Butterfly Drive-Thru

Maybe you've seen the line of cars slowly creeping along through the drive-thru at McDonald's at breakfast time or a Chick-Fil-A at lunch--these places are crazy busy at times where I live. Native wildflowers are like that for pollinating insects. Here, a Great Spangled Fritillary butterfly (large one in center) is slurping up sweet nectar from a Purple Coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) in our yard. A Silver-Spotted Skipper (back left) and another type of Skipper wait in line. For these little fellows, it is not just about having a sweet tooth, it is a matter of life and death for the calories. Plant native wildflowers for the pollinators in your neighborhood. A good place to start is with the Butterfly Wildflowers Mix at Holland Wildflower Farm.com. You'll be surprised how busy your garden becomes!

New Spring Leaves

It's spring again--a little earlier this year, so they say. It is always exciting to me somehow to see the new leaves pushing out from all the various species of plants. It's like a promise of sorts. By late summer, those same leaves will be chewed on by insects, stippled by mites, and spotted by diseases; but right now, they are pristine. Most were formed last fall inside the bud as tiny versions of themselves. All of the cells are there in the bud. In spring, they puff up with water, like water balloons, and push out of the buds, swelling to their natural size before they harden their cell walls. Sometimes they don't have their complete level of chlorophyll yet, so they have a red blush--like the little oak leaves in the pics below. Click on an image to see an enlarged view.

Here's a sampling of what I'm seeing:

Red Buckeye in bud (native forest tree in our backyard) -- hummingbirds love it!

Mistletoe

New fiddlehead of Cinnamon Fern on the east side of our house.

Flower bud of Wisteria vine in Fayetteville.

Shumard Oak in our backyard.

Shumard Oak again.

'Forest Pansy' Redbud in Fayetteville.

Flowering Almond

Thirty foot-tall Bald Cypress in my yard, once a tiny seedling in a Southern Arkansas swamp.

Strawberry.

Dogwood

Viburnum

Virginia Creeper

Poison Ivy

Variegated Iris and Lily Pads in our water garden.

Elm leaves & seeds.

Native Virginia Bluebells by our water garden.

The Castration of Folk Music -- Performance Copyrights, Part I

I left for college (Oklahoma State University) in the fall of 1972.  The following year, I took an elective class, unrelated to my major, which would have a profound effect on me to this day. It was called The Geography of Country Music—a sociology course taught by Dr. George Carney. God bless you, George, for connecting me with my passion. I also taught myself to play guitar that year, using an Lp instruction record I picked up somewhere and an old pawnshop Kay guitar with f-holes.

In his class, I found my way into a whole new world of music: from ancient British Isle ballads--locked up for safekeeping in Appalachia--to old-time hillbilly, fiddle and banjo music, to bluegrass and early country music--before the Grand Old Opry was even old. And I learned of the social forces and changes in our nation’s history that determined where music migrated to.

And oh, the blues, and how that morphed, with European instruments, into jazz, and how it all blended together like gumbo into rhythm and blues in the ‘40’s before emerging, butterfly-like, into rock and roll in the ‘50’s. [it’s ironic that rock & roll put so many performers of these ancestral genres out of business for a number of years—Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs, Muddy Waters—these guys couldn’t get gigs when rock & roll burst upon the scene!]

 

My new musical heroes were the Woody Guthrie’s and Pete Seegers. And Pete’s brother, Mike, and his New Lost City Ramblers with their academic fidelity to old-time string band music. And the Highwoods String Band, the Fuzzy Mountain String Band, and the eclectic Red Clay Ramblers. There were hot pickers like Norman Blake and Doc Watson. And blues guys like Robert Johnson, Elmore James, and Brownie & Sonny. Jazz guys like Django. And all the bluegrass, too. The year I started college, the borderline-hippie Nitty Gritty Dirt Band recorded their historic sessions with many of the legends of country, folk, and bluegrass music and released the Will The Circle Be Unbroken album. I devoured it.

But the core of it, for me, was the folk music. The whole process of it. Pete Seeger is fond of telling his story about jamming with Woody Guthrie and, even with traditional songs (public domain), Pete was never sure which verses were the original ones and which were ones that Woody added. And Woody thought this was the way it should be--how new songs came to be. He once commented on another songwriter to Pete saying, “Oh, he just stole from me, but I steal from everybody!” Pete termed this “the folk process” of music evolution—a healthy, natural cultural phenomenon. Like biological/ecological succession.

Pete helped to start Sing Out! Magazine in the 1960’s which is still published today. In each issue, they would have the music and lyrics to new songs from the folk singers of the day. Some of Bob Dylan’s iconic songs were first learned by baby boomer musicians by leafing through the pages of Sing Out!. And that was the point: getting people to sing the songs! And the songs were such a part of what the Sixties cultural revolution was about. Music was the vehicle that moved the movements. Pete Seeger dusted off an old hymn and offered it up at a civil rights gathering. Martin Luther King loved it and We Shall Overcome soon became the unofficial anthem of the movement.

