Jon Langford & Rob Lentz
Take me where the cement grows
Certainly the installation does demonstrate a sort of devotion, though, as with many acts of worship, both the motives and the beneficiaries are ambiguous. Take Langford’s paintings. For the most part, each of them focuses on a single Barn Dance star: cowgirl singer Patsy Montana, for example, or square-dance caller Arkie the Arkansas Woodchopper. Langford’s MO is to render a single promotional image of the performer and then doodle around it–cute little country-western icons, flowers, musical notes, whatnot. He then scuffs the surface of the paintings to make them look old. Finally, he scrawls portentous little messages, mostly single words like neglect and erased, to let you know that these performers have been, er, neglected and erased. On many of the paintings, red flecks suggest blood–presumably to imply that a violent crime against culture has been committed, but maybe, for all I can tell, simply by accident.
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But the problem with Langford’s art is not that it’s shallow or repetitive. It’s that the only aspect of these performers that really seems to interest him is that they’ve been forgotten. Practically the only thing you’ll learn from looking at his images of Georgie Goebel or Homer & Jethro or Rex Allen is that nobody knows who they are anymore. Lentz’s dioramas are significantly more subtle and well realized than Langford’s efforts, but their focus is the same. For instance, he’s constructed a porcelain model of Bob Atcher, a cowboy singer. In terms of design, it’s virtually indistinguishable from commercially produced kitsch–if the Atcher figurine were relabeled “Roy Rogers,” I suspect Lentz could sell it in the Nashville memorabilia shops he refers to in his artist’s statement. In other words, what makes the figurine art is simply the low profile of its subject. Performers like Atcher are fetishized not so much because of their talent as because of their obscurity, a line of thinking that conveniently shifts attention from the hillbillies who made the records to the urban hipsters who “rediscover” them.
You would never know any of this from visiting the Cultural Center exhibit, which studiously avoids any indication that the Barn Dance might have been a little slick. It’s actually kind of fun to walk around and see how the artists dodge the issue. For instance, Langford and Lentz tell you that WLS music director John Lair left in 1937–but they don’t tell you that the reason he departed (according to the Encyclopedia of Country Music) was that he was committed to hillbilly music and felt the National Barn Dance, increasingly obsessed with the cowboy fad, was not.
Romanticizing the past was a part of country music from the very beginning, but, as Kincaid’s story shows, it had its limitations. Yes, WLS was a “comforting beacon for thousands of migrants who headed north,” as Langford says: it played music they were familiar with, in a style that recalled their past. But an equally important factor in the Barn Dance’s appeal was that it was urban. It can’t be said too often–being poor really, really sucks. Rural people came to the cities because they wanted jobs, they wanted money, they wanted to move on up. So they listened to sentimental music played over a modern device by professional-sounding entertainers. It took them back–but not too far back.
