Banjos, mandolins, w

ashboards, accordions, resonator guitars and stand up basses…Hot rods, motorcycles, trucker hats, aprons, and lots and lots of tattoos…whiskey, Pabst Blue Ribbon, and homemade moonshine…these are all artifacts of a culture. Cultural movements come about as a result of a number of different factors. Political, social, environmental and geographic influences cause cultural change. The history of the United States can largely be illustrated through artifacts, the most powerful of which is music. Music has the power to move us. According to Tolstoy, “music is the shorthand of emotion.”

As an anthropologist, I have been surprised at the cause of cultural change within the populations I have worked with. Often change comes about as a result of material need. Marx is not terribly far off in certain understandings of human motivation. But emotion, I will argue, comes next as a force that drives people to do things…to behave in a certain manner. Music, art, and film harness the emotional powers of human expression in remarkable ways in nearly every culture on earth.

Here in the United States, a variety of players have begun to coalesce in their support of a growing number of musicians whose music is derived from many different genres. Folk, country, bluegrass, Irish or Celtic music, punk, blues, and classic rock are all drawn upon by these musicians in nearly alchemic fashion. Imagine a family tree with limbs labeled with each of these musical tra

ditions, meeting at a trunk, which when tapped, yields fabulous

syrup…the kind you’d want on your pancakes every morning.

I don’t know what to call this music. It is hard to document and illustrate something that doesn’t have a name. Hardcore music was named as such…so was punk…so was rock-n-roll, and blues, and jazz. Some terms that have been used to describe it by other writers are: Rockabilly, Alt-Country, Outlaw Country, and Punkgrass. Yet each of these terms fails to describe the entirety of this “scene.” 

The entries you will begin to see here over the next few months are transcriptions of conversations I have had (or will have had) with some key players in this music scene. Some are prominent musicians, others up and coming ones. I will include musicians, artists, and filmmakers as well as record company executives and festival organizers. The artists and musicians of a given music genre are the blood that courses through the veins of the listening population. They give life and expression to shared feelings, sentiments and desires. It is my hope to provide vignettes or small portraits of those who are making this music happen.  And when the music happens, culture shifts and changes.

I chose UNITE Webzine as a venue for this project for a few reasons.

The first is that James Unite asked me to do an interview. Sometimes that is all that it takes to get something started. The second is that I think there is an unarticulated relationship between punk/hardcore music and what I am attempting to illustrate here. I don’t want to bore everyone with an historical account of blue collar tough times and post-industrial society, but the spirit of working class Great Britain in the 1970s and the spirit of the Rustbelt and southern United States today are kindred in nature. I see these two musical genres as related and I liked how James permitted the artists to speak for themselves. That is

my goal: to be a vehicle through which the story of the players in this music movement get told. After all, it is not difficult to look at one’s life as a narrative, a novel, or a screenplay if you choose that approach. We all have a story to tell. It’s rare that we get an opportunity to tell it such that anyone else will listen. Here’s the opportunity for some of you. I hope it goes well!

Karen Abney Korn