The anomie of America’s divorce from nature could result from the loss of livelihoods which involved being outdoors, like fishing or farming. Our film’s song composer Dirk Powell has two family recollections about this change.

DIRK: My great-uncle Clyde, another gifted Kentucky musician, used to talk to me about the days when subsistence farming was simply life. It wasn’t a matter of being poor. It was a matter of doing what you did. Though that type of agriculture is seen as vastly different from hunting-and-gathering, in some ways it is closer to that oldest form of human existence than to the modern idea of a career. For farmers like my great-uncle, as for our nomadic ancestors, life did not fall into compartments. Work was not a separate thing, and neither was the environment, the spiritual world, or any other aspect of life. “We were always telling jokes, singing songs, always right next to each other, always so close,” he told me. “It was better. It was hard work, but it was better.”

And yet, there can be a tendency to romanticize those days, I know. I felt the brunt of doing just that from my paternal grandmother, Lizena Davis, one afternoon when I was about 14. Having grown increasingly familiar with the music, I found myself playing songs for her that she hadn’t heard in 30 or 40 years. In the middle of “John Hardy,” she burst into spontaneous singing, recalling a verse from what must have seemed another lifetime. “He’s been to the east, and he’s been to the west, he’s been to this world all around. He’s been to the river, and he’s been baptized, now he’s on his burying ground….” No sooner had she sung these words then she stopped herself cold – “You can talk about those mountains all you want,” she said, “But they were nothing but hardship to me!”

I understood. I hadn’t lived that way. It was easy for me to glorify a rural life. And yet, I knew that trading it all away for the material comfort of the American Dream was also wrong. I didn’t discount her, but neither did I discount my pappaw and my Uncle Clyde and the times when the family was together, in the fields, working hard but singing, laughing, praying – not spread out between California, New York, and Louisiana, as just my immediate family is today. I recall those times of being together, in one place, tied so deeply and intimately to that place that it can become all places. Being connected so deeply to that piece of earth that all the earth is known.

Posted on June 10th, 2009 in Christians, Environmentalists, Neo-Traditional Music, Parents