Art to Start Your Week: May 16th, 2022

Jimmie Driftwood and Thomas Hart Benton

Well, readers, its election week in Plymouth, and no doubt people on all sides of various issues and candidates are a bit tense, so hopefully some art will help calm the waters.

The first is an interesting folk tune from the Ozarks, that highland region of northwestern Arkansas, southwestern Missouri, and northeastern Oklahoma that is culturally a piece of Appalachia on the western side of the Mississippi River.

The region’s folk music became prominent in the great American folk revival of the mid-20th century, and the Morris family of folk musicians found themselves recorded by folklorists like Alan Lomax. James Corbitt Morris, known by his stage name Jimmie Driftwood, played a unique guitar, made from a fence rail, an ox yoke, and a piece of the headboard of his grandmother’s bed. He was also a teacher and an outdoorsman whose life spanned most of the 20th century (1907-1998).

( Driftwood with his guitar — photo via Wikimedia Commons)

Driftwood wrote approximately 6,000 songs, including “The Battle of New Orleans” — originally written to help his high school history students learn about the Jacksonian era, he sold it at a roadside venue to country musician Johnny Horton, who made it a hit in 1959.

Here is Jimmie Driftwood’s song “Beautiful Buffalo River,” about a stream in the Ozarks that he helped preserve as a National Scenic River in the 1970s:

The wild Buffalo River, as the above video notes, was painted by famous American regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, himself a descendant of one of Missouri’s most prominent political families (his forbear and namesake, Sen. Thomas Hart Benton, was one of the first United States Senators from Missouri).

I did not know until quite recently that Hart Benton the painter has a southeastern Massachusetts connection, namely his having vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard for decades.

So here is a very interesting piece of his, depicting Chilmark on the Vineyard, from a hundred years ago:

( Chilmark Landscape, by Thomas Hart Benton, 1922. Photo credit — Wikimedia Commons ).

It’s a busy time for many of us, and I did sprain and bruise, though not break, my hand, so I will leave off for now.

Best of luck to all this week!