Creative Activism

Conversations on Music, Film, Literature, and Other Radical Arts

Rachel Lee Rubin, Rachel Lee Rubin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501337222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection brings together interviews with a compelling range of musicians, artists, and activists from around the globe. What does it mean for an artist to be "political"? Moving away from a narrow idea about politics that is organized around elections, advocacy groups, or concrete manifestos, the subjects of Creative Activism do their work through song, poetry, painting, and other arts. The interviews take us from Oakland to London to Johannesburg and from the Occupy movement to the coal mines of Appalachia to the fantasy worlds created by some of our most fascinating writers of spectacular fiction. Listening to the important "cultural workers" of our time challenges any idea that some other time was the golden age of political art: Creative Activism gives us a front-row seat to the thrilling artistic activism of our own moment.

Section 1

Coal

1

“I’ll Throw This Apple Atcha”: Mining and Meaning According to Billy Edd Wheeler

The trajectory of Billy Edd Wheeler’s life is striking. Born in 1932 in Whitesville, West Virginia, he grew up in a nearby small coal camp called Highcoal. The community, he recalls, was home to about 200 families; it was crowded into a valley and did not receive much sunshine. He learned music from other miners and church singing—not recorded music, because he had no access to that. He received his first guitar from Sears, Roebuck & Company for Christmas when he was 14, and wrote his first song, “Paperboy Blues,” when he was 15.

By the time he was 16 years old, Wheeler had learned first-hand about the drudgery of mining. (He would look back on those days in his often-covered song “High Flyin’ Bird,” which he describes as having roots in youthful daydreams about following birds who soared away over the mountains.) So he worked his way out of the valley and attended high school and junior college in Swannanoa, North Carolina, earning tuition by laboring on the campus. In 1955, he graduated from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky—a tuition-free institution set up to educate students in Southern Appalachia. (Berea, the first college in the US South to be both integrated and co-ed, remains tuition-free today.) While at Berea, Wheeler was asked to contribute a few of his songs to an album of the College’s choir, and through this, music publisher Harold Newman encountered Wheeler’s music; he helped Wheeler sign his first record deal, with Monitor Records. As a result, his first album, Billy Edd, USA, came out in 1961.

From Berea, he went to Yale University’s School of Drama to study playwriting. (He would go on to write and compose twenty plays and musicals, including a folk opera commissioned by National Geographic and three outdoor dramas.) Of those days, he has mused that he was seen (by fellow Yale students) as a “country bumpkin,” but that he was also seen (by fellow Appalachians) as frighteningly intellectual. Arguably, Wheeler proves that these two external definitions are not mutually exclusive in his six books of Appalachian humor, which reveal that those seen as “country bumpkins” are frequently what Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci would call “organic intellectuals.”

While at Yale, Wheeler would head to New York on the weekends to try to further his musical career, eventually moving there into a one-room apartment with no furniture—not even a bed. This chapter of his life was a fascinating urban follow-up to his uncomfortable mining-town days—but is a significant index of his strong desire to be a successful songwriter. Ultimately, Wheeler’s songs would be frequently recorded by a range of artists. For instance, rock and roll star Neil Young recorded “High Flyin’ Bird” on his 2012 album Americana. Johnny Cash and June Carter’s 1967 version of Wheeler’s song “Jackson” reached number 2 on the Billboard country chart. A range of other musicians have recorded Wheeler’s songs, including bluegrass innovators Flatt & Scruggs, psychedelic rock band Jefferson Airplane, folksinger Judy Collins, and cultural icon Elvis Presley.

While Wheeler has left his mark mostly as a songwriter, he ultimately recorded fifteen albums, including his songs and spoken-word “mountain tales.” He has received numerous awards for his work. Both of his college alma maters conferred on him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, Berea in 2005 and Warren Wilson College in 2011. Wheeler was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 2001, the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2002, and the West Virginia Hall of Fame in 2007. He has received thirteen awards from ASCAP, and other awards for his poetry. Wheeler is also an accomplished painter; much of this interview took place in his studio with finished paintings and in-progress works surrounding us.

While the arc of Wheeler’s career is striking for its wideness, his concern about the environmental and labor costs of mining has characterized his work throughout. He frequently talks with dismay about strip mining and mountain-top removal, mournfully noting the resultant destruction of natural beauty. His mining songs have been very influential; for instance, multiple award winning and charting folk-country artist Kathy Mattea, who had two coal-mining grandfathers, recorded an album of eleven mining songs in 2008; three were written by Wheeler. He has written two plays about mining. The first of these, Slatefall (1965), written while he was still a student, describes a tragedy striking a coal-mining community. The second, Mossie and the Strippers (1980), is about a woman who lies down in front of a bulldozer and pours molasses into gas tanks to prevent their tearing up the mountain; the play is based on a historical figure known as Widow Combs, a 65-year-old Kentucky woman who did lie down in front of a bulldozer that was preparing to strip-mine her farm in 1965. In short, Wheeler has an artistic version of what he calls in his most-covered song a “coal tattoo.”

