This is Songwriters & Tour Riders, a music podcast from KOSU hosted by Matthew Viriyapah.
Folk singer Willi Carlisle is not a native of the Arkansas Ozarks, but it's a place that he fell in love with. His new album, Critterland, is partially about trying to find community there and how he tries to share that with people who come to listen to his music.
In this episode, hear Carlisle talk about the album, moving to Arkansas, and his favorite Oklahoma story.
On moving to Arkansas to teach and learn
I got there about 13 years ago, and, I came with great intention to learn banjo music and study poetry. I started attending old time jams pretty much right away when I got there and going to square dances.
Because I was new in the area, I didn't really have any friends. I was also teaching. I was teaching at the University of Arkansas, and so it was really hard for me to connect with people because, honestly, I just talked to an 18 year-olds from Texas who I was teaching to write sentences. My whole social life and source of joy was, other poets and then these old time musicians who had learned from traditions that, spanned, you know, in some cases a couple of hundred years who were willing to share.
I was learning to call square dances because they needed callers more than they needed fiddle players. And I was a pretty garbage fiddle player. I was living on a hobby farm for a while out there, and I was not a person that was exposed to farm or animal life very much when I was younger.
And so I was just kind of fascinated with all of it, all of the possibilities that this kind of rural patch of America offered. And then a lot of its complexities were really interesting to me, to the politics of people who have been abandoned by social and civic services, but also have developed a sense of self-reliance.
It has made me realize that there are things in the world sort of worth living for. If other people can live with such kind of profound faith and self-reliance, than maybe I can too
On finding 'Critterland'
Critterland in my own sort of personal history was what I called this little intentional community I tried to move out on to, and the song is kind of about that. But really that song is about trying to discover values that are given to you by nature.
What I mean by that is that when I got close to what was real in the world, which is to say, the natural rhythms of this place out in the rural Ozarks. I discovered a lot of my sort of worse values falling away. I wasn't able to live by those values as intensely as the people that live out there. And there's certainly a possibility I fetishized some bucolic thing.
So the point of Critterland that there might be a place, or a way of thinking, where you can learn from something that is deeper than your own self. And there might also be a place where, there's something worth dying for and thus worth living for.
I personally have found it in this work, in the work of folk singing, I want to offer it to other people in concerts and ideally have the show be an invitation to find that kind of thing for themselves.
Folk music is social and it's political, and so we're always trying to sing anthems for things that we truly believe, even if they're impossible. Because demanding the impossible is what every successful populist movement has done.
Music featured in this episode:
- Willi Carisle - The Arrangements
- Willi Carisle - Dry County Dust
- Willi Carisle - Two-Headed Lamb
- Willi Carisle - Higher Lonesome
- Willi Carisle - Critterland
- Willi Carisle - The Great Depression
- Willi Carisle - Tulsa's Last Magician
- Willi Carisle - Your Heart's a Big Tent
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