The Seed and the Story: Channeling the Tradition of Gleaning

Gleaned potatoes. Photo from the Society of Saint Andrew.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

As the days grow longer and the afternoons warmer, Arkansas’s agricultural fields are beginning to grow and produce food for our tables.  This week’s column focuses on the ages-old tradition of crop gleaning and the role it can play in today’s society.

First, some background information.  A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to visit with Representative Kathy Webb, the recently named director of Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance.  With a 27.6% poverty rate throughout the state, Arkansas ranks six points above the national average.  According to a recent USDA survey, Arkansas is third in the nation for instances of food insecurity, meaning that a significant number of Arkansans, especially vulnerable populations like children and the elderly, are unsure where their next meal will come from. Access to fresh fruits and vegetables are especially difficult, as these tend to be some of the most expensive items in the grocery store.  In some areas, it can be hard to find fresh food stocked in the stores whatsoever.  The Hunger Alliance addresses the multiple layers of poverty-based hunger through several channels, including the ancient tradition gleaning.

Gleaning refers to act of collecting any leftover crops from the fields after it has been commercially harvested or collecting crops from fields where it is no longer economically profitable to harvest, due to factors such as low market prices. In some studies it is estimated that around 40% of the crops are wasted after a commercial harvest, withering in the field.  Through the process of gleaning, these fresh foods are gathered and then transported via food banks and distributed to the hungry, providing people with nutrient-rich food and preventing the needless waste of crops rotting on the vine.

The concept dates back thousands of years, with mention of this practice documented extensively in both the Bible and the Quran.  Typically gleaning is referred to as leaving the edges of the field un-harvested for the needy, travelers, and widows. Here’s an oft-quoted verse from Leviticus 23: 22 regarding the practice in Jewish society: “When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  Leave them for the poor and the alien.”  Drawing from its Biblical roots, this practice was also common in Europe throughout the 18^th and 19^th century and provided countless peasants with food to sustain their families.

Here in Arkansas, since the summer of 2008, the Arkansas Hunger Alliance has worked in partnership with the Society of Saint Andrew, a national non profit whose mission is to provide hunger relief and save excesses fresh produce to donate to critical feeding agencies.  To make gleaning effective, the agency relies on volunteers—everyday people, church groups, and organizations who are willing to denote their time to gather the crops for distribution.  In recent years they’ve also partnered with the Department of Corrections, which has increased the gleaning yields exponentially.  The year before they began working with the Department of Correction they gleaned 289,000 pounds of food, says Michelle Shope of the Arkansas Hunger Alliance.  The following year, with the help of the Corrections Maintenance Crew, 800,000 pounds were gathered.   With the help of both volunteers and the Department of Corrections, they’ve gathered 1.9 million pounds of food in the past four years. Their goal is to reach six million pounds a year, helping to eradicate childhood hunger.

If you or your church or community group is interested in taking part in this ancient tradition of gleaning, you can contact Michelle Shope at 501-399-9999 or mshope@arhungeralliance.org.  If you’re a farmer and want to have your field gleaned, contact the Society of Saint Andrew at 1-800-333-4597 or visit them online at www.endhunger.org.

Do you take part in the tradition of gleaning?  What are some historic examples of this practice here in the river valley?  I’d love to hear about them.

The Seed and the Story: Visiting Decoration Days: A Pilgrimage to Arkansas from California

Photo from Karen Alexander-Stoeckel of her Grandma, Ocie Hance-Alexander (in blue dress) with her brothers and sisters at the gravesites of their parents, Greeny and Dora Hance. Needmore Cemetery, Arkansas.

Beginning this weekend people throughout the area will engage in the decades old tradition of Decoration Days, placing flowers on the graves of their loved ones and transforming the cemeteries into vibrant landscapes of color.  The very first column, which ran in May of last year, was about this tradition and how it can connect families and communities across generations, reminding us that, as long as we keep their stories alive, the dead are always with us.

I asked others to share their stories and a woman here in Arkansas mailed the column to her niece, Karen Alexander-Stoeckel in Cambira, California.  This past week Karen contacted me by email to share her beautiful story, and she said I could share it with you all.

