Thomas D. Isern's Blog: Willow Creek: A Writing Journal, page 5
February 26, 2023
The Farmer Is the Man
Another weekend, another manuscript - this one opening with a chorus from the North Dakota Farmers Union Summer Camp Songbook.
I didn't know when I started Saturday morning that I would end up quoting both Gil Fite and Walter Prescott Webb in the conclusion, but so it went. The subject of the paper is the Granger song, "The Farmer Is the Man," written by the evangelical preacher, Knowles Shaw, when he was sojourning in Kansas in 1874. In the original text of 1874 and the NDFU songbook today, the message is pure farm fundamentalism. That's how Gil Fite came into the story, as he wrote a paper about farm fundamentalism in 1962.
I've printed the paper and now will let it sit overnight. Perhaps the dogs will eat it. Perhaps I will read it over in the morning, and I'll decide it is no good. Most likely, I'll give it a hard read, make some revisions, and send it off. Things are moving off my desk prettty well these days. Not always the things that the people I report to at the university want me to be moving off my desk, but the ones I care about.
"A Genuine Granger Song: Reverend Knowles Shaw and 'The Farmer Is the Man'" - this is one of the discovery pieces in my line of work on Great Plains balladry. It tickles me no end to have tracked this song I have been singing for a half-century back to its very headwaters, its original author and original publication in 1874.
Now, two fingers of sour mash, and six hours of sleep. Then the dogs will wake up.
When the farmer comes to townWhat's going on is, I have these papers presented over the past couple of years at scholarly meetings, papers from my line of research on Great Plains folksong--the stuff we do every Friday night with the Willow Creek Folk School. The papers have begun to accumulate, and so now I'm touching them up to submit for journal publication. Last weekend was a long weekend, and so I finished two. This was a regular weekend, and I finished one.
With his wagon broken down,
Oh, the Farmer is the man who feeds them all.
If you’ll only look and see
I think you will agree
That the Farmer is the man who feeds them all.
I didn't know when I started Saturday morning that I would end up quoting both Gil Fite and Walter Prescott Webb in the conclusion, but so it went. The subject of the paper is the Granger song, "The Farmer Is the Man," written by the evangelical preacher, Knowles Shaw, when he was sojourning in Kansas in 1874. In the original text of 1874 and the NDFU songbook today, the message is pure farm fundamentalism. That's how Gil Fite came into the story, as he wrote a paper about farm fundamentalism in 1962.
I've printed the paper and now will let it sit overnight. Perhaps the dogs will eat it. Perhaps I will read it over in the morning, and I'll decide it is no good. Most likely, I'll give it a hard read, make some revisions, and send it off. Things are moving off my desk prettty well these days. Not always the things that the people I report to at the university want me to be moving off my desk, but the ones I care about.
"A Genuine Granger Song: Reverend Knowles Shaw and 'The Farmer Is the Man'" - this is one of the discovery pieces in my line of work on Great Plains balladry. It tickles me no end to have tracked this song I have been singing for a half-century back to its very headwaters, its original author and original publication in 1874.
Now, two fingers of sour mash, and six hours of sleep. Then the dogs will wake up.
February 25, 2023
What Have I Done?
Last night's Willow Creek Folk School. No. 130, is now uploaded to YouTube. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nKrk1JmDs4
February 22, 2023
Some of the Road, Most of the Time
Up early this morning, going through a manuscript by one of my resident PhD students, and thinking, this is really good work. I can see one, two, three things to point out that will add value, and we'll talk about them, but then I'll get out of the way. There is a stage in your life as a mentor when you think you know better about eveything. There is a better stage, later, when you know you still have tricks you can teach a really good student, and you do so, but you don't have to get your fingers on everything.
Then I spent some time rummaging through some century-old scholarship on balladry in America, and as I did so, I sensed that I was framing in a whole new room for the house of interpretation I have been building for the re-emergent field of Great Plains folksong. This reminded me that I still have oh so much yet to discover and learn, that I am still capable of discovering and learning, and that this is what I do. Three-score and ten is just a platform.
