{"id":4098,"date":"2014-06-07T14:48:04","date_gmt":"2014-06-07T14:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=4098"},"modified":"2014-06-09T13:35:02","modified_gmt":"2014-06-09T13:35:02","slug":"a-clean-well-lighted-place-a-river-runs-through-wisconsins-roots-music-mecca","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=4098","title":{"rendered":"A clean, well-lighted place: A river runs through Wisconsin’s roots music mecca"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Cafe Carpe has been a labor of love, and a family endeavor for co-owners Kitty Welch and Bill Camplin (center) and their offspring, Savannah Camplin (left) and Satchel Paige Welch (top).\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

This is an updated version of an\u00a0article originally published in July, 2010 in YourNews.com, Madison WI edition.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

FORT ATKINSON \u2013 If the carp ain\u2019t bitin\u2019 folk here just start writin\u2019 – and singin\u2019 and pickin\u2019. Actually locals have caught white bass lately in the Rock River, beside the caf\u00e9 named for the infamous scavenger that slouches toward river bottoms. Does the Caf\u00e9 Carpe, a rootsy music mecca, befit its homely name?<\/p>\n

The music club-restaurant sometime scrounges financially but it basks in the harmonious rays of its self-generated musical sunlight. Truth is, the Carpe\u2019s lovingly tended riverside rain garden, situated just below a screened-in porch, symbolizes the place as well as anything \u2013 with its dense growth of eccentric vegetation and a corner configured with small boulders and logs where co-owner Bill Camplin stirs up campfire sing-alongs and the spirit of big sky country.<\/p>\n

The gifted singer-songwriter and his partner Kitty Welch began to feed the region\u2019s cultural wellspring when they bought this house on the Rock in 1985. At the time, the tides were rising for roots music and they\u2019ve rode \u2018em ever since, through hell and high water. The Carpe still holds steady for hard-scrabble blues bashers and song hawkers who trudge the dusty highways of America\u2019s great, broad hobbled back.<\/p>\n

With its weather-beaten wooden sign hanging over the door, the Carpe lies all too easily beneath the suspicion of many locals and regionals. They often can\u2019t sense the level of intensity, ingenuity and engagement radiating from the cozy corner stage in a rigorously enclosed listening space behind the restaurant-bar.<\/p>\n

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Cafe Carpe on Main Street in Fort Atkinson<\/em><\/p>\n

Each Thursday through Saturday, an array of local, regional and traveling storytellers and musicians grace this clean, well-lighted place \u2013 a Heartland beacon where the hearty literary spirit of American vernacular music burns.<\/p>\n

Hemingway is easy enough to imagine at the bar, gradually being stirred by the Carpe\u2019s rough-hewn majesty as a safe haven for musical wordsmiths.<\/p>\n

No doubt, the geographic heart of Wisconsin\u2019s roots music voice breathes from the backroom of the sunlit cafe on 18 S. Water Street, a half a block off Main.<\/p>\n

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Many stripes of musical verifiers here signify a new sort of American Renaissance afoot. No towering Melvilles or Whitmans perhaps, but something else, far more multitudinous, like myriad new hybrids of wildflower appearing along highways and meadows — fresh affirmation of Melville\u2019s fearless confiding: \u201cBelieve me friends, that Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio.\u201d<\/p>\n

He wrote that in his famous American identity-marking essay Hawthorne and his Mosses,<\/em> in July 1850. One hundred and sixty summers later, on the mossy banks of the Rock, you\u2019ll find bards brandishing guitars mandolins and sharply drawn metaphors \u2013 and a few being born, in effect.<\/p>\n

The Carpe has spawned, in its peculiar ways, some superb singer-songwriters: nurturing homebody Camplin, Milwaukeean Peter Mulvey and Jeffrey Foucault who grew up in Fort \u2013 and one year “home-schooled” Camplin’s son Satchel — for beer flow at the Carpe. Mulvey and Foucault have forged impressive touring and recording careers, and an even younger breed of \u201cbaby carpes\u201d: Hayward Williams, Josh Harty, Blake Thomas and Satchel Paige Welch. Foucault will play the Carpe on June 20 (2014).<\/p>\n

