 Delia Brons is a quintessential interdisciplinary artist, really. She is somebody who works in many different mediums. She is a visual artist, painter, ceramics, sculpture, writing, illustration, performance, depending on what the inquiry is, and pursuing the kind of curiosities that she has. And she always has very fascinating curiosities. They take her and all of us into these very interesting explorations of the different perspectives. And we'll see some of what that is today. Odelia has illustrated books. She has, you know, poet books of poetry, books of fiction, and her own book, a very unique book called The Shirtway Story, which is about the triangle shirt with the factory, the terrible fire with workers. And so her curiosity about that and about a grandson of the owner of that has taken her into very interesting places. She's made musical sculptures that actually have found they are in collections all over the world, including The Clintons, Seji Osawa, and many of the musicians associated with the Boston Symphony. She has Beatrice Wood, who is a wonderful ceramist, and many other collections around the world have some of these little magical pieces that one can't resist. There is something in your curiosity that really takes the imagination and pulls it to a different place and makes people really want to feel that. Thank you. So I'm very delious from Odelia. She's part of the reason that I'm here in Plainfield, because she was way, way back in the 70s, was my connection to Combo through her brother-in-law, who, Mark Esther, who taught here. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you. And let's give Odelia a welcome. OK, this is about the cranky and other ill-conceived works of art. So I'll start with the caution. Last summer, a person I don't even know, a fabric artist named Paula Kovar, she went to a museum in Memphis. And I'm sorry to say, but the exhibit included a cranky by the artist Red Grooms. He was a very frenetic sort of New York scene artist. And he did this in 1951 and didn't even know that crankies were called crankies, because they hadn't been called crankies yet. That's Peter Schumann of Bread and Puppet, who gave it that name. It was just panoramic screens or something like that. And so he, Red Grooms, cranky was there. And she was so inspired by it that she went home, and she, as a fabric artist, what she was going to do, she stitched a very long scroll like that. That's going to be her cranky scroll. So she stitched that, and she used scraps. And she didn't follow the cranky roll, which is pretty sensible to make it big, bright, and the kind of bold colors. So the people way back there will be able to see it when you won't. But it's what she did. And she took her own path, and she began this obsessive hand quilting of this thing. So it started looking like that. And she had these spidery kind of images that can't be read at a distance. But they're very interesting. And it expresses, she says, her imagery about the government and about media, and particularly watching too much TV. And it began with pussy hats. But then, eventually, she picked out all those threads because she thought it was too unsubtle. But then a friend built this case. A friend built this case. And it looks like an old TV set. And you turn the button, and a machine inside there makes this enormous scroll sort of wind through a complicated series of S-bends. And I looked at that, and I thought, what have we gotten into? Why would anyone want to express themselves by wandering into the cranky minescape? This is a very odd thing. And why am I here? And so let me tell you how I got to this place. And oh, it can be a warning to you. My artistic beginnings were in coloring the underside of my mother's bed. There were slabs under their wood. And I crawled under with a big, fat, red crayon. And I just did beautiful work for quite some days on those slabs. Nobody knew I was under there, because there were a lot of kids. So who is going to notice me under the bed coloring? That was what I started, how I started. And after that, I've had this long, busy life that she described. My public face for decades was me as a maker and a vendor of literally thousands of clay whistles. And there I am at a home on the Vermont home studio days, selling whistles to these ladies. And they called that whistle. And here's what the whistles looked like. Called the corporate whistle. It's rather large. My daughter Eli said, mom, you need a forklift to pick it up. It has the little men's feet, or often many of them are whistles. And the whole body of it was just a big woo sound. And that was oddly enough bought by a corporation to decorate their lobby in a big case. But I was making fun of them, but they didn't realize. That's Risking Walk for Freedom. And this was a whistle about what it felt like to be on a beach in Florida with my in-laws who like fancy places. And five miles away, the boats from Haiti were trying to come in to put people ashore or fleeing for their lives. And they got caught in the surf, enrolled, and drowned all these people. And this juxtaposition of these two horrible things, the fancy beach and the killing beach, were only five miles apart. And I came home, and I made this whistle, about families in boats and putting your little child into a boat. And what did that mean about where you came from? That you were