Bound: A Few Treads
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Authors
Ray, William Henry
Issue Date
2025-04-28
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
School of Letters , School of Letters Thesis 2025 , University of the South, River, Fiddle, Tradition, Craft, Heritage Arts, Fringe of Society
Alternative Title
Abstract
What follows is a paean to memory, loss, wonder, worth, and belonging. When I first started my studies with the School of Letters in ’18, my vision for this thesis manuscript was a work that would focus entirely on my thirteen years of experience working on the Ohio and other rivers. During that time, I was fortunate to experience some of the last vestiges of a quickly vanishing river culture. I myself was a steamboatman, but through my time on the river I got to know shantyboaters, commercial fishermen, and wooden boat builders, WW II veterans, and a whole other cast of characters. The dearest among them was Joe Rafferty. I lived on his wooden hulled shantyboat for a month, and my essay on that experience was what I hoped to bind the rest of “the river book,” as I was calling it at the time.
However, as I progressed with material, I found it difficult to pair these other sketches of river life to the shantyboat essay. It just felt too different in character and tone color, and perhaps that was because it was an experience beyond observation and was truly transformative. Paired with this was my three decades of following and being a practitioner of traditional music. Over the years, my musical journey has taken me from an outsider, to being in the middle of a healthy traditional scene, and back to the fringes where fellow like-minded musicians are not in great supply. Why then be part of a tradition where most of your colleagues are a generation older than you, leading to the inevitable loss of your immediate community? This question and others, such as what does art look and sound like to the modestly abled, led to the greater introspection of this work, which is bound to the idea that all of us are given the opportunity to be in community with that which is greater than us.
Those questions, in addition to my deep friendship with Joe and the onset of dementia in his life, framed the essays that followed. I felt that this was no longer “the river book,” but in reality, a questioning of other ways of living in this world – a “different economy,” as Wendell Berry writes. So, while I am part of the essays, my intent was not to write a memoire. At best, it is a series of observations from an insider’s view, with the hope of bringing the larger question of what can I take from these observations to readers that have no experience with any of the subject matter. It is a work with gravity, but I hope it is also a work of affirmation.
Structure wise, I have taken inspiration from the great Japanese poet Basho’s “Narrow Road to the Interior” as well as traditional fiddle music. Most fiddle tunes consist of two sections, the A part and the B part. There are some Kentucky fiddle tunes that have three parts, labeled A, B, and C. While most fiddle tunes are played ABABABAB, these three-part Kentucky tunes keep returning to the B – ABCBABCBABCBABC. The B part is the hinge. My hope in this manuscript is that poetry is the hinge and, although the work begins and ends with poetry, it is not the same rigid architecture of the B in the fiddle tune context. But nonetheless, it is my hope that the poetry will link, in a more lyric voice, the essays.
Description
Citation
Publisher
University of the South