“The Roots Would Glow in the Moonlight”
"Cuban Musician" by Leshaines123 is licensed under CC BY 2.0
Cotton Farmer Blues
This Cotton Farmer Blues song came from Todd Harvey, Collections Specialist in Reference at the American Folklife Center and Curator of the Alan Lomax Collection. He and Nancy encouraged us on to build a discography, “This is surprisingly difficult. I only found one song about farming that relates to the soil quality.”
Tulare Dust
Steven Hatcher, Folk & Traditional Arts Director at the Idaho Commission on the Arts in Boise sent in a song about interactions with poor soil conditions. “This is from the '71 album "Someday We'll Look Back" by Merle Haggard & the Strangers,” Steven shared and then dropped the lyrics:
Tulare dust in a farm boy's nose
Wondering where the freight train goes
Standin' in the field by the railroad track
Cursin' this strap on my cotton sack
I can see mom and dad with shoulders low
Both of 'em pickin' on a double row
They do it for a livin' because they must
That's life like it is in the Tulare dust
The California sun was something new
That when we arrived in '42
And I can still remember how my daddy cussed
The tumbleweeds here in the Tulare dust
The wally fever was a comin' fate
To the farmworkers here in the Golden State
And I miss Oklahoma but I'll stay
If I must and help make a livin' in the Tulare dust
The Tulare dust in a farm boy's nose
Wondering where the freight train goes
Standin' in the field by the railroad track
Cursin' this strap on my cotton sack
We often hitch our daily soil work to harmonies and rhythms but our annual Urban Soils Symposium is the opportunity to have music be an intentional point of entry into soil — songs that tell the histories of places, songs that describe working the land and music that echoes the unexpected poetry that emerges from the ground.
USI geologist and lab and field manager George Lozefski, also an accomplished musician, has performed during each symposium and facilitates heady conversations with a band member’s delight. As part of activating the Art Extension Service’s voice in the 2020 conversations on soil x health, I looked for a few digitally accessible recordings with hopes of pulling together a discography/audiography. Soil, when mentioned at all, is often a nested lyric and more typically it’s just expressed melodically as a combination of pitch and rhythm and so combing through the genres of worksongs, rhymes and calls, boll weevil blues, and on to songs about flooding, agricultural pests, settlement, garden was looking for a drop of water in the ocean.
I reached out to Nancy Groce, an ethnomusicologist and Senior Folklife Specialist at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, but their song collections aren’t topical (they’re geographic) and the site-specific searches didn’t yield much, but generated good conversations. Nancy graciously sent a call out to colleagues and here’s some of what came back. Add yours in the comments.
Strawberries and Glory
"Strawberry Vendor" by thelouie is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Vienna Carroll’s song "Strawberries and Glory" was my local anchor for urban soils and their fruits. Vienna and her band, “The Folk” pay homage to NYC subway candy callers as an extension of agricultural fruit callers — like the strawberry vendors she grew up hearing. Vienna has been gardening in Harlem for over 30 years and her album, Harlem Field Songs, is one to get.
Tending the Commons
Tending the Commons is a large oral history project on traditional plants, harvesting and foodways in Appalachia that was conducted by the American Folklife Center in the 1980s-ish. There’s not a lot of music in the interviews, but worth a walkthrough. You’ll hear about ramp patches and the wild bounty of dandelions, poke, shawnee lettuce, woolen britches, creasies, and lamb's tongue that follow. There are the mountaintop removals and the exposed seams of coal, each with earthy and vegetal voices. Listen up:
"The roots would glow in the moonlight" / Woodlands soil as fertilizer / Soil quality and biodiversity in the cove forest / Rich soil on eastern slopes and north hollows / "Basswood really likes the rich soils." / Soil types and the appearance of ginseng.
Dust Bowl Ballads
Kate Blalack, Archivist of the Woody Guthrie Center and Mark Allan Jackson of Middle Tennessee State University lifted up Oklahoman Woody Guthrie who wrote several songs about the Dust Bowl, and others about environmental conditions. The published versions of the lyrics for these songs can be found here and include:
(I can’t mention the Dust Bowl without lifting up The Land Institute).