Returning to the Farm

I rewarded myself two weeks ago with an end-of-semester victory hike up Old Rag Mountain in Shenandoah National Park. After the hike, I was meandering down one of several state routes back to the highway when I came across this barn. I pulled over and did something I almost never do—snapped a photo of it.

The barn looked beautiful. I suppose, in the moment, this was all the reason I needed to stop and capture it. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the barn on the drive home. There was something about it that struck me. Perhaps it was its dilapidated exterior; its sheer isolation against a chilling backdrop of grey clouds and leafless trees; its unfamiliarity after years living in urban areas; or the contemplation only possible when you’re alone in the car for several hours.

Growing up in Ohio, I was surrounded by operational farms. When my parents relocated to “The Heart of it All!” state in the 1980s, my mom fell in love with our neighborhood specifically because it reminded her of her small hometown in Iowa—right down to the smell of freshly spread manure. I used to sneak through the nearby woods, rush by the “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted Sign,” and play games in the fields of a Christmas tree farm—one of several family farms dotting the landscape as I went to school each day. 

Of late, I have virtually no contact with operational farms. I know, of course, that they exist. They lie just outside my orbit. Most of my friends and I chose after college to settle in urban areas, where “there is stuff to do,” by which we generally mean areas where we can find easily accessible concentrations of restaurants, bars, and at least one Target. This doesn’t always mean we live in the heart of a city. More often, we find less expensive housing in city outskirts: the urban sprawl districts close enough to public transportation that we can claim to live in Washington, D. C., Philadelphia, or New York City.

The sprawl has widened enough in these areas to subsume a few farms, meaning it is still possible to encounter a barn or two. However, these barns have been repurposed as homes or antique stores. As cultural symbols, the barn no longer carries just the connotations of backbreaking toil on behalf of feeding the nation or providing sustenance and livelihoods to generations of hardworking American families. Barns have also come to symbolize a bygone era. They are sought after for their age, rust, and “country kitsch” effects. In other words, it sometimes seems that barns are appreciated not for their functionality, but rather because of their aesthetic value. Two industries, in particular, seem to have capitalized upon this aesthetic valorization: the wedding and dining industries.

I've arrived at the stretch of years in which many of my friends are getting married. My Facebook newsfeed basically resembles an online wedding album.  As I passively click through wedding pictures, it is impossible to escape images like this:

There are now entire websites, blogs, and catalogues dedicated to creating the perfect “country kitsch” wedding, providing instructions for producing mason jar center pieces and horseshoe favors. I commend the crafty people who are able to follow these instructions and, in some cases, reduce their wedding costs. Additionally, a good number of the wedding photos I have seen that use barns as props are gorgeous. The contrast of two impeccably dressed people of the present with an old, beat-up structure can be visually stunning. Yet I would bet that the barns in these photos were never destined to be wedding venues. And I know for a fact that my Facebook friends posing for the camera are not at all involved with crop cultivation. They want their photos to communicate a message about them as a couple.

Restaurants have also tapped into the cultural allure of the barn, but for somewhat different reasons. I’ll use as an example Woodberry Kitchen in Baltimore, Maryland. Woodberry is not actually housed in a barn, but rather the old Clipper Mill complex that has since been redeveloped into artists’ studios and upscale condominiums. Upon approaching the restaurant, diners are greeted by old farm equipment and corn stalks. Inside, wooden beams are embellished to give a barn-like appearance, and shelves are stocked with canned fruits and vegetables. Waiters scurry around in plaid shirts and blue jeans, while waitresses wear simple dresses and aprons.

Part of the reason that Woodberry has purposefully tried to give diners the feeling that they are eating in a barn or farmhouse is that the menu is designed to showcase fresh ingredients from Chesapeake area farms. The restaurant’s website explains: “At our table, you join us in supporting sustainable agriculture that respects the abundance and traditions of the region while helping to ensure its future.” Woodberry’s agrarian décor speaks to the “country kitsch” aesthetic demand as well as a business ethic based upon sustainability and reconnecting guests to the origins of the food they eat.

At the same time that barn-side wedding photos and “down on the farm” dining options have become popular, so, too, have sustainability and eating local. It is trendy to purchase produce from farmers’ markets and, in general, to give thought to where our food is coming from. This is especially true among a growing number of young people, even those in urban areas. Many cities have started to create urban farms to increase the amount of fresh, locally sourced produce available to residents. Many of these farms exist thanks to dedicated volunteers. Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), in which a farm delivers a share of its harvest to members or subscribers, is also growing in popularity among a select subset of urbanites.

A recent article even announced that Millennials are suiting up to be the next generation of farmers. Citing the fact that America’s farmers are, on average, almost 60 years old, the article describes a program in Maine to link young people who want to learn about agriculture with veteran farmers to eventually take over untended acres. The initiative was featured in the documentary film, GROW!