willing to risk your family's life in this frightful way. And many of them died. OK, and there's one other there, I think, yes. This is one that really does show the interior of my brain. This is called St. Francis Preaches to the Banjos. And I consider banjos to be really unruly instruments. I like that. And so that's what that one is about. And they just go on and on like this. I don't plan what I'm making. They just keep my brain out of it. And it's just weirdly weird things come out. And I like them. So my mother taught me that whistle-making craft. And I really loved it. But one day I left my work room, and I couldn't get myself to return for maybe 20 years, 15 to 20 years. I'm trying to figure out how long it was. But I was heartbroken. And I tried to fill that empty place. And so I allowed a lifetime of secret paintings, remember the bed slabs, to come forward. And so here's what they looked like. Mostly, they were mad overlay of images. That one is called Long Hours in the Library. And it's really overlays and overlays of deeper, deeper images. So you have to peer through it to see what I'm trying to say. And when it looks like a skin disease, then I'm happy. And it all gets kind of blistered in crack, like old Anolia, kind of this weird look. And I like that. I don't ever mean to do a picture that has a narrative. I start off with the abstract picture, and the narrative comes in and just beats the hell out of the abstract pictures. And I end up with some little story. And I had never intended that. But every one of them does that. Here's one, this is a fat red crayon who's been running things for me for a long time, ever since I was a toddler. And the brain doesn't enter into the process. I let my hand have the say. The fat red crayon gets his run things. And finally, when they blister and crack, then I think, oh, that's done. This one, that was the underpainting. I never went and finished this picture, because that eyeball got so big it stirred me. That's the more I painted that eyeball, bigger, bigger, bigger. And I thought, I've got to get out of here. I didn't do that one anymore. OK, I was missing doing three-dimensional work with these paintings, because I'm not trained in any of this stuff. I just sort of fly by the seat of my pants, literally. And so I thought, well, maybe I could get back to three-dimensional work. And they had a sculpture show every summer at, back in those days, they gave you cash prizes. I always won one. And that was very nice, but it was at Stowe. And they had a river running through their area. And I would make, whenever possible, I would make my work be in the river or beside the river. This was an elm tree that was out in the pasture. And it had died. And I chopped it up, and I hooked it together with chains, or I made my husband do it. And into the river it went. And you're standing on a bridge. And this thing was quite huge. You're looking down at this thing as it moves in the water. So the water becomes an analog for air. And the river tree itself is that pattern of what happens with river topography or alluvial planes. And so I was very pleased with that. And I didn't care how clunky it looked, but I won a prize. That mattered to me. OK, this is the ordinary kitchen chair, putting 18 feet in the air on a thing. And what I noticed is that people would watch a reflection in the water. They'd stand on the bridge and watch that reflection and talk with absolute strangers about what it meant. There were amazing meanings for this chair. It's called high-water chair. But I had no idea, some of the things that people said. I wish I'd written them down. I would stand in just eavesdropping and think, oh, this is pretty deep. Luckily for me, the river wasn't deep there. So I just waited out there and plopped it in. And so the water had tripped people. This is one of just a sheet of real fine cheesecloth that went down into the river. And I was supposed to wiggle down the river, but it didn't just stay straight out. But what happened was that the reflection in the water was so enchanting to me. I really loved it. And so that seemed to me that the water had tripped people into looking at things that works that otherwise they wouldn't have given a minute. And I was very interested in that. That was called spectral laundry. And it went right across the river to a wide place. And when I put it up, it was absolutely clear, poly, whatever it's called, plastic. You could see right through it. And the ghost hung up their laundry. It was a Halloween, actually, or right before it. But in a few days, it all turned opaque. And I hadn't counted on that. So by the time I got the picture, you could actually see the darn things. But people looked at that as if it was art because it was over the water and it had this wonderful reflections going on. So in a similar way, I like a painting to force the viewer to peer through the depths of all this layered translucent crap to what's below it, what's below it, what's below it. And I think that it's interesting to me. And I think it makes my work seem sort of benign to have this little story on the outside. But it's really subversive, because inside, there are all kinds of things going on just like with water. That's what I think. So after possibly maybe 40 solo shows and many, many group shows over the years, I really got tired and lost interest