At this point my phone sounds, and on the end is a great friend in a country town who has a promising idea for an art installation that would draw people onto the land and teach them about ways to live on it, settler and indigenous. (I'm not going to say anything more specific about his ideas, they're his, and I know he'll write about them soon.) I'm still thinking about that conversation and giving thanks there are people who ring me out of the blue with such notions.
But off to the office on a nasty winter day, whoops, I'm in the ditch, gun it, there, I'm out of it, and on with the day. I'm supposed to be in Vermillion leading a delegation of student presenters at a conference, but the South Dakota blizzard scotched that, so here I am back in class. Heck with it, I turned the operation over to my graduate students and watched them operate, and they did a better job than I would have. Which is another aspect of teaching at this level.
Done with that, hustle now, off to the archives, where my methods students are streaming in and opening document boxes and trying to figure out this game of archival research. I set up in the lobby and tell them, come out and sit with me when you need to talk about what you're trying to do. One and two at a time, they do, always with pretty much the same query: What am I looking for here? Well, I don't know, what are you finding?
In each case I come around to saying, You're asking the right question at this point, which is, What is my question? And there are two ways to find it. First, keep rummaging through the documents, see what emerges, see what things align into patterns, see what interests you. (My fellow old-school historians will recognize this as the Idealistic theory of History--watch and wait for the Idea. Yeah, it's kind of mystic.) The other way of finding your question is to look at the secondary literature, the books and articles around your subject, and see what ideas other scholars have induced from, or brought to, the subject. Just be sure that if you get your idea this way, you bring it to your own material as a question, not as an answer to be imposed on the past. This, too, is teaching on a pretty high order. I had some research of my own I had intended to get done, but there wasn't time. Many thanks to our eminently professional archivist who kept the place open late for us to get work done tonight, even though he was feeling under the weather.
And who pointed out as I was leaving, Hey, you know the interstates are closed, right? No, I didn't, I hadn't been looking out the windows. So I rang up Dr. Kelley, who was across town on an arrand, apprised her of the situation, and convoyed up with her to track our way home via the snowy section roads. We could see some of the road most of time. There's a big fat metaphor in there somewhere.
Now it looks like tomorrow is a snow day, which is good, because I have printed out a couple more essays I'm beginning to revise for publication, I should write a couple of Plains Folk radio scripts for recording on Friday, and I need to work out the order of service for Friday night's Willow Creek Folk School, No. 130.
Hey, join us on my Facebook timeline. We'll livestream from the Salon on Willow Creek at 8pm CST. Pop some popcorn, we're doing murder ballads this week.
Then I spent some time rummaging through some century-old scholarship on balladry in America, and as I did so, I sensed that I was framing in a whole new room for the house of interpretation I have been building for the re-emergent field of Great Plains folksong. This reminded me that I still have oh so much yet to discover and learn, that I am still capable of discovering and learning, and that this is what I do. Three-score and ten is just a platform.
At this point my phone sounds, and on the end is a great friend in a country town who has a promising idea for an art installation that would draw people onto the land and teach them about ways to live on it, settler and indigenous. (I'm not going to say anything more specific about his ideas, they're his, and I know he'll write about them soon.) I'm still thinking about that conversation and giving thanks there are people who ring me out of the blue with such notions.
But off to the office on a nasty winter day, whoops, I'm in the ditch, gun it, there, I'm out of it, and on with the day. I'm supposed to be in Vermillion leading a delegation of student presenters at a conference, but the South Dakota blizzard scotched that, so here I am back in class. Heck with it, I turned the operation over to my graduate students and watched them operate, and they did a better job than I would have. Which is another aspect of teaching at this level.
Done with that, hustle now, off to the archives, where my methods students are streaming in and opening document boxes and trying to figure out this game of archival research. I set up in the lobby and tell them, come out and sit with me when you need to talk about what you're trying to do. One and two at a time, they do, always with pretty much the same query: What am I looking for here? Well, I don't know, what are you finding?
In each case I come around to saying, You're asking the right question at this point, which is, What is my question? And there are two ways to find it. First, keep rummaging through the documents, see what emerges, see what things align into patterns, see what interests you. (My fellow old-school historians will recognize this as the Idealistic theory of History--watch and wait for the Idea. Yeah, it's kind of mystic.) The other way of finding your question is to look at the secondary literature, the books and articles around your subject, and see what ideas other scholars have induced from, or brought to, the subject. Just be sure that if you get your idea this way, you bring it to your own material as a question, not as an answer to be imposed on the past. This, too, is teaching on a pretty high order. I had some research of my own I had intended to get done, but there wasn't time. Many thanks to our eminently professional archivist who kept the place open late for us to get work done tonight, even though he was feeling under the weather.
