incognito/ on a reconnaissance mission…”

Be prepared for unabashed, hilarious erotica. But please don’t grouse over such outrageous love of life — Whitman’s sacred embrace reborn.

There are few living poets who write in a straight-shooting vernacular style that can gently grab hold of your mind’s eye and not let go, until he exhales his last beautiful or harsh truth, or until he’s hoisted you onto a high, granite vista to see and feel possibility, as if it were just within reach.

So you think, if only his “what ifs” became “why nots,” and then…

By the way, If you have a chance, go to hear Antler read his poetry. He declaims with exuberant verve, a sly wit, and a fine feel for the nuances of irony and tenderness in his verse.

Antler has been acclaimed by such major and kindred poets as Allen Ginsburg, Gary Synder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who published Factory in the renowned City Lights series. In 1985, Antler won the Walt Whitman Award, given annually to an author “whose contribution best reveals the continuing presence of Walt Whitman in American poetry.” He won the 1987 Witter Bynner Prize awarded annually “to an outstanding younger poet” by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in New York City.

Antler has been invited to read at Walt Whitman’s birthplace on Long Island in 2014.

Touch Each Other is available at Woodland Pattern and People’s Books in Milwaukee. For more information, visit www.antlerpoet.net

“Prove to Me” from the new chapbook Touch Each Other by Antler 

A version of this post was published in The Shepherd Express, Sept. 4, 2013  

September is National Literacy Month. I wanted to relate that, according to the National Center for Family Literacy, more than 30 million Americans have reading skills below basic literacy levels.

One more stat I can’t resist: A Pew research poll from Sept, 28, 2010 found that only 42 per cent of Americans know that Herman Melville is the author of Moby-Dick or, The Whale. The stat emerged as part of a survey of religious and general knowledge.1

To improve that state of affairs, here’s a cool website from MIT that suggests Moby-Dick be offered to young readers because they now typically appropriate information of all kinds from the Internet. Well, that’s what Melville did — appropriate from many sources — in amazing fashion in writing Moby-Dick, which makes it a sort of post-modern book, written in 1851! So the site suggests it may be the right time for web-literate young people to experience this great book. http://cms.mit.edu/news/features/2008/09/project_new_media_literacies_r.php

Generally speaking, one link worth exploring is from the American Library Association site detailing literacy month events and suggestions. http://www.ala.org/conferencesevents/celebrationweeks

I also wanted to share my favorite image of literacy. This photo depicts Lynn Bartoszek, at the time a dedicated ESL teacher in Madison, reading for her three nieces, Katherine, Hillary and Sonya, at a holiday family gathering. All children should have an aunt, or a reading mentor, like Lynn.

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1.http://www.pewforum.org/2010/09/28/u-s-religious-knowledge-survey/