America's music is centered around the displacement of the beat: you hear it in the rhythmic feeling of blues and all its musical offspring. Renegade Minstrels' music is exploring the significance of this fact by making music that reflects the theme of displacement in so many elements of America. Look to what the United States did and does to Natives, the natural world, African Americans, migrants, immigrants, poor and sick folk all falling through the cracks--it's all displacement.
In our Northwest Bedrock Songs concert, you will see various paintings by Erik Sandgren that depict rotting totem poles of native Northwestern carvers whose tribes died away decades ago, or dissolved into the melting pot. I fear I'm starting to sound like our music is about wallowing in guilt, but that ain't it at all. Our music is made to create perspective--that vantage made by great blues singers, who recognize that there's lonesome folks every place you go, so instead of getting down, you'd best Get Down by celebrating the life you've got, through the sounds you wrought with chords of all sorts.
It makes me think of Sandburg's book on Lincoln, where as a young man, "Abe picked out such a question as 'Who has the most right to complain, the Indian or the Negro?' and would talk about it, up and down the cornfields."* Instead of learning to debate these kinds of issues, we put them out there in songs and images for to remind folks that there's things that need contemplating, that there's a right to complain, and that we all need to be exercising constantly.
So that you know where we're coming from: Woody Guthrie made music for the same folks we're playing and singing for, and so you'll hear his songs in our NW Bedrock concert for this very reason.
I hope to put ideas, updates, epiphanies, and fairly concise ramblings up on this blog just about every week, in hopes that you will check in with your Renegade Minstrels every once n' a smile will come across your worried mind. That smile is meant to last you at least until you can come round and watch us sing, strum and thrum out our blues and folk tunes in some fine venue or another.
Check out our website: www.renegademintrels.com
Also, please look at Sandgren's paintings: www.eriksandgren.com
* Page 14. Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years & The War Years One-Volume Edition. Harvest/HBJ Book, 1982.
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The displaced of this nation are a “fitting and proper” subject for artistic expression and political action. Lincoln would approve. The dynamic and the dialectic of this country is between the super success of the successful – enabled, somehow, by our combination of extraordinary continent and Founding Father fruits – and the “have nots” or “have not enoughs” who, for whatever reason, have been left in the dust.
That there are those among us who are disadvantaged, dispossessed or disenfranchised is a stain on our ideals and an affront to our better angels.
The fact that we all (liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, Libertarian or Neo- Conservative) AGREE that this is so, regardless of our views as to the causes and remedies thereof, reflects THE character of the American spirit that the Renegade Minstrels art appeals to.
Art is an appeal to ourselves, our inner selves – on a channel not accessible by intellectual access – to reconstitute, to reconnect with THAT that makes us what we are, in this case, American.
dadaw
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