It would be inaccurate to say that eating local has become widespread practice. Similarly, the Maine Millennials who are taking over farms are few in number, with most young people still opting for a career path that carries more prestige. However, The New York Times reported a few months ago that the number of farms in the United States increased by 4%—the first increase after decades of decline. Optimistically, the resurgent interest in working on farms, eating locally sourced food, and even “country kitsch” is bringing renewed vitality to agriculture in America. Barns as symbols of livelihood and sustenance may eclipse any connotations of them as objects of a bygone era.

Perhaps if I return to Old Rag Mountain in the near future, the barn in my photo will speak to this shift. Instead of being a striking scene of abandonment, it may be the workplace of a new college graduate in search of a promising career, providing fresh produce to Americans through farmers’ markets and upscale restaurants.  

All Folked Up

In the car a few days ago, I heard two songs on the radio, back-to-back, that caused me to pause and reflect. The first song was “Little Talks” by the Icelandic band Of Monsters and Men and the second was Mumford and Son’s new single “I Will Wait”. Making the experience all the more striking was that these two songs were preceded and followed by pop artists like Nicki Minaj or Katy Perry. Although it’s difficult to place bands like Mumford and Sons in a genre, their sound certainly differs from the majority of pop musicians whose work populates the airwaves. Some would classify these bands as “folk”, or perhaps less definitively as “folksy”.

It is easy to see and hear something in these bands that reflects the form, themes, styles, and aesthetics of folk music. Take, for example, the instruments they use in their songs. In place of synthesizers or electric guitars, we often hear what we consider “traditional” instruments, those accessible to the “common man”, like the banjo, fiddle, and harmonica. Additionally, these bands clearly attempt to take on a “backwoods” or “down country” persona, wearing clothing that conveys simplicity, age, and wear—the fashion equivalent of patina.

Song lyrics don’t reference cell phones or nightclubs, but rather rural landscapes, manual labor, and, occasionally, passages or figures from the Bible. The Head and the Heart, an indie/folk outfit out of Seattle (shocking, I know), intone in their song “Lost in My Mind”:

How’s that bricklayin’ coming

How’s your engine runnin’

Is that bridge gettin’ built

Are you hands gettin’ filled

Fellow Seattleites, Fleet Foxes, more explicitly demonstrate these themes in the title track off their 2011 album Helplessness Blues:

If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm raw

If I had an orchard, I'd work till I'm sore

And you would wait tables and soon run the store

Is there reason to believe we are in the midst of a folk revival? Purists would argue no. They see folk music as part of a largely oral tradition in which songs have been passed down for generations. That continuity is the key. The bands described above are, for the most part, performing music they have written and embodying styles they have invented. They are creating novel cultural products with recourse to the past (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s work on heritage for more on this). In this sense, today’s folk artists aren’t reviving anything. They are simply making a statement in the present with the vocabulary of the past.

Regardless of whether or not we can call the popularity of this “folk” music a revival, it is unquestionably popular. What is it that makes songs harkening back to simpler times and porch-front banjo picking so compelling to many people today? One possible answer came to me while listening to the newest Mumford and Sons album. A familiar song started playing, which I identified as Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”. Here we had a contemporary folk band resurrecting a song from the 1960s folk revival.

If we are witnessing a folk revival, it certainly isn’t the first (or best example of) one. There was another moment of folk consciousness in the 1930s and 1940s, epitomized in Woody Guthrie’s Dustbowl Ballads. The collection featured traditional folk songs Guthrie learned from migrant workers, as well as original compositions chronicling his travels from Oklahoma to California. Guthrie is often cited among a list of folk artists from the 1930s and 1940s that inspired a later generation of folk artists in the 1960s, including Bob Dylan.

Serious fans of folk music would likely cringe at even implicating that Mumford and Sons belongs to a lineage stretching back to Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. For one thing, Woodie Guthrie and Bob Dylan both used their music to promote social justice (with the former supporting labor and the latter supporting the civil rights and anti-war movements). Yet, there is a common thread running through the work of these artists. All of them emerged in response to temporal demand for something traditional, a connection to the past.

Much like the 1930s, we are living in a period of economic crisis. And similar to the 1960s, our social world is increasingly marked by rapid, sometimes jarring, change. In the words of Dylan, “times, they are a changin’”. In the face of such crisis and change, we seek solace in the past. Nostalgia for what has been replaced and remorse for what has been lost take root. It is during times like these that folk music comes to enjoy enormous currency. We might even think of folk music as a type of coping mechanism. 

So the songs that struck a chord within me as I listened to the radio may not truly be folk music. We know that many of these bands are fabricated to meet the demand of the day. After all, Of Monsters and Men is from Iceland, prompting questions about exactly whose folk they are representing and celebrating. It is also clear that what I heard is less a revival of pure folk music than a new creation with a folksy veneer.

Despite these truths, I took comfort in the songs and sang along. For a brief moment, I could at least pretend to commune with the world being left behind as I drove forward. Who knows how long this folk moment will last, but if Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan are any indication, there’s staying power to music that forces us to look back in the rearview mirror—music that reminds us to remember.