Tag: ethnography

Listening to Labor in the “Little Cities of Black Diamonds”

Miners from Congo, Ohio.

Throughout this series of posts, I am presenting portraits of people and places of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds region in Appalachian Ohio. Each post focuses on sounds and how paying attention to them can give insight into issues such as labor, protest, recovery, and social life. Recording and carefully listening to these sounds can also suggest ways of bridging between place and creative sound works.

Well Rocks

Workers throwing limestone rocks down a well, Crooksville, Ohio. Photo by Brian Harnetty

Visiting an Independent Gas and Oil Rig:

“You want to get a badass sound, man? Check this out,” says a young assistant working at a gas and oil well drill site. I am standing next to a small opening in the ground, perhaps a foot across. It is a cold December day, and I join an independent driller and his crew to record them as they work on the well. Two assistants fill up buckets with limestone, and the rocks are slowly thrown down the hole. As the rocks descend hundreds of feet, they bounce randomly off the walls of the well. A few seconds later they begin to hit the bottom, and the sounds that travel back to the surface are sharp, percussive, and reverberate through the long tube of earth. “Sounds like a gun ricochet,” says one of the men. “Yeah, or it’s like water,” the other remarks. To me, it sounds like fireworks coming from the wrong direction, and I note that the sounds of the rocks measure the distance traveled into the ground. They send sound waves down and back up, vibrations that we feel racing back out of the hole. Fortunately, nothing else comes up with the sound. “You better stand away from that hole a little bit,” says the driller, “the sparks going down in there may light some of the gas. It might do that, it might not. I heard it yesterday go ‘Whoom!’ before gas fire shot out…”

Workers throwing limestone rocks down a well before drilling.

This drilling site is in a small clearing in the woods. The rig sits in the middle, a 1956 model that is attached to an old truck from the same year. The rig’s appearance looks as if it couldn’t possibly work. Yet it does, and natural gas powers it from a nearby well. With a long hiss, the air is let out of the line and the motor starts. Gears, wheels, squeaks, and cables all conspire to create lurching rhythmic patterns.

The drilling begins. The drill bit does not rotate; instead, it pounds. The pounding is both heard and felt and, from this point on, shouting is the only way to communicate. Behind the rig’s controls, the driller looks like a conductor of a musical ensemble: his rhythmic movements are in tandem with the motor and his many years of experience make his continual adjustments to the old machinery graceful. There are many levers that he is simultaneously operating, allowing him to add an inch of cable at a time to the drill’s length. In this dangerous and unstable environment, I am reminded that he can’t see what is happening below the surface; he is working by knowledge, touch, and sound. The rhythmic regularity of the pounding sonically connotes his years of experience and his control over the machinery. At the same time, variations in the intense pounding tell him what kind of rock he is drilling through and at what speed.

Later that day, I leave the drill site while the men continue their work. As I walk away, the overwhelming sounds of drilling fade into the distance yet are still throbbing in my ears and stomach.

Joshua “Judd” Matheney, Mine Inspector:

“Could I tell you a little story about that?” asks Joshua “Judd” Matheney on a sound recording from the Little Cities Archive. The recording was made in 1988, and Matheney speaks of his family, childhood, and work as a state mine inspector. The sound and grain of his voice reveal his age and regional accent as he recounts his life, and his descriptions of working in the mines are vivid. For example, the sounds of controlled explosions—what he calls “shooting down a hole”—were frequently heard. Matheney also remarks on his experiences as an inspector and of getting along with men and women working in small family mining operations. Throughout, Matheney’s voice is quietly heard on the cassette tape just slightly before hearing it at full volume, a tape “print-through” that has the ghostly quality of pre-echoing his own voice.

Interview with Judd Matheney. Courtesy of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archive.

Matheney continues his story, and talks about “sounding” the roof of a mine to check for safety:

I went in a little mine up Pittsburgh Holler one day—couple of men working by themselves. And I looked up at the roof and there was just like a circle around it. …I said, ‘Let me have your pick a moment.’ And, uh, I sounded it with a pick, a customary way of checking the roof. And it sounded a little drummy, and I said, ‘Fellas, I believe that’s dangerous.’ …One of ‘em handed me a pinch bar, and I pinched a little bit, and finally got a pretty solid hole. I chipped in, gave a good pry on it, and there was big circle of slate, at least six foot across, and there was this cone shape. …It would’ve mashed those two men easily. …Of course all men didn’t escape them kind of conditions, many men got tangled up with them and lost their lives.

The “drummy” quality of the roof indicated—to Matheney’s trained ear—an unsafe mine. Hillel Schwartz refers refers to this process of tapping the roof of mines as “jowling,” a term used in the UK and dating back to early coal mining there. Matheney’s ability to sound the mines as well as a lifetime listening to those operating them served as a means of not only maintaining mine safety, but also building long-term rapport with miners.

Miners from Congo, Ohio.

Miners from Congo, Ohio. Photo courtesy of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archive.