Her father Virgil “Odell” Alexander was born in Casa in 1929 to Robert Alexander and Ocie Hance-Alexander, and as a child he “loved to hunt in the hills with his coonhounds and bring wildlife home to tame as pets.”  At the age of five, he picked cotton to supplement the family’s income, later working in a lumber mill near Petit Jean. In 1953 he moved to California where he began work in the dairy business. He and his wife had five sons and one daughter, Karen.   Here is how she describes her relationship to Decoration Days:

My brothers and I were born and raised in California and Arkansas seemed like a distant planet to us.  The stories my daddy shared with us were rich with lessons he had learned and the love of his Hance and Alexander family.  As children, we only made a few trips back east to visit our grandparents because Daddy’s work schedule was so demanding.  I remember the well on the back porch of Grandma’s house and how cold and sweet the water was.  The fireflies in her front yard were a sight I’ve never seen anywhere else. 

The letters from home were precious to my daddy.  He prized the photos that his mama would send every year that were taken on Decoration Day at the Needmore Cemetery.  Photos of relatives in their Sunday best and women wearing corsages , standing or sitting near grave sites that were splendid with flowers.  As a child I did not understand my daddy’s fondness for these pictures of grave sites and was too young to appreciate the culture they derived from.

Grandma and Grandpa are gone now and so are the letters and photos from home on Decoration Day.  The relatives who gathered in those old pictures are also gone or soon will be and the love of my life, my daddy, passed away last October.  My brothers and I are having a memorial service for him here in California and then I will be bringing his ashes home to Arkansas where he requested they be laid to rest.

When I come to Arkansas, I will be attending my very first Decoration Day at Needmore Cemetery and words cannot express how emotional I feel about being near so many of my family laid to rest there.  Because of the oral history my daddy passed down to his children, I will not merely be reading names on headstones but remembering that my great-great grandfather, John Henry Alexander was remembered as being able to “sit a good horse” and walked every day down to the general store with the aid of his cane to enjoy talking, whittling, chewing tobacco and in general passing the time of day.  I have gathered bouquets of Lavender from my back yard and I have them drying to take with me to Needmore Cemetery to be lain in honor and respect to all those who lived before and are now rejoicing with my daddy.

I’m bringing my camera too.  Like my dear grandmother of years past, I intend to share and cherish these photos with my family in California. My daddy’s legacy of home and family lives on through my nine year old granddaughter who recently stated that if given any place in the world to visit, she chose Arkansas where my Papa is buried.

She signed the email, “Looking forward to visiting your wonderful state and celebrating Decoration Day soon.” What’s your Decoration Day story?  What does the tradition mean to you?  I’d love to hear from you, see your photos, and share your stories with readers.  And I am so honored Karen allowed me share her beautiful story here.

The Seed and the Story: Paths of Tradition Bearing

Delegates from the Kentucky Remembers! camps. 2007. Photo by author.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

I recently mentioned the online folklife and oral history class I’ve been teaching and that I’m a big believer that learning should always be multi-directional. Teachers come to class with knowledge and years of study, but engaged students come with open minds, questions, and curiosity, a form of wisdom that is truly under-recognized in our society. This willingness to ask questions and to seek out a greater understanding not only helps students think more deeply about the world around them, but it also encourages the teacher to view their work in new ways. Everyone learns together.

I first noticed this when working with the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights back in 2007. I was the staff oral historian for the Kentucky Remembers! Camps where I helped students prepare to interview community members about the civil rights movement in Kentucky. Our goal was to document some of the lesser-known figures in the movement, the every day people who fought, and are still fighting, for equality. I was there to helps the student do research, conduct interviews, and formulate in-depth questions. I soon discovered, however, that the students were teaching me. Their willingness to be inquisitive, their desire to understand more about their communities, and their willingness to connect the stories of the past with the realities of today helped me to rethink my role as a teacher. And at the end of the camps when I sat down and listened to their interviews with community elders, I began to realize that there’s nothing quite as powerful as the young and the old speaking together.

This is all to say, I’m deeply appreciative of what my students bring to the table. So I want to share one example from my current class. The students have been reading texts and watching videos about various cultural traditions including Laotian weaving, African American gospel, and Ozark Balladry. I’ve asked them to think about the concept of tradition bearers, of being someone in their community who carries traditions from one generation to the next. In the film A Singing Stream, a film by Tom Davenport about African American gospel singing traditions in a North Carolina family, the matriarch of the family, Mrs. Landis, isn’t one of the main singers. But she sees to it that her sons learn to sing, providing them encouragement, surrounding them with singers, and giving them time and space to soak it all in. As one of my students, Jeffrey noted, “It’s her tradition to maintain the tradition.”