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Cafe Carpe was artistically formative for singer-songwriter Jeffrey Foucault, who performs here with his singer-songwriter wife Kris Delmhorst in a club in Pennsylvania. Courtesy www.pollstar.com<\/em><\/p>\n

Once America\u2019s great writers spun vast fields of poetic grass or poured Vesuvius craters of ink into great sea novels. Today they just as often let dazzling lines fly from their lips like hungry fish leaping for a firefly and emerging with a whale of an inspiration \u2013 a curious illusion possibly effected by the refraction of river water and the Carpe\u2019s hearty port wines.<\/p>\n

Their profile slowly rises. The place maintains a vibrant website www.cafecarpe.net<\/a>, with a performance schedule chock full of artist bios by the relentlessly witty Camplin. Accordingly, his own live performances invariably blend tangential drollery; uncanny, falsetto-haunted crooning and impeccable taste in roots songs, especially his Dylan.<\/p>\n

A recent Camplin performance ranged from his poignant character sketch Old Man, Where Are You Sleeping Tonight?<\/em> \u00a0to Townes Van Zandt\u2019s dusty, picaresque Pancho and Lefty<\/em>, where he called up the two young set openers, Harty and Thomas, for a lovely three-part harmony, a scene typifying the Carpe\u2019s nurturing artistic camaraderie.<\/p>\n

The joint also draws diners nightly for trademark homemade pizza and jambalaya. There\u2019s social lubrication available and sometimes a lonely local barfly nursing a tragedy in the bottom of a beer.<\/p>\n

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Cafe Carpe co-owner Bill Camplin is almost as handy in the kitchen as he is on the bandstand.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Reality check: some nights the performers slightly outnumber the listeners. This partly reflects a decades-old cultural assumption \u00a0\u2013 despite Bob Dylan\u2019s long preeminence as America\u2019s greatest living poet \u2013 that \u201cfolk music\u201d is a sentimental strain of button-down kitsch, a la the Kingston Trio. Consider Gene Santoro\u2019s chapter on \u201cthe folk revival\u201d in his excellent 2004 book Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock and Country Music<\/em>. He describes how blues folk rabble-rouser Dave Van Ronk deconstructed Santoro\u2019s musical expectations of folk when he first heard him in a Greenwich Village club in the 60s.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwo things I knew even as I was alternately squirming and transfixed through Van Ronk\u2019s show: he was a hellacious guitar picker, a real \u2013 and therefore in pop and folk circles rare musician and he was the only white guy I \u2018d ever heard whose singing showed that he truly understood Louis Armstrong and Muddy Waters,\u201d wrote Santoro. \u201cWhen he roared he felt like a hurricane blast shaking that little club.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most serious folk musicians have actually strove for Van Ronk\u2019s standard ever since, and many white folksters reveal understanding, in their bones, of the great black fathers of american roots music. Dylan as much as anyone. Today\u2019s folk artists seem to be real musicians for their purposes, while working to raise the bar with good ol\u2019 American competitiveness which nice, pinko communal values still can\u2019t obliterate.<\/p>\n

As Armstrong once said: \u201cAll music is folk music. Horses don\u2019t sing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Camplin has an interesting philosophical perspective on Caf\u00e9 Carpe, which he calls a \u201cfailure\u201d after 24 years of drawing a deep array of singer-songwriters touring which probably wouldn\u2019t have happened if he hadn\u2019t opened the joint when the roots movement first gained traction. Yet he rues the fact he can\u2019t dependably fill the 70-seat music space for traveling performers to make it worth the trip.<\/p>\n

Still, they built it and they did come, and that\u2019s where he admits laboriously fitful success.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere oughta be several places like this in Madison and five in Milwaukee,\u201d Camplin asserts. There\u2019s no comparable venue in Wisconsin, though Milwaukee\u2019s\u00a0Shank Hall and Linneman\u2019s Inn and Madison\u2019s High Noon Saloon and Mother Fool\u2019s Coffeehouse all add roots musics but none with the frequency, or focused quality experience of listening sequestered from the bar or plying waiters.<\/p>\n

