Old-Time Music and Dance: Community and Folk Revival

30. The Reclusive Muse

— 281 — 30 THE RECLUSIVE MUSE At the beginning of the 1980s, nearly a decade had passed since Dillon Bustin called that first dance in the green house and conjured up the spirits of old-time American dance. Dillon’s interests had passed through several phases, and now he had turned to productions of works on southern Indiana. In 1983 he made a recording, Dillon Bustin’s Almanac , of songs composed during his years of subsistence farming and rural life. A prominent theme was the way the exigencies of rural life— gardening, cutting firewood, and the assault of the seasons—coupled with the incomprehensible dissonance of the modern world led Dillon and other rural artists toward an evolving inwardness. This theme was echoed in a trilogy of documentary films made with filmmaker Richard Kane. In the films, he examined what he called the “reclusive muse” that inspired art forms produced by rural Indiana vernacular artists in response to a changing world. In Tough, Pretty, or Smart (1981), it was Pike County and the band the Patoka Valley Boys, for whom old-time bluegrass music was a repository of community values in an atmosphere of rapid technological change. Add and Mabel’s Punkin Center (1984), featured Add and Mabel Gray, who turned their general store into a museum of country collec- — 282 — Old-Time Music and Dance tibles, folk art, and local memories in southern Indiana. And Water from Another Time (1982) was a study of three southern Indiana folk performers . In the film, Dillon and Ronnie Moon were depicted driving through Orange County, visiting native artists known throughout the region for their exceptional talents. One, Lois Doane, was a self-taught watercolor painter, batik maker, and poet, who in her youth had worked as a housekeeper in the grand resort hotel at French Lick. And there was Elmer Boyd, an eccentric folk inventor and avid reader. The third artist, Orange County singer, composer, and fiddler Lotus Dickey, actually a late replacement in the film, was the most influential of all of Dillon’s subjects. I return to Lotus in the next chapter. A theme shot through these three works echoed Dillon’s emerging views on folk culture in southern Indiana. These subjects were all rugged native artists who enjoyed few material rewards from their art, yet they persevered, under the most austere conditions, because their insights seemed to leave them no other recourse than to create. The style of the films was slow and deliberate, as each artist struggled to extract from his or her life and work the words that might reveal some underlying pattern. In each case, the motivating force of rural vernacular art was not the uncritical response to life’s exigencies, not the passive inheritance of tradition, but a deliberate and premeditated nurturing of a local antimodernist ideal. Southern Indiana, in its landscape and in its circumstance, had drawn these people together and helped forge their ideals. But what of Brown County? Similar in terrain, Brown County lay not to the south of Bloomington but to the east, and only a short drive south from Indianapolis. Nashville, its county seat, was virtually an antiquarian bazaar, an entire economy built around objects invested with the values of quaint rural life, sold and displayed in antique stores, country-style restaurants, craft shops, and eccentric museums. Nearby Brown County State Park had even adopted names for its buildings from a comic strip that had once depicted a fictional Brown County of quaint speech and colorful characters. Clearly this was a facade, but how did it really differ from the evolving fictions of native vernacular artists in the southern counties? Dillon took up this question in his most deliberate work, If You Don’t — 283 — The Reclusive Muse Outdie Me (1982a), a book which recounted the events leading to Brown County’s peculiar status as a site invested by outsiders with intense romantic sentiment. It focused on the life and work of Frank Hohenberger, an early-twentieth-century photographer who had captured the rustic ideal in Brown County and left extensive diaries of his experiences. In its earliest years as a romantic site, Brown County’s appeal was merely scenic, the subject of landscape painters uninterested in the people of the region. But Hohenberger was not like the painters; rather, he was genuinely fond of the people. Consequently, they were most always the subjects of his photographs and...