in jurying. And instead, I illustrated books. And this is what the poor man got for this book. It was really frightening pictures. And I made a cranky show. And this was back in 2008. And this cranky was a lesson of what not to do is paint it on old fashioned house wrapping tie back, which detests paint and pops it off. And it's also a hairy and disgusting surface. So as the paint popped off, I started really liking this look. But this cranky never got shown. It never even got finished. The guy who wanted it for the book kind of moved on to other things. So there I was, left holding the bag. So I just put it up in a gallery show around the top of the want room like some sort of insane freeze. Then a couple of years ago, a body of work that I painted over many decades, several decades at least, was revealed as an accidentally created book. And it was published. And to my surprise, then another book began to take form. And that was inspired by a chance complaint. These two are my daughters. And they write that I never taught them the old songs, which they had no interest in at all. I know hundreds of old songs. And so I decided I would make a little homemade book of songs for them. And I chose my favorite ballads, two versions of it, what they had become in their earliest beginnings when they were first written down, and what they became over time when they came to America. So you might have 56 verses of Daring Dune with a Knight. And suddenly it comes to American. It's a man named Old Bangamu goes in the woods and kills a pig. And it's four verses. And that really is what happened, what Sir Lionel became Old Bangamu, and with that kind of reduction in story. And it's a very popular and good banjo song. And so I was working away at that. And then you will remember those clay whistles that dominated my life for so long. And then with this long absence from my life, I woke up one morning a couple of years ago. And I wanted clay in my hands. I couldn't believe it. It's that feeling like when you want to gargling. You don't just like your hands on this itch to get into dirt. And so I went and got some clay. And all of a sudden, dozens of whistles about ballads started coming off my fingers. And since I don't think about what I'm doing, I put it down and I say, oh, there's Jimmy Randall. He's called Lord Randall in other places. But where I grew up was Jimmy Randall. And you know, and Lord Thomas and Sir Eleanor, and the farmer's cursed wife, and all these things. They just all were flinging every one of them. I sang the whole time. Not out loud that I have people that might suffer. But I sang as I worked in my head. And it was a very interesting thing for me. And then things started getting really complicated. My publisher, who has Goddard Roots, said that he wanted to publish this new little book. And I had already finished his heats of whistles. And they were all overshadowed by very long dull essays. But annoyingly enough, the publisher had some ideas of its own. After telling me I could do whatever I wanted, he said, can't the essays be shorter? And not so many of them. And not so academic. And all those whistles, no, no, no. And maybe, how about some paintings? And then he said, oh, no, maybe not. And so Benny, her, painted a cranky scroll of a ballad and had performed it at Marshfield Library, which was a wonderful event. There's pretty poly inside of this little theater. And he was interested in it. And I thought, why have I done this? And because I thought, OK, I noticed how the word ballad makes people's eyes glaze right over. And I wanted to see if singing a long-forgotten song to this moving scroll was as interesting as watching art reflected in water. It isn't, but it does have some possibilities to it. The possibility that I didn't foresee was the publisher saying, why not crankies? And I said, in my book? And he said, yes, cranky ballads, a book of cranky ballads. And I thought, mm, how? And so that brings me to the fix I'm now in. And the burning question of the hour is, what is a cranky? OK, a cranky is a pre-industrial viewing box. It's a box with a window. And that one, the piece of hideous tie-back is covering the window because the scroll is trying to roll through. And this was a hippie-made one. Then see that third wheel? There no one knows what it is or why. It was put there. It's ball bearing action, though. And it really is fancy compared to the rest of the cranky. And nobody knows how to do it. It's a very unworkable, heavy, heavy unworkable cranky box. But it was from the days when crankies were just starting to be reborn. And so through that window, you see a portion of the panorama painted on a scroll and it gets cranked past. And there might be music to it or a narrative to it, or there may not. And crankies were immensely popular everywhere in the 1800s. And they were called panoramic theater or some fancy name like that. And some were very tiny, like this. That's a person's hand under it, supporting this little, tiny, tiny, tiny cranky that you turned with the little knobs at the top. And it's a story, it's English, and it's a story about the Boer War, which must have been in the 1880s, something like that. And some crankies were huge. That's in the Boiling Museum in New Bedford. It's enormous scroll, it goes down, it comes back, it goes down again. And it's a Boiling voyage. And you could