Middle Atlantic Folklife Association

Water the Roots: A Proposal
By Bau Graves

Most people in the music industry can trace their passion back to a moment of youthful epiphany when they first heard Muddy Waters, or Hank Williams, or Charlie Parker or Woody Guthrie, or Public Enemy, or whoever – and the power and excitement of that instant changed their lives forever. That music emerged from the background noise of America, reached out, and just grabbed hold of us. But the music that we love today would simply never have been created if all those masters of innovation had not had a deep pool of tradition from which to draw.

Those pools are fed by a cultural ecosystem that is now seriously compromised. The granddaddy sitting on his porch teaching a few tunes to his grandchild, or unleashing a rowdy favorite at the local dance hall, or moving the congregation to a frenzy on Sunday morning – this community-centered heritage that is the very foundation of artistic creativity has nowhere to turn for its sustenance. The entertainment industry is dominated by a handful of multinational conglomerates that strictly limit what most people can see or hear. Government pays lip service to honoring our heritage – but the budgets tell a very different story: support for culture of any kind barely registers on the public agenda, and funds for traditional arts are a tiny fraction of that minuscule allocation. Private foundations that offer the lion’s share of support for public culture have shown little interest in supporting the roots of our heritage. There is not a single major national foundation that includes support for traditional culture within its mission. The Bill Monroes and Robert Johnsons of tomorrow are dying on the vine for lack of sustenance.

This points to a need for an innovative mechanism for getting support to the grassroots artists who need it the most. If the corporations, governments and foundations don’t get it, where can we turn? One possibility might be the community of popular artists. Country, rock and hip hop stars do get it – most of them got there because they had one of those life-changing epiphanies. They immediately and intuitively understand that without nurturing the roots of our heritage, the innovators of tomorrow will have nothing upon which to build.

Stadium scale performances generate a lot of money. A typical coliseum concert can have a ticket gross of $250,000 – $500,000. If ten major stars agreed to donate a single night’s work, it could generate several million dollars to distribute in support of traditional heritage – more than any foundation currently gives. If a hundred artists gave up one night’s take, the resulting $20 million would dwarf our combined federal and state outlays for traditional arts. Do it annually for a decade and the investment would make this the most ambitious project in support of grassroots culture in the history of American philanthropy. That’s a project that can change people’s lives.

What would the money do? It could offer a living wage to master traditional artists and foster the mechanisms of distribution and touring that can make their voices heard. It could subsidize the performances, recordings and new media expansion needed to get this critical work to the public. It could help revive vital American art forms – Franco-American fiddling, Puerto Rican bomba drumming, or old-timey banjo picking – that are currently facing the long diminuendo. It could generate an international network of presenters whose first sensitivity is to the artists right in their own communities, and to the bonds that connect them with the entire planet. It could amplify the public’s awareness of its own heritage, and maybe even entice some of those corporations, governments and foundations to start paying attention.
How could this work? At a meeting last year that the Fund for Folk Culture convened to discuss the support of refugee cultures in the US, Robert Baron suggested that “What we need is a National Performance Network for the traditional arts.” NPN was designed twenty years ago to support emerging contemporary performers and move their work around the country: relatively straightforward goals. They developed a system of linked venues with a guaranteed fee subsidy to accomplish this, and it has been a boon for the development of the whole field of contemporary performance. A modest infusion of cash has had a positive and measurable result. The folk arts need something similar.

However, calling it an “NPN for traditional arts” misstates the intention and runs the risk of (further) ghettoizing the folk arts. What we’re really after is creating an infrastructure of support systems for community based expressive culture that can and should cover the spectrum from tradition to innovation. The system we are struggling to imagine has to include some other components that are not a part of the NPN model and that may ultimately be of more significance to the field than the sharing of resources that networks facilitate (important as that would be).

A. It is not just ethnic artists that we want to move around the country but a method of community engagement that discards the outsider/curatorial model of public arts programming in favor of a participatory one. “Who makes the decisions about how a culture gets represented?” is the pertinent question. It is not necessary to commission a study of how to do this. There are many public cultural facilitators around the country who have been doing it for years. Among us is probably the core of a new network. What we need is a strategy – or probably a whole grab bag of strategies – that can lead many other organizations to move towards a community-generated model of public culture. It is easy to imagine the kinds of funding stipulations that could spread this gospel, even among grants that are serving the most mainstream arts organizations. Our goal is not to funnel resources to a limited network, but to begin to expand in ever-widening circles of influence. So network partners will have a key role in facilitating this – but will ultimately be of less importance in a widespread scene that is necessarily highly decentralized.

B. There are already existing networks serving many ethnic communities below the public radar – for example, the connections among Somali musicians in Ontario, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Maine. A part of the charge of the network partners and any fellow travelers they can enlist will be to find those networks and connect local artists and activists to them. This can create a network that is linked to a whole series of other networks, some of which are extremely informal and most of which are outside the nonprofit sphere. In terms of getting the work around the country, some of these networks could be far more effective than anything we can create. But they are so informal that many emerge and disappear rapidly. Maintaining these alliances requires a lot of flexibility.

The other side of this coin is the imperative that I think many of us feel to drag this work into the public square. By doing so we’re implicitly claiming that it is as vital and valid as the elite arts that still dominate in schools, concert halls and museums everywhere. This is also a refrain familiar to anyone who works regularly with ethnic communities: they want the general audience to see and appreciate how cool they are. Perhaps what we need is to find points of intersection between our nonprofit world and all those ethnic networks so we can feed each other. We need them and they need us, too, but there’s been precious little crossover between Carnegie Hall and the ethnic banquet hall.

C. The international angle – making connections of American communities with their homelands and vice versa – adds an enormous layer of complexity and expense to this endeavor. I can just hear the funders saying “Well, let’s just get this thing started domestically, and then if it works we can expand to international work.” But if we restrict our vision and pretend global connectivity isn’t integral, we’ll be doing a great disservice to our community partners and ultimately end up with just half the loaf. (This is not just the case for community-based culture, but for every aspect of the arts in America. Our shameful refusal to aggressively support international exchange is damaging us in ways we can’t fully grasp, and has social, political, even military implications.) Globalsim is the name of the game, and you can bet that Disney is going to be representing all those other cultures their way. We have a moral obligation to do whatever we can to offer an alternative view. From the perspective of community partners, and the general arts audience, international work will be the most exciting and visible piece of this project.

How to make this vision a reality? We start with one artist. If one top level entertainer adopts this project as a cause, and agrees to act as an ambassador to the music world, the concept can sell itself. Once a handful of performers commit, the project could build quickly – participation would be viewed as cool (and a tax deduction, too). This is all about the support of artists by artists. It is about taking control of the systems that support our shared heritage, and doing something about it that is simple, tangible, and free of the complications and bureaucracy that hamstring so much cultural development. Artists will want to be a part of it, because the tradition has already given so much to them.

This is a cause in search of a champion, or an institutional base that can afford to devote some time to its nurture. It has been discussed at several gatherings of folklorists and arts activists – but then we all go home to our own stations of overwork, and the vision drifts off into dreamland. Where will we find a spark than can ignite such an effort and change the world? Mick, Bruce, Prince: we await your call.

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Bau Graves is Executive Director of the Jefferson Center in Roanoke, Virginia, and author of Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community and the Public Purpose (University of Illinois Press, 2005). He can be reached at bgraves@jeffcenter.org, 540-343-2624, x202.