Folklorists in the South Retreat

I’m honored and excited to be speaking this weekend at the Folklorists in the South retreat in Memphis, Tennessee.  Sponsored by South Arts, this retreat brings together folklorists and other cultural workers from both the academic and public sectors for a weekend of discussions, panels, networking, and more. The event will also include updates from national partners, media presentations, concerts, and field trips.

I’ll be spekaing Sunday morning on a panel about Creative Economies and the Media Arts alongside Folklorist and BBC radio producer Rachel Hopkin and Steve Grauberger, producer of the Alabama Arts Radio series with of the Alabama Folklife Program.  I will discuss my work with media as a participatory action research tool, how media can help build and sustain community, and the role different aspects of media can play in inter-generational outreach and partnerships.  I’ll also touch on my work with the McElroy House and the role interactive media plays as both an organizing tool and an aspect of educational programing.

Other panels will include updates from National Endowment for the Arts, the American Folklife Center, and the NASSA Folk Arts Peer Group.  There will also be sessions detailing research and the creative economies, programing and creative economies, and a visit and tour with Levon Williams, curator with Stax Records.

I’m looking forward to learning from my peers and discovering new ways of working in the south.  I’m also very excited to have this opportunity to discuss the Boiled Down Juice, the McElroy House, and work happening in central Arkansas.  I hope to see you there!

“Group Singalongs Provide Comfort For a Livelihood Lost”: Relearning Songs Lost During a Stroke.

From NPR. Toelken is second from right.

This wonderful audio piece has been making the rounds in the folklore world this week.  Produced by Hal Cannon of the Western Folklife Center for the What’s in a Song series, the audio essay features folklorist Barre Toelken discussing how he’s rediscovering some of the songs he lost after his stroke.  From NPR:

For the past several years, a group of friends has gathered every week in the living room of a suburban home in Logan, Utah, to sing long-forgotten songs. It’s a fun way to spend the evening, but it’s also therapy for a dear friend.

Until several years ago, Barre Toelken was a folklorist at Utah State University. He’d spent much of his life preserving sea shanties and other antique songs, but then he had a stroke and was forced to retire.

“I used to know 800 songs,” Toelken says. “I had this stroke, and I had none of these songs left in my head. None of them were left.”

But, Toelken says, he soon discovered that, with a little positive reinforcement, he could remember some of the forgotten music after all.

“A little bit at a time, I realized I still had the songs in my head,” he says. “So now I meet with this group of friends once a week a week, and we sing.

“This group doesn’t use any musical instruments, because I can’t play the guitar since the stroke hit me,” Toelken says. “And they did that as a sign of respect, I think. But they’ve all said how much they’ve learned about the songs since they quit using the guitar because instead of concentrating on their hand moving, they have to concentrate on the words.”

You can listen to the audio by clicking here.

Musical Migrants Radio Series: Jesse Lee Jones and Yoko Noge

Yoko Noge. From Yoko Noge.com

You can follow the Boiled Down Juice online via Twitter or Facebook.  You might also be interested in the newly forming McElroy House: Organization for Folklife, Oral History, and Community Action.  If you know of a topic we should cover, please contact us with your ideas!  Thanks for reading! 

I’m really excited about today’s post, a look at the The Musical Migrant radio series now airing on the BBC in partnership with Falling Tree Productions.  So often we feature pieces about artists and activists who rediscover their roots.  But sometimes people feel more at home in a place  far away from where they were born.  This series sheds some light on this complex topic and provides an intimate look both at the successes and vulnerabilities of a few individuals who have chosen this path.  This post also features a short write-up from the series’ producer, who is also a bit of a musical migrant.

So today we’ll feature two pieces from the series, two musicians who have moved to other countries in search of a deeper connection with the music they love.   Produced by independent radio producer  and Western Kentucky University Folk Studies graduate student Rachel Hopkin, these pieces give us a behind-the-scenes look at how these individuals came to find a sense of belonging in music  so different from the styles of their homelands.

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“Words As The Way To Freedom:” Jimmy Santiago Baca on Making Contact Radio Progam

From Poetrypoetry.com

Originally conducted in 2009 by Progressive editor Matthew Rothschild, this interview with Jimmy Santiago Baco aired two months ago on the Making Contact radio program.

“Words as the Way to Freedom” explores Baca’s discovery of poetry while serving time in an Arizona prison for drug possession.  He discusses how poetry changed the way he saw beauty, the trans-formative potential of discovering heritage, his experience writing a poem for the mother of an illiterate member of the Aryan Brotherhood, and what made him decide to return to his home community to help others find freedom through language and expression.

For a little back story on Baca here is an overview from his bio page.  (You can read the bio in its entirety by clicking here).

Instead of becoming a hardened criminal, he emerged from prison a writer. Baca sent three of his poems to Denise Levertov, the poetry editor of Mother Jones.  The poems were published and became part of  Immigrants in Our Own Land,  published in 1979, the year he was released from prison. He earned his GED later that same year. He is the winner of the Pushcart Prize, the American Book Award, the International Hispanic Heritage Award and for his memoir A Place to Stand the prestigious International Award. In 2006 he won the Cornelius P. Turner Award. The national award recognizes one GED graduate a year who has made outstanding contributions to society in education, justice, health, public service and social welfare. 

