Being a farmer, I'm always trying to connect people to the farm or the earth in general. So I'm looking to put together an hour set of farm/agriculture related blues songs. Any songs come to mind. Here's one I'm trying to tighten up.
the James Cotton version of "diggin my potatoes" from his "high compression" album really jumps along, what with his references to potatoes, potato vines, cabbage sprouts, roosters, and clover!
You probably won't like my one attempt at bitter sociopolitical satire, "Old McDonald in Mississippi." The moral of the song, and the video, are intentionally obscure. Please read the very long rationale in the extended video description:
Actually, here are the complete liner notes, as it were.
Gussow was inspired to write this song by a story that was related one afternoon a couple of years ago on WTNM-FM in Oxford, part of Mississippi's statewide SuperTalk network. JT and Dave, a pair of cantankerous conservative talk-show hosts, were discussing a Christmastime news item that had come over the wire from somewhere up in Arkansas. Apparently Jimmy Bob (not his real name) had been found in a morally compromised condition in a local nativity display, one that contained several farm animals. JT and Dave exchanged a pained chuckle or two as they wondered aloud at what the poor boy was thinking. "Thank God it didn't happen in Mississippi," one of them finally sighed. Then they went on to decry Muslims, taxes, Obamacare, liberals, school administrators, and fools of every stripe.
Gussow was grateful to JT and Dave--it's better to be enlightened about the presence of human depravity rather than remaining unwisely ignorant--but he was also disturbed by the shadow that this strange tale cast on his own pastoral view of the contemporary South. An innocent nursery rhyme like "Old McDonald Had a Farm" suddenly seemed haunted by unspeakable degradation--or by unintended and riotous comedy, or by both. Rustics have of course been perennial figures of mockery since Roman times, but so too have they been summoned--by Jefferson, by Crevcoeur, by the Southern Agrarians--to represent the embodiment of American civic and moral virtue. (Pepperidge Farm remembers, even if you don't.) Southern rustics in particular have occupied a troubled place in the national imaginary. The Beverly Hillbillies make us laugh; DELIVERANCE makes us shudder. "Good Country People," a story by Flannery O'Connor, features a traveling southern Bible salesman--the good country person of the title--who drinks whiskey, carries condoms in his hollowed-out Bible, and steals a young woman's prosthetic leg. Some of us remember Billy Beer.
Bestiality is the ne plus ultra of slanders with which southern male rustics might be labeled, and yet, in an age when men can marry each other, interracial marriages (such as Gussow's) are proliferating across America, Herman Cain and Jerry Sandusky (along with Eddie Long, Ted Haggard, and various Catholic elders) strive to disown their frisky libidos, and so-called animal-rights criticism is insurgent within university English departments, who is to say precisely where sin and sodomy reside in contemporary America? In one recent poll, almost half of Mississippi's registered Republicans thought that interracial marriage should be illegal. Where do YOU draw the line? What's so wrong, finally, with looking to a sheep for comfort on Christmas eve? Or the lamb of God? We are all companion animals in God's eyes.
As Gussow began to meditate on the theme, very much in the spirit of Edgar Allen Poe preparing to write "The Raven" or Herman Melville brooding on "Benito Cereno," the ground suddenly gave way. Here, like a gift from Heaven, was the perfect medium through which to express the weird, unstable, libidinous, fractious texture of American cultural and political life in the late fall of 2011.
This video is a Rorschach test, not a Litmus test. A Litmus test, in a political context, traffics in binaries: either you're with me or you're against me. A Litmus test has two colors, variants of red and blue. A Rorschach test offers an infinitely more fluid and responsive field of play for imaginations committed to the project of unconscious projection.
What you see when you look into the window of this video is where and who you are. If you dwell in hate, you will see hate. If you dwell in love, you will see love. If you are bluesy, you will see (and hear) blues in the bittersweet texture of southern and American life imaged here. If you are convinced that the problem is always somewhere else, or somebody else, this video will confirm--and frustrate--your belief. If you love the South, this video will challenge you to enlarge the dimensions of that love. If you have given up on America, this video impolitely asks you to chuckle and reconsider. If you are somebody who reflexively parses the world in terms of black and white, sunshine and darkness, this video sincerely requests that you make a little more room for shadows, shades of grey, and rainbows.
Thanks for reading this far!
EZ REFERENCE GUIDE FOR THE TYPOLOGICALLY CHALLENGED:
Old McDonald = God
his farm = Garden of Eden
Bill Clinton = Dionysus/Pan
Obama = antichrist/Messiah = blues trickster
mixed couple at end of video = David and Roselyn, New Orleans buskers = family values
Merry Christmas to one and all!
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Oct 13, 2015 3:20 PM
Kham, one thing worth considering is just how oppressive many southern black folks felt farming to be. Obviously there's a long prelude in the forced labor of slavery. In the post-Emancipation era, you get sharecropping, and sharecropping devolves during the first three decades of the 20th century. (Read Honeyboy Edwards's autobiography.) The Great Migration was a great migration of black southerners AWAY from farming. The cottonfields, the canefields, were brutal places. That's all "farming." But it's also compelled labor; exploited labor.
And of course there are lots of blues songs about the county farm and the prison farm: punitive farming.
Johnny Cash writes in his autobio about working the cottonfields. Not fun. But there was a lot of music there.
I just think it's important, when thinking in a blues context, to realize that the Jeffersonian agrarian ideal of the independent small farmer has been a terribly difficult thing for black southerners to create for themselves. Some managed to do it. Read W. Ralph Eubanks's NEVER IS A LONG TIME. His father was a (black) agricultural agent in Mississippi, and he owned and farmed his own land. A rarity, but it did happen.
The people who sang the songs, though, tended not to come from that sector of black society.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Oct 14, 2015 4:35 AM
@kudzurunner Farmers (real farmers that actually grow real food and work regularly in the fields not on giant tractors) are still exploited or externalized. This compelled or exploited labour hasn't changed. Its still at the heart of farm incomes and farm hours for labour its just not forced.
My hope is to sing about the highs and lows of farming and have good banter between songs. A kind of education. To make a living growing real food (again not the perverse global food commodities that is soy, corn and wheat grown to produce nutritionally devoid diabete promoting food with long shelf lives) is near impossible if trying to pay a mortgage and provide for a family. It's a life style and a life of servitude. Not that the big cash croppers (soy, corn and wheat farmers) have it any easier when considering the debt load and earned income that comes with tractors, implements, sprayers and seed royalties. Its amazing any of us farmers continue to do so.
Its a cryin' shame there isn't more recent music about the lack of food security and/or the fact that farm incomes are close to, if not on par with that of the great depression.
Maybe now is the time to start a renewed interest in the second generation of "real" blues from the land. Back to where the blues literally came from. Toil in the soil! I'll have a kick at this can or cow or clump of wet soil as it may be...
Sorry if this a rant. If you see rant please realize that I am merely feeling modern blues in the making!
Last Edited by kham on Oct 15, 2015 10:57 PM
