I met
Joe Bageant on Saturday, and played some guitar and sang with him. So it seems we kinda see eye to eye on a bunch of things. I hadn't read his book, Deer Hunting with Jesus, and I had to miss his talk at the
Adler School of Professional Psychology (where I teach part-time) because my of other job, but I was glad to see that his talk was pretty much reproduced on his blog and I thought it was pretty provocative and right in a lot of ways. I since bought a copy of
"Deer Hunting with Jesus" and found it to be - first - kind of depressing, and - second - eerily prescient about the financial meltdown that happened last year as a result of the housing bubble. I'm on the "guns" chapter now and find that pretty interesting. It challenges my liberal assumptions about gun control but is also pretty thought-provoking in the sense that maybe the "bloodline of values" I talked about in an earlier post really does include a strong streak of wanting to be able to resist oppressive government by having an armed populace. If so, that's kind of scary.
I haven't had the kind of life experiences Joe has had -- I've never lived in Belize, or tended bar on an Indian reservation -- but I still think, as Studs Terkel said shortly before he died, that "the big boys are not that bright." And that we all need to help each other out and pay attemtion to human needs, and that this wonderful system of capitalism and markets that we have come up with will NOT solve very many of the problems we face. But I do participate in it (it's next to impossible not to), and I think it has its uses.
So thanks, Joe, for your nice remarks about my singing and my choice of tunes ("Hard Times Come Again No More"). I appreciated your funny blues lyrics and you made some good points in your political observations in the bar there, which sounded prettty much on the money. I didn't get to ask you if you were a
U. Utah Phillips fan but I wouldn't be surprised if you were.
My earlier entry here about the way I hoped our economic meltdown might lead to a return to some of the fleeting hopes of the 60's and 70's seems to be in line with a lot of what Joe has to say. And I agree with him that making music is a good way to get people out from in front of their TV sets. The interesting thing is that a lot of what you run into while delving into old time music and down-home entertainment is so closely tied to that whole Scots-Irish tradition and culture that Joe talked about. In fact all of us who hang out at the Old Town School of Folk Music and take classes there would cringe sometimes at some of the politically incorrect song titles (Google
Uncle Dave Macon if you need examples). Notwithstanding my defense of "Blue Tail Fly" last year on my blog.
Even Stephen Foster, who was the subject of some of our conversation, had to be edited to avoid being too offensive. The state of Kentucky had long used "My Old Kentucky Home Far Away" as the state song. It was only in the last few years that they thought to take out the reference to "darkies" in the lyrics (ya THINK?). But actually, Foster was strongly empathetic to the issues that the African-American community of the day (largely consisting of slaves) had to deal with on a daily basis. A lot of country music has its roots in that kind of sensibility. One example" "Faded Love," made famous by Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, and later by Patsy Cline, was a reworking of an old song called "Darling Nellie Gray," about the plight of a slave who was separated from his love when they were sold to different owners. But back to Stephen Foster, a recent CD of his songs had a version of "Hard Times" by Mavis Staples, who is of course a major singer of civil rights songs. So it's not hard to find a rich vein of social awareness in the songs of someone who was dismissed for years as a hack who played up the cornier aspecs of Southern life.
But music prevails over prejudice and ignorance, and learning about the common threads between African-American music and Appalachian, Cape Breton, Irish, Scottish, and even English folk tunes is kind of reassuring. People always find ways to create connections through their music.
On a larger level, I agree with Joe that there is an American "hologram," in the sense of some consensually validated myths that serve as a backdrop for personal, community, and political judgments and values. Alfred Adler (who was actually pretty subversive, in my book) based his theories of human behavior on the idea that all human beings operate according to a set of fictions that shape behavior by allowing people to set goals for themselves. Pathology usually happens when a person's "private logic" is too far out of whack with the common sense of generally accepted fictions about ourselves, people, life, and how to get along. But Adler's theories also allow for the possibility that "common sense" could be out of whack with what's good for all of us (including what's good for the planet we all have to share and hand to our children and grandchildren). Adler, who had to flee the Nazis in the 1930's, was acutely aware of the fact that there can be widely accepted but "socially useless" belief systems. Adler spoke of how the social instincts that served early humans well (like loyalty to the tribe) may not serve modern humans so well. This implies that we need to use our reasoning brains to guide our innate instinct to band together (our community feeling) in the right direction. It also means that people need to be willing to question their assumptions - learned from parents, culture, religion, and the social milieu - to be sure that those assumptions are in line with what is socially responsible and useful for humanity as a whole. Adler saw the rapidly shrinking "global village" (although that name hadn't been invented yet), and knew that we were going to need to transcend our old-fashioned nationalism, with its striving for power, and instead develop assumptions and values based on our shared humanity. See how well we're doing at that these days...
Anyway, Joe Bageant is a hell of a writer and a pretty good blues singer, and an interesting guy to have met. I'll try to scan the photo I got back of him and me singing and post it on here.