On the weekends, in the college years, I played rhythm guitar for old ranchers at the Old Time Fiddlers’ Association meetings in Ripley, OK. I jammed with my new musical friends and even played in a coffeehouse on campus with a couple of buds as The South Sea Drifters (we played folk and bluegrass while dressed in Hawaiian shirts). We played whatever we liked—and whatever we could pull off!

Flash forward a few decades: the band I now play in, the Hogeye Ramblers, is having trouble finding a venue to play in because of some strange legal issues involving performance rights to copyrighted music.

In my next post, I’ll share about how this simple folk process of music performance and free sharing of songs has been corrupted (can I say castrated?) by the same sort of corporate interests that alarm the Occupy Wall Street folks and that caused a groundswell of reaction against the SOPA/PITA legislation (i.e., regulating the internet in the name of copyright infringement). I promise you, the music nazi’s are lurking in your town, too! It threatens coffeehouse owners, restaurants, clubs and even yoga instructors with hefty lawsuits. Those of you who know me well, know that I am not ordinarily an alarmist or a loose cannon, but this is real. More to come …

PostScript: You are more than welcome to visit the Hogeye Ramblers on YouTube but be forewarned—some of the songs may involve copyright infringement over performance rights! And for heaven’s sake, don’t let anyone see you tapping your foot or, even worse, start singing the songs yourself …

Ice Flowers and Frostweed

About three years ago, my wife and I were taking a winter walk to the back of our property. It was a nice, sunny morning, but had frosted hard during the night and the air temperature was still below freezing. After crossing the creek we walked into a clearing between two tree-lined areas. We saw the strangest meadow of flowers we'd ever seen--the flowers were made of ice! Scores of them!

We determined that each was coming from the broken stub of a woody stalk from a perennial plant that grew the previous season. We eventually learned that they were a perennial composite wildflower called Frostweed (Verbesina virginica). The next year we were able to establish them in our backyard. (I also learned not to allow the pretty white flowers to go to seed else all of my non-mowed areas will become a meadow of Frostweed).

The stalks grow 5-7 feet tall and can attract butterflies and other insects. The Wildflowers of Arkansas book says that the leaves are eaten by deer. They grow along streams, roadsides, open slopes and valleys and bloom in late summer and fall.

The really cool thing is that in late fall or on certain days of winter--when the ground is well-saturated and unfrozen, but the nights are cold--the bottom of the frostweed stems will still actively pump water from the perennial roots up through the base of the stem. Since the above ground portion of the stem is dead wood and usually has broken off, the water has nowhere to go but out. The water hits the cold air and immediately turns to ice. The water pressure inside the plant continues to push it out in gorgeous ribbons of ice called "ice flowers" or "frost flowers". Each one is unique. The thin ribbons are adorned with minute striations or lines--like spun ice--when viewed up close, formed by ribs in the tissues at the base of the plant. By late morning they have all disappeared due to the warm sun. Their ephemeral beauty makes them all the more special.

I've seen this nondescript plant for years without giving it any special thought or knowing its name. Now I      notice it all along the roadsides and bordering riparian areas (wooded corridors along creeks and rivers). I've seen the pretty ice flowers along Hwy 16 as I drive to work.

Here are some more photos of our frost flowers ...

Here's where I stripped the outer layer of lower stem to see where the "frost" is coming from:

Proto-Rap and Bob Dylan

I confess that I am not a fan of rap "music". The quotation marks symbolize my problem with it, and with its twin, hip-hop--they simply are not musical to my ear. This genre sounds like angry people talking fast as if they are making a game of it, so I'll have to listen over and over to slowly unwrap their message. Some are crude and vulgar and demeaning to women. No thanks. Lest I be viewed as a crusty, old musical curmudgeon, let me offer a couple of positive points before I move into my thesis. I will say that rap has provided a platform for many people--black, white, and brown--to give voice to the issues in their lives. And rap/hip-hop has penetrated and expanded into middle-class white America and pop radio maybe beyond even that of the 1960's musical icons. That said, let's move to Mr. '60's Protest Icon, himself--Bob Dylan.

For the last several years, a recurring thought to me has been that maybe Bob Dylan invented rap. Every time I hear his song, Subterranean Homesick Blues, I think, "that is not rap, but it sounds like its parent". It was recorded way back in 1965 (when I was 11), on the Bringing It All Back Home album, which, by the way, also included his iconic Mr. Tambourine Man. (if I'm overusing the word "iconic", it's hard to think about Bob Dylan in the context of the '60's without using it. Dylan is the one that moved popular music out of the rut of silly songs like the Beatles "I love you, yeah, yeah, yeah" and on to more substantial ideas.) Here is a video from a 1967 documentary--before there were music videos--of Bob Dylan creatively fooling around with his song playing in the audio.


Check out the bearded guy in the background who is the last to meander away. He is Allen Ginsburg, famous beat poet of the 1950's and one of the mentors of Bob Dylan and scads of other hippie generation movers and shakers.

Let me know what you think of my thesis about Bob Dylan being the first rapper. By the way, Dylan's song is just another incarnation of various talking blues songs that Dylan heard from his other mentor, Woody Guthrie. It seems that even the most creative artists reshape other artists' ideas, add their own reflection, and present them to a new audience. That's good . . . what Pete Seeger calls "the folk process".