And who pointed out as I was leaving, Hey, you know the interstates are closed, right? No, I didn't, I hadn't been looking out the windows. So I rang up Dr. Kelley, who was across town on an arrand, apprised her of the situation, and convoyed up with her to track our way home via the snowy section roads. We could see some of the road most of time. There's a big fat metaphor in there somewhere.
Now it looks like tomorrow is a snow day, which is good, because I have printed out a couple more essays I'm beginning to revise for publication, I should write a couple of Plains Folk radio scripts for recording on Friday, and I need to work out the order of service for Friday night's Willow Creek Folk School, No. 130.
Hey, join us on my Facebook timeline. We'll livestream from the Salon on Willow Creek at 8pm CST. Pop some popcorn, we're doing murder ballads this week.
O Lord, they're going to hang meYou're guilty, dude, Lord have mercy on all of us.
It's an awful death to die
O lord, they're going to hang me
Between the earth and sky
February 20, 2023
Bachelors and Ballads
When you're teaching full-time, the weekly calendar gets pretty cluttered, and so if you're going to write, you have to make time for it. One way I keep an oar in the water is with incremental obligations. Plains Folk, the weekly newspaper and radio feature, is one of these for me, as is the Willow Creek Folk School, my livestream on Friday nights. These standing dates do not allow me to go dormant as a writer; there are holes to fill. What suffers, chronically, is the backlog of long-form projects, some of them at hand, others more aspirational, that require more sustained attention.
So this long weekend (by virtue of one of those faceless winter holidays), I set myself tasks. There were two journal articles, which is to say, long-form essays, holding space on my desk and in my mind, and I resolved to move them along. Both these projects are part of my emerging line of work on Great Plains balladry, work that originated with research for the folk school. The two of them, too, share a subject: bachelorhood on the prairies.
The first has to do with the folksong I have come to call the Anthem of the Plains, "Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim." Here's a link to a nice 1883 version of the ballad from Dickey County, North Dakota, sent me by Ken Smith. I managed to track the ballad to its headwaters in Smith County, Kansas, where its original author was a printer named Frank E. Jerome. Then I followed the song forward to Dakota Territory, where while remaining identifiable as the same song, it morphed into a form that resonated better with a broader citizenry of the plains.
Over the past few weeks I had been writing a series of radio scripts for Plains Folk about this balladic saga, when it occurred to me, wait a minute, these short pieces would fit together nicely to make a longer essay on the subject. Accomplishing this is not just a matter of scissors and paste; it takes a lot of reconfiguration and welding.
Anyway, I commenced work on the longer piece on Saturday, had it pretty much done, I thought, that night, returned to it before 6:00 Sunday morning, and ended up editing and polishing until 11:57am--at which time I announced to Dr. Kelley it was done, and I had sent it to a journal editor for consideration. One down, one to go.
Sunday afternoon and evening, and pretty much all day today, I worked on the second essay, which deals with a ballad called "The Stern Old Bachelor" or sometimes just "The Bachelor Song." I discovered what I thought was the first, original text of the song, by a fellow named Arthur Loreny Stokesberry, published in Kansas in the Ninnescah Herald of 18 July 1887--until I found that the piece actually had appeared a little earlier, on 14 July, in the Dighton Herald. I worked out the context of the ballad and the biography of its author, massaged the narrative into good order, and 9:28 tonight, sent the manuscript to a (I hope receptive) editor.
These essays, as I said, are part of an emerging line of work that will eventuate into a lot more articles and two books canonizing the ballads of the Great Plains as they never have been before. I had to live long enough, surpass my three-score and ten, in order to be able to this work, because it is utterly dependent on, as I said in one of the essays, "the wonders of optical character recognition and the digitization of newspapers in such collections as Chronicling America and Newspapers.com." This is like doing literary-historical research with a gill net, which I am dragging through millions of pages of digitized newspapers to snag the catch-phrases of balladry.