His phrase stuck with me. So often people tell me they have nothing to pass down. They can’t cook; they don’t garden; they can’t sew. They’re not tradition bearers, they conclude. Of course, that’s never true. We all have skills worth passing down. That aside, the important point here is that Mrs. Landis didn’t have to be a singer to be a tradition bearer. She opened up her home and assured her sons access to the tradition. We may not all be excellent quilters or know how to speak the language of our foremothers and fathers. But that doesn’t mean we can’t support those who do, partially by making sure the young people in our society gain exposure. The tradition bearers can only carry it on if we help them and the young people won’t know if we don’t tell them. That’s something we can all do.

Please don’t forget about the garden book we’re working on! More information here and here. 

Yarnbombing in downtown Little Rock.

Mother and daughter yarn bomb together.

Yesterday as part of the Arkansas Literary Fest in Little Rock several people gathered to yarn bomb the area around the river market library and the youth section of the library itself.  Sometimes called knit graffiti, yarn bombing involves taking knitted objects and decorating typically urban landscapes, an attempt to add beauty and color to the sometimes inorganic city landscape.   (You can read the Art of the Rural post envisioning yarn bombing in rural areas by clicking here).  It’s important to also note that these activities are not wasteful, utalyzing scrap afghans and other knitted objects that were gathering dust somewhere in a back closet.  Because they’re made from natural fibers they’ll dry out and withstand the elements for some time.

We started out with a small group but pretty soon many passersby—both children and adults— joined in on the fun. By the end of the afternoon yarn poms hung from the branches alongside the spring flowers while formerly discarded knits enveloped tree limbs and park benches.

This event was held in conjunction with a talk by Gale Zucker, co-author and photographer for the book Craft Activism: People, Ideas, and Projects from the New Community of Handmade and How You Can Join In.  Yarn bombing is just one of many craft activist approaches detailed in her research.   She  and co-author Joan Tapper also highlight others who might be familiar to readers including Carolyn Mazloomi and the Women of Color Quilter’s Network, Virginia Fleck and her mandalas made from recycled shopping bags, and the Red Scarf Project, which provides scarves to students who were a part of the foster care system.  The book is a compilation of ideas, crafter profiles, and patterns for those who want to join in on the action.

I had a chance to speak with Gale about her research, as well as several others who either attended the event or simply got drawn into the bombing as passers by.   I’ll be posting a radio story featuring their comments sometime this upcoming week.  Until then, here are a few photos from the day.

Besides the great conversations we had with Gayle, it was wonderful to see how many passersby soon began to join in, picking up scrap knitting squares and sewing them onto the trees, park benches, and shrubs. As intended, a yarn bomb sparks conversation between strangers, leads to discussions about the nature of handmade, and helps us all notice our surroundings.  I even found a home for one of my fingerless glove prototypes, which now graces the trunk of a tree.  And my twin boys got their stroller yarn bombed, for sure one of the highlights of their day!

Were you at the yarn bombing or want to get involved in Little Rock yarn bombing?  Let’s discuss and get together with others who want to do the same.

Poms hanging from the trees

Passersby join in and help.

Partice, one of the main organizers, bombs a tree trunk.

Donated yarn pieces for the bombing.

A truly intergenerational activity.

Bombing the park bench.

The young ladies made this wonderful collection. Gale Zucker in the background.

You know you love granny squares!

The yarn blended in with the flowers for a magical look.

One of the youth library workers joins in to help with the sewing on of the flowers.

Mother and daughter.

The Seed and the Story: ARVAC and VISTA, Folk arts and the War on Poverty in Arkansas.

Click on the photo to connect to ordering info via Amazon.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

Alongside researching the history of Chickalah and Harkey’s Valley, I’ve been reading In Service to America: A History of Vista in Arkansas 1965-1985.  Written by Marvin Schwartz, this 1988 publication traces the VISTA organization throughout the state.   I’ve been particularly interested in the work of this organization in central Arkansas, including the creation of a craft co-op, which served both Yell and Pope Counties.