go into movie theaters or at spares and go into an auditorium. And you would see moving scrolls of this sort of various adventures. There would be a Boiling voyage was this one, a trip down the Nile or a trip down the Mississippi. And then after you left, the next crowd came in. And then they would see going up the Nile, going up the Mississippi, because they didn't want to rewind this thing between shows. And nobody, I have no idea how that was even accomplished. They must have had horses or something. Anyway, mostly forgotten, crankies are still cherished by puppeteers. And here's Peter and Alka Suman, very tiny there. That's smaller than real life, I promise. And they, and as I said, he coined the word cranky for when he brought this thing back to life. And it's also adored by ballad singers and people with an interest in the past. My first cranky experience was a lifetime ago. And it was Peter and Alka Suman and the bread and puppet theater troupe were spending their first summer, their first winter in Vermont, and working here at Goddard. And they put on amazing shows all the time. And there was a cranky called Rats that they put up. They have been really vital, Peter and Alka, and their whole troupe in providing the cranky theater the current term cranky. So here's a real quick look through crankies, contemporary crankies. This is in an old shop front that's been discontinued as a shop front. Then become an adjunct to some museum. Like in not fall'em up, but somewhere along there in Massachusetts. And it's the history of that region. Here is a very mysterious one. This is a guy named Kobe Ford who's gotten lots of awards for his puppets and his innovations in puppet theater. And this is a cranky he's putting on for Appalachian Christmas event. And it's outdoors, so he's lit it with candles. And I don't know how you do it. You probably go shadow puppets with it, but I don't know how you do that with candles in the way, because they might. Well, it sounds excitingly dangerous. And the next one is Carolyn Shapiro, who's local. She's made this long scroll about the Lawrence Phil Stripe, and showed it at the old labor halls. And that's her scroll unrolled on the floor, which is exciting to see. This is a show called The Cabin of Curiosity. And they do everything. They have masks that split open. They have hands that are made of wood but are articulated that one person up there is holding this hand that does things. And they have a musician, and they have a cranky riding along back there. And their shows, apparently, are always very exciting. OK, here's an odd one. This seems like a modern idea, the invisible cranky box. There's no cranky box there. There's just two people holding dowels and turning them. But that actually is the ancient concept of crankies. They still do it in India and in other countries. They might have a vertical scroll, might have a horizontal scroll, but they're just turning the paper with their hands. OK, and here's one of the most common ways that people do crankies is to paint a scroll or glue on cutouts that are just silhouettes. And this cranky, obviously, is going to be a vertical one. So that lady's going to fly about her flower bed, I guess. But that's a common way of doing things. Her name's Pali Sunek. And here's one in Puerto Rico that is a very good little idea because if you're doing outdoor activist work and putting on a cranky, you might have to run. And so this thing can just be picked up, folded like that, and off you go. And you're out of there before the danger gets to you. And this is a high cabinet, pretty fancy. I can't remember the name of the person who's doing it. But I can see some troubles with that. Nobody, more than two feet away, will be able to see what's going on up here. It looks like it shows how fanciful we can get. And the last one is a one that I did. I call it my very popular Brecht Theater because it's so apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic. But it has a, I do a lot of these sort of cut out some things that are very lightweight so that I can pick them up. It's some wall insulation, you know, that kind of silver paper on it. And then I coat it with bits of fabric because my dog eats sheets. So I have lots and lots of fabric to use. Yeah, she goes through those sheets. OK, so that brings us to the cranky of the hour. And the cranky of the hour this morning is knotting on town. And I'm going to tell you about it a little bit. OK, this is what's called the Lost Ballad. And it survived in England on a piece of paper. But it hadn't been sung for hundreds of years, literally. People knew it existed because of it being written down. Musicologists knew. But for some reason, it had died out entirely. And this is sort of a speculative piece of history I'm going to do now about what required this song banished the way it did. And most ballads from anywhere, but particularly the Scots-British ballads, arrived in America over and over. They were brought by waves and waves of immigrants coming through. And the song catcher is what he was called in Appalachia, of Cesar Sharp, called Cecil in England. Cesar Sharp and his accomplice, Maude, came from England and traveled to isolated communities looking for old songs. And they described travels. Next one. They described travels so arduous that they said there were no roads. And this is a ferry