There are a couple more pieces lying around here I need to touch up, and when I do them, I will feel like I have planted my guidon in this field of research. Also that I have done something to enrich the literary-historic culture of the prairies. I feel like having a glass of whiskey, but I won't, because it would slow me down swinging into a full day of work tomorrow. I better just have a chat with my dog and get some sleep. But those ballads keep ringing in my ears.
So this long weekend (by virtue of one of those faceless winter holidays), I set myself tasks. There were two journal articles, which is to say, long-form essays, holding space on my desk and in my mind, and I resolved to move them along. Both these projects are part of my emerging line of work on Great Plains balladry, work that originated with research for the folk school. The two of them, too, share a subject: bachelorhood on the prairies.
The first has to do with the folksong I have come to call the Anthem of the Plains, "Little Old Sod Shanty on the Claim." Here's a link to a nice 1883 version of the ballad from Dickey County, North Dakota, sent me by Ken Smith. I managed to track the ballad to its headwaters in Smith County, Kansas, where its original author was a printer named Frank E. Jerome. Then I followed the song forward to Dakota Territory, where while remaining identifiable as the same song, it morphed into a form that resonated better with a broader citizenry of the plains.
Over the past few weeks I had been writing a series of radio scripts for Plains Folk about this balladic saga, when it occurred to me, wait a minute, these short pieces would fit together nicely to make a longer essay on the subject. Accomplishing this is not just a matter of scissors and paste; it takes a lot of reconfiguration and welding.
Anyway, I commenced work on the longer piece on Saturday, had it pretty much done, I thought, that night, returned to it before 6:00 Sunday morning, and ended up editing and polishing until 11:57am--at which time I announced to Dr. Kelley it was done, and I had sent it to a journal editor for consideration. One down, one to go.
Sunday afternoon and evening, and pretty much all day today, I worked on the second essay, which deals with a ballad called "The Stern Old Bachelor" or sometimes just "The Bachelor Song." I discovered what I thought was the first, original text of the song, by a fellow named Arthur Loreny Stokesberry, published in Kansas in the Ninnescah Herald of 18 July 1887--until I found that the piece actually had appeared a little earlier, on 14 July, in the Dighton Herald. I worked out the context of the ballad and the biography of its author, massaged the narrative into good order, and 9:28 tonight, sent the manuscript to a (I hope receptive) editor.
These essays, as I said, are part of an emerging line of work that will eventuate into a lot more articles and two books canonizing the ballads of the Great Plains as they never have been before. I had to live long enough, surpass my three-score and ten, in order to be able to this work, because it is utterly dependent on, as I said in one of the essays, "the wonders of optical character recognition and the digitization of newspapers in such collections as Chronicling America and Newspapers.com." This is like doing literary-historical research with a gill net, which I am dragging through millions of pages of digitized newspapers to snag the catch-phrases of balladry.
There are a couple more pieces lying around here I need to touch up, and when I do them, I will feel like I have planted my guidon in this field of research. Also that I have done something to enrich the literary-historic culture of the prairies. I feel like having a glass of whiskey, but I won't, because it would slow me down swinging into a full day of work tomorrow. I better just have a chat with my dog and get some sleep. But those ballads keep ringing in my ears.
February 19, 2023
WCFS No. 129
Last Friday's Willow Creek Folk School (No. 129), now uploaded to YouTube - https://youtu.be/-AuZsAs1W3s
That Hungry Coyote
Last week on Prairie Public - https://news.prairiepublic.org/podcast/plains-folk/2023-02-18/that-hungry-coyote
February 14, 2023
WCFS No. 128
Last week's Willow Creek Folk School, then livestreamed to Facebook, now uploaded to YouTube - https://youtu.be/lcLEukESUWE
In the West
Last week on Prairie Public - https://news.prairiepublic.org/podcast/plains-folk/2023-02-11/in-the-west
February 4, 2023
I Claim Ownership!
This week on Prairie Public - https://news.prairiepublic.org/podcast/plains-folk/2023-02-04/i-claim-authorship
Willow Creek: A Writing Journal
From the home office on Willow Creek, in the Red River Valley of North Dakota, historian Tom Isern blogs about his (literary) life on the plains.
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