Created in 1965, VISTA was an outgrowth of President Johnson’s War on Poverty and Economic Opportunity Act of 1964.  This national legislation sought to provide lasting and locally based solutions to struggling communities.  Operating much like a domestic version of the Peace Corp, volunteers in the VISTA program received a subsistence wage and lived in economically poor areas where they worked in partnership with community members to generate economic initiatives and help residents gain access to health care and adequate food.  VISTA volunteers, many of them college age, worked to help create grassroots programs which focused on local needs, thus making each VISTA program unique to its region.

In 1960 approximately 40% of the population in the river valley was living below the poverty line.  Illiteracy, inadequate housing, and unemployment were rampant.  One of the first VISTA programs in the nation was the Yell County Economic Opportunity Program, a pilot recipient of an OEA grant.  The organization was soon absorbed into its larger sister organization, ARVAC (Arkansas River Valley Area Council), which hosted numerous national and local volunteers.   ARVAC formed programs such as the Housing Development Corporation, an organization utilizing the rural tradition of barn raising to help low income families secure homes, and ARVAC Rural Folkcrafts, a network which provided a market for rural quilters, white oak basket makers, seamstresses, and other artisans, allowing them to sell their traditional wares and earn a living for their families. Another organization, Counseling Associates (formerly known as ARVAC Community Mental Health Program), began under the ARVAC VISTA program and operates independently today.

In its early days VISTA brought in volunteers from around the nation, but in later years became more focused on long-term, locally based volunteers, which helped the programs thrive.   From the beginning, the goal of VISTA programs was to become self-sufficient. ARVAC stuck around and quickly became a model of successful VISTA organizing.   ARVAC’s craft co-op, which began in 1975, continued throughout the 1980s, as did housing initiative, which later became known as Universal, INC.

Schwartz’s book features interviews with a few river valley VISTA workers, including the late Myrtle Cress who worked in Ola and Betty Burnett who organized a housing co-op in Dardanelle.  It also highlights the work of Lou Vitale who was instrumental in founding the crafts co-op. I’d love to learn more about the creation of these initiatives, how people felt about the work, the craftspeople who sold at the co-op, and the use of the barn raising tradition in area housing initiatives.   Were you affiliated with VISTA?  Did you or someone in your family sell crafts at the co-op?  Perhaps your house was built utilizing the barn raising tradition?  I’d love to hear more.   An extra special thanks to Mike Luster of the Arkansas Folklife Program for introducing me to this book.

Also please don’t forget we’re still working on compiling stories of plants and seeds for our book on stories and gardening in the area.  We’d love to include your story!  To learn more visit us here.  To read a little bit about the backstory of the garden book read this column.

The Seed and the Story Column: Garden Stories Book and McElroy House.

Wood sorrel from my grandmother's house.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading.

As the days grow (unseasonably) warmer, the wood sorrel in my front yard is beginning to bloom.  Often called false shamrocks, wood sorrel comes in hundreds of varieties and is sometimes considered a weed.  Sometimes referred to as Oxalis, the little pink or yellow flowers shoot up from the three-leaf clover-like base of the plant.  In the variety I have, the plants grow in fat, round clumps.  My plant comes from a cutting of a plant that once grew along the walkway leading to my grandparent’s house on Second Street in downtown Dardanelle.  After they died my mother dug up some of the roots and planted them in her yard.  After she died I dug some up and planted them in mine.  When I moved to Little Rock last year, I dug some up again and took them with us to our new home where they now grow along our walkway leading up to the red front porch.  Come to find out, as one of my cousins informed me this week, the plant originally grew in my great grandmother’s yard, long before I was ever born. And who knows.  Maybe she dug it up from her own mother’s yard in Cardon Bottoms. We invest so much memory and meaning in our plants.

For a few years now I’ve become increasingly interested in the way plants carry our stories, and I’m especially interested in how gardens play a role in this part of Arkansas.  Seeds passed down through families often bare the name of family members or geographical locations.  Recent immigrants bring with them seeds from home, their gardens a marriage between a former home and a new one.  And if you take a walk though just about any flower garden in the area, the gardener will likely tell you stories of friends or relatives who once gave them a cutting of the lilac bush or the four o’clocks which now cover their yard.   Last year I wrote a piece about my grandmother’s love for irises and soon discovered just how many other people had similar connections to the plant, family members treasuring both the bulbs and stories passed down through the years.  You can learn a lot about people, I’ve discovered, by asking them about their plants.