boat taking them up the river to where they can get through some notch into a village that was totally cut off from the real world, our real world, our world. And excuse me, that one. I come from that sort of world. And so he discovered in 1917 was when he was at the height of these explorations in Appalachia looking for new songs. Because people didn't realize that the British songs had come here. And so this was a real big deal for musicologists. And he was back in some horror. And he discovered that these old songs were honored by the families who had brought them over and treated them as family heirlooms. These are their treasures. And they were glad to sing them to him. And he would write them all down. Choke. He would write them all down. And he ran into one family called the Richies. And they had a daughter, Una Richie. They had 14 kids. And the third oldest was called Una. And she and her cousin sang a song for him. They were in Viper, Kentucky. Imagine being from Viper, Kentucky. That's great. And Una also has a Goddard attachment because she married a man who taught at Goddard. And that was a lifetime ago. Definitely. She's no longer alive. But they lived in Plainfield. His name was Tom Jacob. And anyway, they sang this song for him. And he thought, oh my goodness, it's not in in town. It's still alive. It's still being sung. But not in Europe, not in England, here in Appalachia. And it was a pretty astonishing moment. And their family lore said the song had been passed down since their arrival before the Revolutionary War. And they believed it was a song about the Great Plague. And so that's the family of all the, that's 11 of the kids. There's Pa and Ma. And then they had three more. Next one. And that's their baby, Jean Richie. And she grew up and recorded that song in 1957. I think for Alamo Max or somebody she met him and he recorded her singing. I think it was Smithsonian Records that put it out. And because of that record and thanks to her, that song returned to England and now is a part of their folk repertoire. They have no idea it spent 300 years out of commission and that it ever came here. It's theirs as far as they're concerned. Okay, so Nottingham Town is a kind of a riddle song. Riddles were very popular before better entertainment were invented. And a lot of old songs have riddles in them. You probably know some of them yourself. And most of the ones with riddles started off with pretty gruesome ballads. And all that's left now is, I gave my love a cherry. That was in a rather obscene song, actually. But the obscene parts have all been stripped away. Anyway, Nottingham Town. And I always sang it Nottingham Town because I thought people made a mistake and were saying it wrong. But they didn't. It was Nottingham Town. And so this riddle song is filled with kind of a slightly amusing but otherwise not contradictions because the background is sort of an apocalyptic gloom. And this is a poster from the Levelers who I'm gonna talk more about in a second. But the Levelers did these amazing posters on very cheap paper and just spread them everywhere and sold them for very cheap because it was their way of getting their political message around. And that poster shows pretty much the basis of why the worlds turned upside down. They felt everything was wrong and going wrong. And so cats were being chased by rats and the house is upside down and the man is being pushed by a cart and he's got his boots on his hands. That kind of thing. And this song, the contradictions in it and the contraries can be seen. I think sociologists have coined this term rights of reversal. And it's a term that describes ritualized events like a party that you do every year, a ritualized event in which violations of social norms is allowed. So it's sanctioned misbehavior. And for instance, it's Saturnalia which was a Roman leftover that has got remnant still in England. It was a festival that allowed misbehaviors. There were backward actions of all sorts. And you see the man riding whatever that is backwards. That was like part of the party. And over here is a man wearing a donkey's head but he's also a crowned himself king. And so you could, a peasant or ordinary person could pretend to be the monarch for that party and go around as sexual reverses, cross dressing, things like that were part of the fun. And in the Feast of the Bean King, this is a custom that still goes on. I have Norwegian relatives who have a, at that time of year in the winter, they have a porridge for breakfast that has an almond in it. Whoever gets the almond is the king for the day. And in my family tradition, not directly from now, those people, there's a bean or a piece of un-cooked carrot cut like a little crown that's in the lental soup or whatever you're serving for dinner. And then that person is king and gets to order everybody else around. And so pretending you were the monarch in these days would have been a very dangerous thing to do unless you do it on those days. Peter Bruegel, the younger painting, and it's called The King Drinks. And though that guy's drinking, so it's probably him. Anyway, these sort of hijinks were supposed to relieve social tensions. And they were purposefully invented to relieve social tensions. And they're most often seen in societies with a high level of internal stress. And we have examples today in our