by Peter Berryman
Beatniks and Folk Music?
In June of 1964, the summer before my senior year at Appleton
(WI) Senior High, my pals Bill, Ed and I climbed
on our clunky Schwinn Varsity bikes and pedaled down the side
of Lake Winnebago about twenty miles to Oshkosh. We met highway
21 there and headed west, through towns like Omro, Redgranite,
and Wautoma, and spent our first night in a roadside park outside
Coloma. Three weeks, twenty bivouacs, and a thousand miles later
we could be found eating shredded wheat in tin bowls and listening
to horses fart on the shore of Sylvan Lake in the Black Hills
of South Dakota.
All along this tentless and scruffy journey, we found interesting
places to unroll our sleeping bags at night. I remember sleeping
sitting up, leaning against the trunk of a small, surprisingly
dry pine tree on the outskirts of Lanesboro, Minnesota, in the
middle of a terrific downpour. I remember snoozing in the farmyard
of a kid named Dave Mortenson outside of Alden, Minnesota.
He had seen our exhausted selves and our bikes as he cruised the
streets in his old pickup truck with vice-grip pliers for door
handles, and had invited us to stay on his parents' farm that
night. He was a folk music freak, way out in the middle of nowhere!
We listened to Woody Guthrie and Peter Paul and Mary
records with him then went out and slumbered by the barn. I remember
sleeping on the porch of a woman in Interior, South Dakota, on
the edge of the Badlands, who took great pride in her collection
of what she swore were miniature petrified horse brains.
Ever since that trip, on the many other expeditions I have made
over the years (in cars), my eyeballs have wandered the landscape,
in search of cubbyholes where, under less automotive conditions,
I might crash for the night. There's always an inviting bridge-underside,
billboard lee, pine grove, forgotten shanty, riverbank thicket,
or other rustic slumberland somewhere.
To me, these areas will always have a sort of transcendent glow.
It's the same kind of radiance that draws the postcard collectors
to the postcard bins of an antique mall, the orchid hounds to
a soggy bog, the tornado chasers to a squall line.
"Glow" is not quite the right word to use however, because
it seems to suggest a positive value, though I guess that's usually
appropriate. But I'm really talking more about a sense of importance,
a new awareness -- or as Mr. Rogers might say, a "specialness"
-- than about any intrinsic goodness. Like when I'm trying to
decide on a garden shed design, all the sheds in the neighborhood
take on a new mantle of importance, as I walk the dog by them
in the evening; like all eyelashes must glow for Maybelline
as she strolls the blinking streets.
As with most people, different kinds of music have had varying
luminosities of importance for me at one time or another. Back
in those high school days, you could find, in the back bins of
Treasure Island, Lightnin' Hopkins and Leadbelly
albums for less than a dollar. For me those glowed almost as brightly
as the polka bands of Fox Valley beer tents, though I sometimes
lost all these glimmers in the solar coronas of high school girls.
I used to marvel, back on the bike trip, when we would pick up
our mail at predetermined post offices every few days, how my
girl friend's handwriting itself became dazzling, like a twenty
dollar bill in a birdbath.
These glows fluctuate over the years. In music, the beam can narrow
from a floodlight on folk music in general, to a spotlight on
acoustic blues, to a laser light on Robert Johnson. It
can start out as a spotlight on one song from the movie Oh
Brother Where Art Thou and widen into a floodlight upon endless
back porches of folk music variety. You can be swayed to look
in the direction of someone else's spotlight, by reviews in the
press or testimonials on the kiosk. That's what a publicist does;
shines his distracting light ever brighter on your periphery,
hoping to make you swing your penlight his way. More interestingly,
I would say that's what an artist does too; makes you see the
glow of something otherwise unlit for you but now illuminated
by his/her spotlight. The artist is saying, "Maybe this soup
can doesn't glow for you, but here's how it looks, when it's glowing
for me." And from that day forward, every soup can retains
a faint afterglow from your experience of the artist's high beam.
Which brings me to the beatnik concept of digging, mentioned in
a previous episode or two of Whither Zither. To dig a yo-yo
is to appreciate its yo-yo-ness. That's what I think this glowing
is all about. It's about digging something. You begin to appreciate
one yo-yo's yo-yo-ness, and magically, even if you can't see them,
you know that for you, all yo-yos in the world have clicked on
suddenly like wee sconces for evermore.
I know there are granola sacks full of definitions of folk music,
but one of them for me involves its communicating this kind of
personal, very specific lighting scheme. It has dawned on me that
this may be why beatniks and folk music came heavily onto the
scene at about the same time. They both incorporate digging, in
their own way. They are concerned with appreciating the appreciations
of individuals in the world. Woody Guthrie and Jack
Kerouac were on the road at about the same time, and weren't
just reporting on the world as normal creative people might, but
were specifically excited by reporting on how the world glowed
under the particular lights of their observees. They were both
appreciators of appreciation! As were the non-songwriting folk
singers of the time, who were (and still are) trying to see and
portray the world lit as one specific miner or farmer or cotton
mill girl or man on the flying trapeze might light it.
I think this relationship between beatniks and folk music could
be illuminating, if I could only figure out where bongos fit into
the equation.
One final thought. One advantage to my growing older seems to
be that as I read books, listen to songs, look at paintings, and
hang and adjust my own internal lighting systems, the world gradually
becomes more well lit in general. It's hard to scan any scene
without coming across a good number of objects glowing with varying
intensities of transcendent importance. Now, if I could just remember
why...