Along with the help of a few other people, I’m working toward the creation of the McElroy House: Center for Folklife, Oral History and Community Action, an intergenerational and inter-cultural organization working to document and discuss folklife and oral history in our region. Gardening is a tradition that’s alive and well in our area and it transcends racial, geographic, even linguistic, boundaries.  Our first project for the Center is putting together a publication about the stories behind plants and gardens in the river valley and Yell County areas.  Gardening knowledge is instrumental as is seed saving, and thankfully other groups and publications are filling this need.  What we hope to do with this project is focus on the stories behind the plants and the relationship between the gardener and their gardens. So, do you have a plant or plants that carry special meaning, perhaps a link to past generations?  If you’re new to the area, have you brought seeds or cuttings with you from your home state or home country?  Why are these plants important to you and what meaning does the garden hold for you? After all, gardening can be hard and is a labor of love. We’d like to hear why you love it and what brings you back to it year after year. It doesn’t matter if you’re a seasoned gardener or someone’s whose just started.  It’s your stories we want to hear.   Please help us spread the word.  If you know of a gardener who you think should be included in this book, please let us know.

“The Many Variations of the Arkansas Tattoo” in the Arkansas Times

Tesuansey Link. Photo by Brian Chilson of the Arkansas Times. Read the article to see more photos.

An article about the Us Tattooed Kids:  Arkansas Project came out in the Arkansas Times today.  Below you’ll find the first few paragraphs. Follow the “read more” link to read the entire article via the Arkansas Times site.

The next step in this project will be working toward a radio piece and a hardback book….and possibly more projects.

You can help us move the project forward by submitting your Arkansas tattoo photo and story and joining the conversation at the project’s facebook page here.

For at least a decade now, Arkansans — both native-born and transplants — have been choosing to mark their bodies with representations of the Natural State. Razorback tattoos have long been popular, but these Arkansas tattoos are more topographical, a marker of geography and a symbol of home. They range from simple outlines with a star or heart marking a hometown to ornate designs involving a birdhouse, a cotton plant or an area code.

For Cheyenne Matthews, co-host of the “Shoog Radio” show on 88.3 FM KABF, it’s the state Capitol, surrounded by stylized clouds and the word “Arkansas” inside a ribbon at the building’s base. The design, which graces her forearm, is part of a series of images created by Caleb Pritchett of Electric Heart Tattoos in Little Rock to help raise money for the show. “Everything we play and do is Arkansas-based,” Matthews said. “It’s a grassroots movement towards Arkansas stuff in general, events and music.”

Anthony Buckaloo and artist, Scott Diffee, the Parlor in Rose City. Photo by Brian Chilson.

Continue reading the story at the Arkansas Times here:

Click here to continue reading at the Arkansas Times site.   

The Seed and the Story: Learning From Students and Folkstreams films

The Landis family. From the film, A Singing Stream. Image from Davenport Films.

The Seed and the Story is a weekly column exploring folklife, sustainability, oral history, human rights,and community in Yell County, Arkansas.   The column is published in the Post Dispatch and is syndicated in the Courier.  Please remember to support your local paper and independent media!  The Seed and the Story column is just of many features you can find on the Boiled Down Juice.  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter.  If you enjoy our posts, please tell a friend. And thanks for reading!

I’ve had two exiting developments recently. I recently found out this column will be running every week rather than every other week! Thanks so much for your support.  I’m looking forward to more opportunities to learn from readers about this area’s history and its present day, and I’ll be working toward making this column more interactive, featuring more voices from our diverse and culturally rich community.

Secondly, this past week I began teaching an online class at Arkansas Tech entitled “Folklife and Oral History.”  I’m thoroughly impressed with my students and their level of engagement.  I’m a firm believer that the best part of teaching isn’t sharing your own knowledge but rather learning from the students themselves.  Their questions require me to think more deeply about the readings, and their observations are opening my eyes to new ways of conceptualizing the importance of traditions, music, and the role of tradition bearers (a phrase folklorists use for people who carry on traditions) in a community.  Plus, they’re teaching me about their own family and community traditions, which I find endlessly fascinating.

This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to teach a subject like folklife and oral history—a subject that dwells heavily on the past and its role in the present day—in such a modern, online format. I’ll be the first to say that I deeply appreciate the lines of communication the Internet provides.  It can be a tool for greater democracy and a way to reestablish connections lost over the miles or years.  Yet I feel strongly that younger generations could use more exposure to a life a bit more unplugged.  Funny how online resources can actually introduce students to traditions that are decades, even centuries, old. So last week I had the students watch a few films via Folkstreams, an Internet site housing hundreds of folklife films.