Chicago\u2019s fabled Old Town of Folk Music also lends the music but not the intimacy. This remains part of the challenge of this movement, the paucity of small club owners willing to consistently commit to non-commercial, largely acoustic music. But Camplin\u2019s \u201cNo Depression\u201d philosophy copes with disappointment serviceably for now.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m enough of a Republican to think that music shouldn\u2019t depend on grants,\u201d he says wrly.<\/p>\n

Interpret his political colors from his new unrecorded song “The Fat Cats (are takin it easy),”\u00a0part of Camplin’s forthcoming album Understory<\/em>, a rollicking ditty which has had crowds buzzing of late. He\u2019s a small businessman-artist with a big voice and artistic integrity. He expects a standard of excellence and commitment from artists.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think more musicians should try to build rapport with audiences rather than doing one-night stands,\u201d he says. \u201cThe old jazz players knew how to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cultural time may be on Camplin\u2019s side, to see renovated small-town venues like the Stoughton Opera House, which a few years ago developed a full season of largely roots-style performance events that has given Madison\u2019s Overture Center a run for its money. The names Stoughton has hosted recently positively glitter: Dr. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys, The Del McCoury Band, Iris Dement, Richard Thompson, Arlo Guthrie, Richie Havens, The Cowboy Junkies, Rickie Lee Jones, John Sebastian, Leo Kottke, Dan Tyminski, the Smothers Brothers and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. Gillian Welch plays at Stoughton on July 3 (2014) in a sold-out show.<\/p>\n

The fabulously refurbished opera house has whizzed past Overture and the Wisconsin Union Theater as the hippest fancy night out in South-central Wisconsin. The revered Stanley and Tyminski \u2013 who dubbed actor George Clooney\u2019s singing on the soundtrack to O Brother Where Art Though Thou?<\/em> were central to the success of that Coen Brothers\u2019 movie, which singlehandedly sparked the bluegrass revival in 2000. Frankly, roots music lovers never had it so good.<\/p>\n

This all bodes well for Fort Atkinson’s nobly bottom-feeding river cafe, but not if people simply opt for chandelier shows and neglect the roadhouses that begat each of those big names. Camplin and Welch have persevered with alt-business savvy. Camplin himself is almost as skilled in the Carpe\u2019s kitchen and spent all of a recent Saturday garbed in a white chef\u2019s frock, as he sliced fixings for a scrumptious (I attest) jambalaya and dragged huge, smoking-hot pans of chow out of the ovens.<\/p>\n

Veggie chopping is dicey work for a guitarist, he admits. A few Camplin fingertips may have nestled in among the jambalaya ham bits over the years, he half-jokes. The restaurant also has a stable of able cooks, including Welch, and the couple has succeeded well enough to extensively remodel their home above the venue, and add the faintly funky luxuries of a riverfront patio and rain garden.<\/p>\n

Their son Satchel Paige Welch, embodies the new breed of musical bard. His name, from the legendary black baseball hurler, bespeaks Camplin\u2019s passion for the American pastime, particularly its dusky heroes like Henry Aaron, who\u2019ll always be a Milwaukee<\/em> Brave in these parts.<\/p>\n

Maybe Paige will be the next Shakespeare born on the banks of an American river. Okay, he was two when his parents moved to Fort Atkinson but Rock River life and culture runs in Satchel\u2019s currents.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s patiently cultivating his muse and craft, writing a perfect guitar riff for a Foucault refrain, adding his vocals, bass and production skills to his father\u2019s latest CD and building on the promise of his debut CD at age 18.<\/p>\n