culture, casual Fridays at work, where you get to pretend you're in the Bahamas for the day or whatever you want to wear, or Halloween costumes at work. It's very recent, maybe within 20 years, that I've, on Halloween's my birthday, so I notice Halloween. And you go into a bank and all the clerks are dressed like cows. And they're having a lot of fun, but this is sanctioned by their bosses. And kids wearing backward clothing for school, they have a backward day, or they have a pajamas at school, they're all designated days. You can't just do it any old time. It's designated. And it's an old idea that's still around as to implement stress relief. And it's orchestrated by the people in power exactly for that purpose. And so it is generally, this song points out a lot of contraries of that sort. The whole song is that. And it was also said to be a riddle, but it's also a political statement. It's generally agreed, and it might not be so, that the Nottingham Town song emerged in England in the late Middle Ages, and that would be 1350. It was a time of appalling social stress, and political complexity, and lots of warfare. They were fighting constantly, internally, and all over the place. And so it was a miserable era, and it was made worse by horrible weather, really unspeakable weather, and famine, and plagues. And the plague is the main actor here. This is a bubonic plague, and it swept through England, it's called the Black Death, in 1346, and in one year, half the population was dead. Now that's neat. I can't imagine what that would be like to have whole families, whole towns disappeared, and even wars stopped for a little while, trade stopped, and people were very frightened, and wouldn't go and do anything, and tried just to hide out so they wouldn't get the plague. But a real important thing was that the amount of land under cultivation just plummeted. It was a precipitous drop in how much was, how many fields were being cultivated, and that resulted in famine. And the workers, who weren't very many of them left, and they realized suddenly that they were a valuable commodity, and they demanded actual wages, not just a bite of food, and all a little ratty hovel to live in, but actual wages. And the landowners were horrified and resisted, and there were resulting resentments of that that were very fierce, and they built very slowly over a long, long time, because there were always punishments for this kind of misaction not happening on the designated day. And so these people were asking for something they weren't allowed to ask for, and so it took, it was a very long, slow burn that started up with this kind of, with the plague. Okay, the plague returned again and again. It had its own schedule. You never knew when it was gonna show up, but maybe 10 years after the great plague, 10 years later it came back again, and that, and then again and again, and that increased the sort of helpless terror of the populace. They never knew what was gonna hit them in when. And one response was that obsessive art began, and you've seen these, a dance of death is a theme, and okay, here's the plague. This is from an old manuscript of medieval, manuscript of them burying the dead, very skinny corpses, and that's a very skinny, but it's an interesting picture because it's so unlike most medieval art, it's got this sort of obsessive quality to it of scratch, scratch, scratch, you know, of emotion. Yeah, there's a dance of death. That was in a church in Slovakia, I think they got in Rome during World War II, but it's a very long freeze of all kinds of people of every description, and a death is courting each one of them or dancing and holding hands with them in a long, long, long line. And I, so everybody was doing it. Here's what I got, another one. Yeah, here's Hans Holbein, the younger, and he carved these little wood blocks that are very repetitive. It's the death grabbing a, here the fat abbot who's holding his little Bible like, don't take me, but he's being taken anyway, and they're women with babies and they're babies, and he just goes on and on, it must've been a little book. And this is supposed to be instructional for you about these guys in escape, how are you going to? And what do you need to do to trick death into not taking you? And so next, yeah, here's Bosch, a wonderful scene of a death bed scene and both an angel, the good and the bad are both fighting for this man. Down here, it shows what he used to be. He had armor and stuff, and then he became a miser. There he is putting what my children called, when they saw this, when they were little girls, they said, oh, he's got a devil in his toy box. But the devil's under the toy box, but the toy box is still, oh yeah, no, there's one in there. He's an hoarding gold, and then there's a little tiny faint ray of light coming from a crucifix up there, trying to get his attention from all these other things that are much more compelling. And it's supposed to suggest to you that maybe sin isn't worth it. It's not worth the price, and the sin here is green and avarice, but people were singing ballads like The Wife of Us as well about loss and death of a lady about bargaining for your life against death. It doesn't work. And there were mummers plays about morality plays and Morris dancing that took on these themes, and those groups have been around since the beginning of time, as