Selected discography

Billy Edd: USA (1961)

Billy Edd and Bluegrass, Too (1962)

A New Bag of Songs (1964)

The Wheeler Man (1965)

Goin’ Town and Country (1966)

Paper Birds (1967)

I Ain’t the Worrying Kind (1968)

Nashville Zodiac (1969)

Love (1971)

Wild Mountain Flowers (1979)

Songs I Wrote with Chet (1995)

Milestones (A Self-Portrait) (2001)

New Wine from Old Vines (2006)

Rubin:How did you start singing?

Wheeler:Well, I started in church. We had sort of an interdenominational church in High Coal. High Coal was a very small coal-mining town in Boone County, West Virginia. And this black preacher used to come to our church in the evenings, and he would teach shape note singing.¹ [sings] Do re mi fa so la ti. My voice is not very good right now.

That was my first foray into singing. And then, when I was about 13, my parents, my mother and stepfather, bought me a guitar. It was a Kay, a round top, fourteen dollar guitar.² A terrible guitar because the frets stood so high, it almost made your fingers bleed to press them all the way down. So it took me a while to get used to that. And then some of the coal miners there at High Coal taught me my first chords.

I knew basically three chords—G, C, and D. It’s amazing how many songs you can write with just three chords. Later on, I learned a few augmented chords and a couple minor chords, but that was about it.

Rubin:So coal mining has been in your music, you can say, from the very beginning, if the miners taught you the chords!

Wheeler:And I remember, after I came to Warren Wilson College as a high school student in Swannanoa, North Carolina—I was 15-and-a-half—a couple times in the summers I would go home, and I got jobs working for the coal company. And so, I got a feel of what it was like. I mean, it was the hardest work I’ve ever done, because we did it with a pick and shovel. There was a prospector, he was an older man, and on the High Coal side, in Boone County, there was a big mountain, and they were mining that. And they wanted to see how far it went.

And so, we went around to Kanawha County, which was only a couple miles away, and went around there and about six miles up to Dorothy, West Virginia, where that same seam was supposed to come out. And I don’t know how many miles it was in between. And they wanted to see how pure the vein was there.

And so, Mr. Hudson and I, it was tough getting our equipment up there. We had a wheelbarrow, and we had a pick and shovel and dynamite. And dynamite comes in little waxed packages about an inch-and-a-half in diameter, about six inches long, in brown waxed paper. We had a rope tied to the front of that wheelbarrow, so he would push and I would pull to get up to the site where the level of the vein was.

And then, we started picking our way into the mountain. And the seam of coal was only about thirty-six inches high. So we were on our knees all the time. What would happen, we would pick in as far as we could, and we were going in about five feet wide, maybe six. And when it got so hard with the slate and the coal, he would take an auger with a breastplate and I would put myself against the breastplate and he would turn it and drill a hole back in there. And we would take turns doing that—sometimes he’d have the breastplate and I had the auger and turned it.

And when we got it in far enough, he would put a couple of sticks of dynamite in. Then he would put a cap, a blasting cap that’s hooked to a wire. He would open up that dynamite and stick that blasting cap in there, and then seal it back. And then he would trail the wires, very thin wires, and then put more sticks in behind it, and just tamp them in good.

They connected to a larger cord, and we would take that out to the opening and take it around to the side, and then he would touch those wires to a battery, and BOOM. [Laughter] It would just blow everything out. And as we went in, we had cut trees ourselves, and we’d put them in to support the roof. Well, the dynamite blew those out, so we’d have to take them back in and reset them.

We did that day after day after day, all summer long. After the first week, I didn’t think I could get out of bed. Every muscle in my body was tired and sore. But I had to. And so, we kept going back. And at the end of the summer, I was in the best shape that I’ve ever been in in my life.

Rubin:Best and worst, probably.

Wheeler:[Laughter] Yeah, from that work. So that was my on-hands experience with coal.

Rubin:How do yo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Section 1 Coal
• Section 2 War and Peace
• Section 3 Borders
• Section 4 : Sex, Gender, and Sexuality
• Section 5 Economic Justice
• Section 6 Prisons
• Section 7 Transformations
• Contextualizing Timeline
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page