Sometimes in a creative life, you find yourself out on a precariously thin limb, and looking forward all you can see is a proliferation of branches, each one of them thinner than the one it shoots off of. I found myself climbing such a metaphorical tree some years back working on a long-term project, and have had to spend a few years retracing my steps and then trying to climb the tree again. 

 

But misadventure though it may have been, that tree-climb was still an adventure; and despite the archetypal fallout between myself and my co-conspirator Christian Nagle, we worked our asses off and had a blast doing it. In hindsight, I'd say our main problem was climbing out on too many different limbs at once, spinning off multiple side projects without bringing any of them to completion. We just had too many great ideas, and went with all of them, when in fact we only needed one.

 

That, and the fact that we ran out of money. 

 

Sometime I may write more about the saga of the Fertile Crescent/Great American Music Project/Snake in the Kitchen/Doppelgänger Pictures (see what I mean) saga and my adventures with Christian , but looking back over my old blog posts I came across this one, which describes the genesis of the tale and gives some sense of the enthusiasm we had for our mission.

 

To embark on any true adventure, one must take on the persona of the Fool, for stepping out into the unknown is always a gamble. But win or lose, if you live a mindful life, you always come away wiser and richer for the experience. 

 

What follows is a missive written the night before we embarked: 

 

 

In the morning we ride…

 

Friday morning, that is, on the road before dawn, Nagle and I  making a beeline to Nashville, Tennessee, from whence we commence a journey through the South, Deep South, and South by Southwest, to discover and uncover the swampiest, deep-hollerest, twangiest, rockin-est, funkiest, most absolutely legit representatives of American roots music to whom fortune, friends, and friends of friends lead us.

 

The seed of this plan was sprouted, as these things often do, by a back porch conversation between two old friends, talking about taking a road trip together.  I had a few assignments, all music related, that happened to fall along an arc on the map that encompassed just about every major fountainhead of American music.  Nashville.  Memphis. Mississippi. New Orleans.  West Louisiana.  Austin.  And Christian, a veteran of the Nashville punk scene from way back, now an award-winning writer and a documentary filmmaker, had a few friends in high places, and one or two others hiding under a mossy stone thirty miles down a dirt road, all of whom had connections to various roots musicians all along the exact trail I was taking. What would he think, I asked him, about riding shotgun with his HDcam and shooting some footage; we could find some old-timers, some young upstarts, some blind fiddle players, some crazy hybrid bands playing some kind of zydeco-punk-bluegrass with Duane Allman-style slide guitar. Or whatever. We both knew enough of what we didn’t know to know that there was probably more incredible music out there just waiting to be heard than we could even fathom.   As we continued to toss the idea about, over-caffeinated and mutually prone to flights of fancy, it slowly became clear to both of us. We had to make a film.   

 

And so, after many back-and-forth emails and a lot of texting and skyping and a few more back porch conversations, we began to reach out to our friends.  We sent out an email, asking for help on what we had begun to call “The Fertile Crescent Project”.  Fertile, because we realized that between the southern Appalachian mountains and the hills of Texas there was a spring, a river, a deep well–use whatever metaphor you like–that from the early days of European settlement and on into the present has continued to bubble up with some of the most exciting and world-changing music that history has ever witnessed.  Robert Johnson.  Louis Armstrong. Muddy Waters. Elvis. Bill Monroe.  The Neville Brothers.  Stevie Ray Vaughn. And this region, this crescent, this series of arcs that lopes in a south-westerly direction along the former strongholds of the Cherokee and the Chickasaw and the Choctaw, continues to be a hotbed and an incubator for music into the twenty-first century.

 

With all those thoughts in mind, I dashed off a précis to Christian, he made a few modifications, and we sent off the email, thinking we might get one or two responses to help us get started along the way:

 

The Fertile Crescent: Following the Trail of American Music

They say that Jazz is America’s only truly indigenous music.  Whoever coined that idea must never have been to a juke joint, or stayed up all night sitting around a fire at an old-time festival, or watched pickers and fiddlers blaze through suped-up folksongs at a bluegrass concert.  Or listened to country radio on a long drive.   Or followed the second-line of a brass band throwing out two-chord jams through the streets of New Orleans.

 

The worldwide domination of American pop, hip-hop, and rock aside, the melting pot of diverse cultural influences that spawned American roots music has given rise to more distinct styles  than any other country can boast.   And in the American South, along the folkways that trace a diagonal path from Virginia to Texas, those traditions are alive and well, and continue to inform and influence musicians and captivate listeners around the world.

 

We are on a journey to trace the “Fertile Crescent” of indigenous American music.  From the mountains of Southern Appalachia where immigrant homesteaders holding on to a half-remembered oral tradition of Scots-Irish song, dance, and instrumental music created the primal mountain sound known today as “old-time;” to the hills of Kentucky where virtuoso musicians took the essential elements of old-time and turned it into the “high lonesome sound” of bluegrass; to Music City, Nashville USA, home of country, alt-country, roots rock, and the highest per-capita concentration of musical talent in the world; to Memphis, home of Gospel, Beale Street blues, and Elvis; and on down through Mississippi, where Delta blues rose up through the sweat and struggle of African slaves working in cotton fields that stretched from horizon to horizon, transforming ancestral sounds from Senegambia and the Congo into the dirty dust-my-broom 12-bar stomp that carried the seeds of rock and roll in its threshers; to New Orleans, birthplace of jazz, home of the world’s greatest brass bands, and a bubbling soup of multicultural traditions and musical styles, from the funk of the Neville Brothers to the raunchy Bounce music of Cheeky Black, to the ghostly African call-and-response chants of Mardi Gras Indians, and the proud traditions of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band…. From there we move west, into Texas, where white folks grab the blues and crank it up to eleven, and the Spanish influence gets stronger.  From the ghosts of Stevie Ray Vaughn’s Texas blues to the breakneck pedal-steel-and-fiddle rhythms of Western Swing, and into Tejano territory, where Mexican and American folk blend into a modern troubadour tradition that sings of the struggles of life along a border fraught with racism, drug trafficking, and political chess-games.

 

We will follow a connect-the-dots route through these musical incubators, seeking the sung and the unsung, the big-names, the diamonds in the rough, the club owners and songwriters, backyard pickers and session masters…wherever the trail of breadcrumbs leads, we will follow, seeking to capture a little bit of the soul of American music, and maybe learn something in the process.  Any of you along the way who wish to lend us a helping hand, either by uncovering hidden gems or offering us a meal and a crash pad, we’d thank you kindly.  We most certainly would.

 

 

 

The response was overwhelming.

 

Within days, we had more replies, with more suggestions of people to contact or people to see, than we knew we would ever be able to follow up on in the month that we had allotted for the trip.  And every day the list grows a bit larger, and the names a little bit bigger.  So already we know, this is just the beginning.  We don’t want to be getting too far ahead of ourselves, but we both know instinctively how far this thing could go.  We’ll confide that knowledge to each other, but to the public we are trying our best to stay humble and just let thing unfold as they must.  So for now, we will pack my black 2000 Cherokee Limited, already past the 250k mark, with guitars and gear, and hit the road on a wing and a prayer, hoping that fortune will be with us.

 

If you don’t hear from us soon, call for backup.  We might be stuck in a ditch somewhere.