far as people know. And artists began to produce a lot of art for the masses, not just for rich people, but for the masses. And these were these broad fives, posters, things like this. These were very inexpensive and widely available. Okay, here's a piece of Leveller art of chicken roasting the man, basting him a little bit. And that is pretty typical of the art that started coming out of this sense of indignation about an attempt to politicize what they believed and under very, very huge obstacles. And so many organized radical factions came ripe over these years, and they rose gradually out of those long decades of reoccurring plagues and growing social discontent. And they had names like, okay, you've heard of many of them, the Calvinist, the Puritans, the Diggers, the Ranchers, the Quakers, the Shakers, and Seekers, and they all had different opinions. And Diggers thought you should be able to farm on public land if you didn't have land of your own. And they got clobbered for that. But the one group that I am most interested in is the Levellers because of their art and this world turned upside down theme. There's a little tiny one of a fish fishing for a man. I don't know what's going on over here, but the fish up in the tree and the bird in the water, it's all, everything's backwards. And the Levellers were a very vigorous democratic movement dedicated to leveling society and social inequalities and political inequalities. They wanted abolition of the monarchy. They wanted agrarian reform. They wanted equality for the sexes. They wanted religious freedom. They had all kinds of outrageous demands. And by the mid 1600s, so we've had quite a stretch of the rate play, beliefs that had only been very cautiously expressed during medieval days were now openly, were out in the open with these posters going up all over the place. And there's a butcher, the butcher's the cow, the meat is the man. And so these images, they just sold these things everywhere. They were everywhere. And it was, to some, these images suggest that the ballot in Ottoman town was a level or creation. But it actually is loaded with medieval imagery and probably the ideas in the song had over time become commonplace with the working people. So it became of everybody who was poor, just about everybody, had these feelings in the back of their mind if they didn't come right out and say them. And so this long, slow burn that had been ignited before the great plague culminated finally in the English Civil War, which oddly enough began in the town of Nottingham, which I think is red herring, but anyway, the monarchy was toppled and Cromwell began a very vicious and oppressive rule. And the Levler beliefs, they had backed Cromwell. They thought he was a man of the people. And it turned out once he got power, he was the most bloodthirsty despot imaginable. He became, after he got powerfully, became a fanatic Puritan. And anything that was fun was forbidden. And anyone disagreeing with him should be killed and work was killed. This is a mass grave being excavated now in Durham. These are Cromwell's debts. He slaughtered people and just, they were just shoveled into mass graves and nobody ever had any record of it. And now it's known that this is, because they're finding them and finding tons of people in there. In Ireland, he killed the men and did, they ended up like this, but the women and children in towns that he was conquering were sold into slavery and the Barbados and never were heard of again. Hundreds and hundreds of women and children. And so he was a- What time is that? That would have been 1651 maybe? Around 1650, sometime during those times. And so some levelers clearly escaped the mass executions that they were on the end of and they made it to the colonies. And I imagine the Ritchie family bringing this precious, not him in town with them, maybe was part of that exodus from, that flea from Cromwell. And I say this because it is very well documented that leveler doctrines played an enormous role in creating our constitution. One man, one vote, equality under the law, all those ideas that were put purposely and knowledgeably by the people who wrote it. They were leveler concepts and all the years I went to school I never heard of the levelers or that they had a part in making our constitution. So to me, that was very interesting. And the ballot, not him in town, not him in town was surely one of Cromwell's intended victims because it stopped. It was not sung from then on in England. And but it escaped with its singers to hide out in Appalachia and got to be an heirloom. So the interpretations of this ballot are to me, the outstanding feature of the ballot is that it offers a lot of freedom of interpretation to the listener. And some say that the words are just tomfoolery left over from a medieval mummer's play. That it's something that nobody, never made any sense, it was always just a joke. Others say, as the Ritchie family said, that it had to do with the desperation and confusion of the plague years. And Charles Upton, a metaphysics poet and a scholar said that in the 14th century, the ballot nottingham town would have been considered as a mystical map. And it showed the path to universal wisdom. This is a map of this scheme. It shows a path to the universal wisdom that's found at the heart of all spiritual thinking. And so it's apparently