To give them an introduction to traditional singing styles I chose two films: A Singing Stream: A Black Family Chronicle produced by Tom Davenport and Alemda Riddle:  Let’s Talk About Singing produced by George West. The first film explores traditional African American gospel music as it is passed down in the Landis family from rural North Carolina.  The film highlights how music plays a key role in the family’s fight for civil rights and provides an example of how a study of traditional music opens a window into family, political, and community histories.  This musical link to the past provides a source of strength to fight for a more just future.

The second film profiles Ozark ballad singer Alemda Riddle, a woman who lived her entire life near Greers Ferry, Arkansas.  The well-known ballad Hunter, John Quincy Wolfe, met her in 1952, and began recording her songs, some which dated back to the 16^th century.  Riddle became a hero of the folk revival and recorded and traveled extensively.  The songs she was singing may have been hundreds of years old, but her role as a widow traveling the country made her quite a radical figure in her day and age.

Many of the students noted how this traditional music, centuries old, can provide a source of strength for the present day and how the music was a tie linking family members across generations and miles. As I watched the two films together, I began to notice how each individual, in their own unique way, held on to the past with one hand while reaching out for the future with the other. And ultimately that’s what a healthy tradition is about: a link to the past that builds a bridge to a better future.  You can watch these, and countless other folklife films, at www.folkstreams.net.  I love hearing stories and traditions from readers.   Or send me a letter with your stories.  I especially love those.

Monday Music: Damien Jurado “Arkansas.”

This video has been making the rounds among Jurado’s Arkansas fans, both expat and current residents.  I’d love to hear your take on this song and video from his most recent album, Saint Bartlett. 

I love Damien Jurado, even though it’s been a few years since I’ve really listened to his music.   The song is certainly catchy , exploring the idea of Arkansas, as Stereogum said, as both a place and idea.  You’ve got your requisite guns, dead body, PBR cans, dirt roads, wilderness, and creepy, white Ozarky-Appalachiany mountain guy.

I usually like Jurado’s ongoing dialog with myth, music, and place.  But I can’t decide if he’s using the stereotypes in the video to try to ask deeper questions about place (and self) or if he’s playing with the images as, well, images.

What do you think?

Friday Video: Almeda Riddle: Now Let’s Talk About Singing.

From the Arkansas Encyclopedia

This past week I had my students watch a few films from the wonderful resource, Folkstreams, an internet site hosting hundreds of folklife films.  One of the films we watched was Almeda Riddle: Now Let’s Talk About Singing.  The film was produced by George West in 1985.

It had been a few years since I’d seen the film, and after watching again I discovered how many layers can be found in this story.  There are underlying discussions about the role of music and memory, tradition and future, even tradition and tradition bearer.  In case you are unfamiliar with ballad singer, Almeda Riddle, here’s a short description of the fim from the Folkstreams site:

Almeda Riddle was born in 1898, near Greer’s Ferry, Arkansas and lived her entire life in that area. Her father was a fiddler, a singer, and a teacher of shaped-note singing. The church she attended throughout her life used unaccompanied singing and this practice reinforced her use of traditional unaccompanied style as a ballad singer.

This video tells how and where Almeda Riddle began her 10 year stint of singing old ballads all over the country. In an informal manner, folk musician Starr Mitchell chats with Riddle about her singing tours and her commitment to preserving the past for the future. The video was filmed two years before Almeda’s death in 1986.

Almeda was “discovered” by John Quincy Wolfe, a professor at Arkansas (now Lyon) College who brought her to the attention of Alan Lomax, John Lomax’s son. Alan had, by this time, taken up the work his father had begun and was the best known collector of American traditional music. Usually called Granny Riddle, Almeda traveled to such places as Harvard and the Newport Folk Festival to sing, and she left behind an extensive body of recorded traditional songs.

More than eighty field recordings of Almeda Riddle can be heard, along with scores by other Arkansas singers, on the website “The John Quincy Wolfe Collection: Ozark Folksongs”.

Due to copyright  laws I can not embed the video here.  Click here to stream the video from the Folkstreams site.  

To learn more about Almeda, read her entry at the Arkansas Encyclopedia here.