This thoughtful, slightly angst-ridden young man bridles at those who persist in asking why he\u2019s still at home, what he\u2019s up to. (He’s since moved to Nashville and is music producing, including his dad’s upcoming CD) His situation mirrors others of a generation that, in hard economic times, has begun investigating older forms by making the past their own, like his friend Alex Ramsey of the excellent alt-country folk band The Pines, who also lives at home biding his talent. Ramsey\u2019s father Bo added quietly dazzling resonator guitar to Foucault\u2019s Ghost Repeater<\/em> CD.<\/p>\n

These are also children of better-know entities like the 30-year-old public television phenomenon Austin City Limits<\/em>, the mushrooming annual South by Southwest music conference, also in Austin, Texas, a profusion of roots music festivals nationwide and the Americana Music Association.<\/p>\n

Old Crow Medicine Show, Gillian Welch, Norah Jones, Justin Townes Earle, Hayes Carll, Josh Ritter, Tift Merritt, Diana Jones and recent Oscar-winner Ryan Bingham are a few of the big young talents on the roots scene. Such young talent represents the fresh warm crust of a deep dish pie of performing talent many years in the baking, and brimming with the mature fruit of previous Carpe performers, including Peter and Lou Berryman, Greg Brown, Rory Block, Ronny Cox (a singer songwriter best known as a film actor (Deliverance, Bound for Glory<\/em>), Cliff Eberhardt, Ramblin\u2019 Jack Elliot, Sleepy LaBeef, Country Joe McDonald, Geoff Muldaur, Utah Phillips, Jim Post, John Renbourn, Dave Van Ronk, Claudia Schmidt, John Stewart, Eric Taylor, Tony Trischka, Dar Williams, Robin and Linda Williams, among others. The Carpe has also hosted a reading by legendary author Ursula K. LeGuin and a political stump speech by legendary songwriter Carole King.<\/p>\n

But don\u2019t sons and daughters typically reject parent\u2019s values and aesthetics? In fact, a whole generation of musical artists is asserting identity on their own roots-related terms, shaping new styles from re-thatched sprigs of the past. Such identity factors may account for more than any rekindling of the idealism their parents professed to change the world with, Paige says.<\/p>\n

As he puts it: \u201cI\u2019m trying to globalize.\u201d Then you hear his own generational idealism, sans transformative notions: \u201cWhy speak to one culture when you can speak to all cultures? If I\u2019ve developed my style or voice right, it\u2019s really important that I communicate with an 80-year-old as much as I do to an 18-year-old.\u201d He slightly brings to mind the ambitiously the real, old Satchel Paige, who made America love him on his own terms, mythical or not.<\/p>\n

In The Roots of Romanticism,<\/em> philosopher Isaiah Berlin wrote that the profoundly influential Germanic Romantic movement, which championed folk music and dance, asserted that culture involves \u201can infinite striving forward on the part of reality.\u201d Folk art communicated the growth of human groups for which \u201corganic, botanical and other biological metaphors were more suitable\u201d than \u201cchemical and mathematical metaphors of 17th<\/sup> century French popularizers of science.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTruth is like a pearl,\u201d Foucault sings in the song\u00a0City Flower.<\/em> Increasingly creative young Americans like Satchel Paige, following his namesake, aim for the outside corner of destiny, mixing pearls with their knuckleballs.<\/p>\n

_________________<\/p>\n

Unless otherwise indicated, all photos by Kevin Lynch<\/em><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Highway 61 Revisited: The Tangled Roots of American Jazz, Blues, Rock and Country Music<\/em>. Gene Santoro, Oxford University Press 1994 p 104<\/li>\n
  2. The Roots of Romanticism<\/em> Isaiah Berlin, Princeton University Press, 1999, p 101<\/li>\n
  3. Ibid pp. <\/em>59-61.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Cafe Carpe has been a labor of love, and a family endeavor for co-owners Kitty Welch and Bill Camplin (center) and their offspring, Savannah Camplin (left) and Satchel Paige Welch (top).\u00a0 This is an updated version of an\u00a0article originally published … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-146","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4098"}],"version-history":[{"count":31,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4168,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4098\/revisions\/4168"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}