one heart for us all, but this is a map to get there. And Upton said all the characters in the song are allegorical and would have been considered allegorical to a person in the 14th century. And all the colors have meaning and the poetry is all coherent and it's complete. It's not nonsense. And all the seemingly contrary symbolism represents the necessary steps on the road to transmutation. So anyone who rolls their eyes at this, which is awful lot of people that I know, they're not considering how people felt about alchemy in the 14th century. It guided their life and their worldviews. It was how they sorted information. Yeah, there's a part of an alchemical map drawing and it's not about not in Upton, but everything means something in this picture. He has on red boots, that's not an accent just because it looks really pretty. There are things mean things in the alchemical world. Okay, there's an alchemical painting more recent than the medieval times, but it shows a very fanciful idea of what you call the alchemical laboratory next. Okay, here, these guys, up to now. These are, this is Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia. Robert Hunter said that Nottingham Town was his model for songwriting. That the strong imagery and the symbols, his meaning can be varied or open to personal interpretation and he liked that and that was what he wanted was that kind of option for the listener. And he called, and Garcia called what they were trying to do with their music, psychedelic alchemy because they said you take rhythm and melody and lyrics and lots of drugs and you can meld your followers into one state of cosmic consciousness and that's what they wanted. Now we're not gonna have that happen with Nottingham Town sadly enough. But we could, but we won't. Others saw that ballad as an opportunity. Bob Dylan snatched the tune and the mood of his song for Master's War. And for me it's just the love of a haunting melody and a mysterious story. It suits our unsettled times and I made that my interpretation of this. When I do the cranky, you'll see that I'm not doing a medieval scroll. It's, the man comes to a town where no one will look up or look down. And I thought, well, who are these unhelpful people? He has to be given directions to where he already is and then they won't help him. And so next, please, I decide, oh, they're all on cell phones. They can't look up or look down. They're busy. And so that's a feeling that you get now if you go into a cafe and not a single person has their head up or is talking. They're all in some sort of screen. And I thought, well, this, I decided to make this song now become a discussion of what technology's done to human relationships. And then from there on it goes downhill. I dressed the protagonist in black and white. And those are the colors of a British Morris Dance group called the pig molly dykes or pig dyke mollies. And the pig molly means a person who dresses as the other sex. And the pig dyke mollies always were black and white. And despite Cromwell Morris Dancing has remained a popular street entertainment and it survived since the most ancient times long before not a mountain was conceived. Is there another one? Yeah. A hobby horse. Thanks to this one back up. See the little gray horse in the song, the man rides a gray horse. And because of that little picture and the Morris dancers in that line that looked just like with the bells on their legs, they looked like the Morris dancers from nowadays. And I thought, oh, I'm gonna make the horse be a hobby horse. That'll be the horse in my song. And this little woman, that's a medieval drawing of a woman being a hobby horse and ringing a little bell. It looks like. And so hobby horses have remained the beloved creatures of off base theater since way back. I made the queen and the king into puppets and they're manipulated by drones and puppeteers. And the powerful ending of my scroll there is a standard nightmare of our era. And so now for the cranky. And then afterwards if anyone has any specific cranky questions about how to make one or anything like that, I'll tell you. So we have to move things. Just shut up to get the cranky. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. In Ottoman town, not a soul would look up, not a soul would look up, not a soul would look down, not a soul would look up, or show me the way, to show me the way to fair and Ottoman town. I ride a gray horse, I lead a gray mare, gray mane, gray tail, all gray is her hair, gray mane, gray tail, green striped down her back, oh, not a hair on her that wasn't coal black. She stood so still. She threw me to the dirt. She tore my heart. She bruised my shirt from bridal to saddle. And on the cantos, I rode over the plain. Yes, on the cantos, I rode over the plain. I met the king and the queen. And the company mare, a riding behind. There a marchin' before, I met a stark-naked drummer. Come beatin' a drum, his hands and his pockets gonna keep himself warm. And when I got there, not a soul did I see. They all stood around, just staring at me. I called for a, and to stifle the dust for it rained the whole day. Sat down on a coal, a coal frozen stone. 10,000 stood around me, 10,000 stood around me. And yet I said that never was born. 10,000 that never was born. And did it work? Were you more interested in hearing a ballad if it moved? Mm-hmm.