Don’t bury me on the lone prairie
And you’ll stand out in buttons and bows. –Gene Autry
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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.
In his artist’s statement Langford writes that the Barn Dance was “enormously popular but never Pop.” I beg to differ: if the Hoosier Hot Shots weren’t pop, then neither is “Weird Al” Yankovic. A cursory listen to the Hoosier Hot Shots box set issued last summer by Proper Records shows that the band did sing some cowboy- and hillbilly-inflected songs–but then so did Bing Crosby at the time. In fact, the Hot Shots played many numbers that would have been right at home on Crosby’s set list: “Avalon,” “Saint Louis Blues,” and of course “Back in Indiana.” Their sound was rooted not in hillbilly fiddle tunes or country-brother duets but in Dixieland and swing, the prevailing pop idioms of the day; they broke into the pop chart’s Top 40 twice. Even the Hot Shots’ carefully cultivated “wacky” image was perfectly mainstream. You can actually see this for yourself at the Cultural Center. The Hot Shots don’t have an individual piece dedicated to them, but if you look closely at the photograph of the entire National Barn Dance cast on the historical timeline, you can pick them out–they’re the glee-club refugees in the monogrammed sweater-vests.
Furthermore, Kincaid was not a string-band musician, and his image, while folksy, was not exactly authentic. He performed folk ballads in a hugely popular, mannered but comfortable style, much as the Kingston Trio would in their folk-revival heyday. According to the Web site for the Berea College library collection where his papers are archived, he came to Chicago not to perform on the Barn Dance but to attend college. Much of his repertoire came from systematic song-collection trips, similar to those more famously made by the Lomaxes. Kincaid’s wife, Irma Foreman, who occasionally performed with him, was a graduate of the Oberlin Conservatory.
Which is too bad, because a healthy genre desperately needs artists who hate the past as well as those who love it. Northanger Abbey was Jane Austen’s way of thumbing her nose at gothic literature; Stankonia was Outkast’s raspberry to both gangsta rap and Native Tongues. Such productive aesthetic disagreements are few and far between in the nostalgic consensus that is alternative country. In this context, Lentz’s diorama Ghosts in the Hayloft is perhaps more pointed than he intended. There’s a lovely frame on the wall, and when you peer through it you expect a glimpse of life, music, and art. But the only thing you see is the interior of an empty barn.