Baca has devoted his post-prison life to writing and teaching others who are overcoming hardship. His themes include American Southwest barrios, addiction, injustice, education, community, love and beyond. He has conducted hundreds of writing workshops in prisons, community centers, libraries, and universities throughout the country.   

You can learn more, find more links, and read more poems of Baca’s by visiting his homepage at http://jimmysantiagobaca.com/

Here’s the interview with Matthew Rothschild as aired on Making Contact this past November.

Friday Video: Revisiting Sufjan Stevens “The Great God Bird” and audio from Brinkley, Arkansas

From NPR

This week’s Friday video is more of a Friday audio piece.  And it’s an old one, originally published in 2005.   Sufjan Steven’s “The Lord God Bird,” popped up into my playlist yesterday, and every time that happens I always wind up hitting repeat at least three times.  Sometimes more like seven.

Below is an audio clip from Youtube for the song. There’s another video that was produced for the song which you can watch here, but I don’t feel that the video, in any way, captures the mystery or the layers of the song. So I prefer this one with the single image.

For those new to the song or the story, Sufjan Stevens wrote the song as part of an audio piece for NPR back in 2005 exploring the town of Brinkley, Arkansas .  Here’s the back story on the story and the radio piece from NPR:

Singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens has a lofty goal: exploring each of the 50 states in song. He’s already released a critically acclaimed full-length CD simply called Michigan. His latest honors the people, places and history of Illinois.

Independent radio producers Dan Collison and Elizabeth Meister were curious about how Stevens writes his songs, which, much like their own work, are filled with stories of places and people. So, they introduced Stevens to the Arkansas town of Brinkley.

Brinkley is a small farming town not far from where the ivory-billed woodpecker recently was rediscovered. News that the bird is not extinct has brought a ray of hope to the residents of Brinkley.

Producers Collison and Meister spoke with people in the town, then shared the interviews with Stevens. He wrote a song about the ivory-bill, known as the “lord god” or “great god” bird because of its breathtaking appearance. Together, they offer a portrait of Brinkley in word and song.

It’s a nice audio piece, if a bit surfacey, tip-toeing into the complexity of place, economy, insiders, outsiders, poverty, wealth, and the varying perceptions of the animals with whom we share our homes.

The song, however, stands alone. It has such wonderfully mythic quality and succeeds in capturing something of that place between geography and imagination.   Hit repeat seven times and you’ll discover a new layer with each listen, even six years later.

What do you hear in the song? 

Have a great weekend, everyone.

“Knit One” on Ozarks at Large

Last week my radio piece about Knit Night at Knit 2 Together Yarn Store in downtown Russellville aired on the Ozarks at Large program on KUAF 91.3 FM Public Radio. This piece serves as a companion piece to the written story published in The Courier and  features the voices of many area knitters discussing how they learned their craft, why they enjoy it, and the importance of knitting together. I am so thankful to these knitters for allowing me to listen to their stories and share them with you.

If you want to listen to the entire Ozarks at Large Program for Friday February 4th click here. The knitting story airs toward the end of the show.

If you want to just hear the knitting piece then click here.  Because this story marks the first time I’ve done a radio piece in quite some time, per the request of my boss, I wrote and recorded an introduction explaining where I’ve been, what I’ve been up to, and how I came to begin writing radio pieces about central Arkansas.

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Up the Ridge, a film about remote Appalachian prisons, racism, and the intentional tension between rural and urban

This very important film was produced out of Appalshop’s hiphop radio program, Holler to the Hood.
The film synopsis reads:

Up the Ridge is a one-hour television documentary produced by Nick Szuberla and Amelia Kirby. In 1999 Szuberla and Kirby were volunteer DJ’s for the Appalachian region’s only hip-hop radio program in Whitesburg, KY when they received hundreds of letters from inmates transferred into nearby Wallens Ridge, the region’s newest prison built to prop up the shrinking coal economy. The letters described human rights violations and racial tension between staff and inmates. Filming began that year and, though the lens of Wallens Ridge State Prison, the program offers viewers an in-depth look at the United States prison industry and the social impact of moving hundreds of thousands of inner-city minority offenders to distant rural outposts. The film explores competing political agendas that align government policy with human rights violations, and political expediencies that bring communities into racial and cultural conflict with tragic consequences. Connections exist, in both practice and ideology, between human rights violations in Abu Ghraib and physical and sexual abuse recorded in American prisons.
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“No One is Illegal,” most recent radio program from the show “Making Contact.”

This radio program is an edited version of a talk by Harjap Grewal, an organizer with the Canadian-based group, “No One is Illegal.”
He discusses the ways in which NAFTA, the state sanctioned guest worker programs, and cooperations put profit before human rights and engage in a new form of Indentured labor and slavery. Likewise, he explores the legacy of colonialization and racialization of immigrants that is still very much with us today.

He describes immigration as a “political act,” and discusses not only immigration stories in the U.S. and Canada, but also the situation in Spain where over 6,000 northern African immigrants died last year trying to make the journey.

Most importantly he provides examples of ways to resist and provides examples of resistance from Vancouver.

The only problem is that there is some music playing in the background that can be very distracting. I can’t figure out why it’s there.

Listen Here.

More about the program Making Contact

Sign up for Making Contact Podcasts.

Barre Toelken always talks about the “So What? Question.” So…Some questions for folklorists and ethnographers that come to mind—
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