Listening to Labor:

Both of the above examples are brief glimpses into the dominant industry in the Little Cities for nearly two centuries: extracting energy in the form of gas, oil, and coal. As I listen in, I am reminded that the workers listen, too, as part of their jobs. For them, listening becomes seamlessly integrated into their routines and keeps them safe, a sonic tool to discern danger. For my own practice, I listen to these archival and contemporary recordings repeatedly and carefully. David Grubbs suggests this process of repetition reveals facets of recordings that cannot otherwise be heard, and can transform them into musical gestures. I focus on the grain and hiss of the deteriorating archival recordings; the machinery and its interaction with the land; the rhythmic and melodic pacing of the workers’ words; and their stories. I pick up on the overlapping cadences of labor and everyday life, and they seep into my own work as I sample and collage them together.

The recordings make audible an unstable and changing past, as Judd’s voice moves forward to meet us in the present. Observing the independent driller of today shows his struggles to survive amid an uncertain work environment and larger corporations moving in to the area. This in turn points to yet another future iteration of the extraction–boom–bust–destruction cycle. I hear the complex tension between labor and environment unfolding over time, and the arc of people’s lives coming and going. I listen to the voices of these people coming together contrapuntally, and also listen for new voices to break this cycle, opening new ways of thriving in the region that are not bound to extraction alone.

Place, Sound, History, Now: Listening to the “Little Cities of Black Diamonds”

straitsville

Courtesy of the Little Cities of Black Diamonds Archive

In a brief essay from 1975, author, farmer, and environmental activist Wendell Berry wrote that he used to think there was a division between culture and place. He thought art could be detached and removed from environmental damage, that art was somehow perfect in an imperfect world. After inadvertently damaging his own property, he recognized that the complex relationships between power, culture, and place are in fact deeply entwined. Berry acknowledged, “It used to be that I could think of art as a refuge from such troubles. …Art was what was truly permanent, therefore what truly mattered. …I am no longer able to think that way. That is because I now live in my subject. My subject is my place in the world, and I live in my place.”

I listened to Berry’s words carefully, and took them to heart. After returning from being a student in London to my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, in 2000, I increasingly incorporated regional and local material into my work, mostly from sound archives. I developed friendships with like-minded artists and musicians who felt a deep sense of embodied stewardship toward the cultures and places where they lived, from Whitesburg and Berea, Kentucky, to Chicago, Illinois. Since 2010, I have done ethnographic research in Appalachian Ohio with a focus on sound and senses of place. Over this series of posts, I’ll write about the archival and contemporary sounds that I have listened to in the region. I’ll also consider how listening connects me to the people and history of the area, and how these sounds might become material for creative projects.

For the past two centuries, this region of southeastern Ohio has been immersed in extraction industries, from coal, oil, and gas to timber, iron ore, and clay. Located in what is now the Wayne National Forest, the towns that quickly arose around coal mining in the 19th century are collectively referred to as the “Little Cities of Black Diamonds.” The area is also bound together by a common heritage of booms and busts, environmental destruction and recovery, and the formation of early labor unions. After nearly a century of economic and population decline, another boom and bust cycle is playing out with the rise of hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Despite facing an uncertain future, the communities that live in the Little Cities continue to work for environmental, economic, and cultural enrichment. On a personal level, my father’s and mother’s families have roots in the region, with both families immigrating there in the 19th century. For me, listening to the past of the Little Cities involves listening to traces of family history. And because there are so few recordings, I also listen through images and text: photos, yearbooks, musical scores, and letters. David Toop (2010) refers to this process of listening to “silent media” as a form of “mediumship,” where writing and images offer clues and suggestions of “acoustic space.”

The sonic ethnography I’ve been doing in the Little Cities falls under the auspices of sound studies, an emergent field that draws from disciplines such as anthropology, performance studies, geography, and cultural studies. But in listening to these places and people, I also rely on my background and training as a musician and composer. In local archives and oral histories, field recordings and conversations, I listen to many voices in counterpoint across history. This practice echoes Edward Said’s (1993) contrapuntal rereading of the cultural archive with an ear to tension and exchange between power and marginalization. It also follows the sound art collective Ultra Red’s (2013) call to listen “in tension,” to allow many different voices to be heard, and to push creative practice into direct social engagement. For me, research in the Little Cities becomes groundwork for current and future sound works, including recordings, performances, and installations. Disciplinary lines break down; research and creative practice influence each other and become integral to one another. Together, they affect my compositional decisions. They allow me to develop sonic material that is richly contextual and always grounded in people and places.

In the Little Cities, I listen to these people and places closely. I hear the soundscapes of energy extraction, including independent oil and gas drillers who have worked in the region for fifty years, as well as contemporary sounds related to fracking. I listen to the forest, to environmental damage creating silences there, and to the emerging sounds of recovery, such as the return of wildlife to the region’s waterways. Through archival recordings and contemporary conversations, I listen to oral histories of those that have lived in the Little Cities. Residents describe concerts and basketball games, parades and funerals, and hopes for the future. I also pay attention to those affected by extraction-related disasters, such as miner Sigmund Kozma as he describes the sonic qualities of “pressure” and “force” of a mine explosion. Finally, I listen to voices of dissent and protest, of people who seek to avoid yet another boom and bust cycle after fighting so hard to recover from the previous two centuries of extraction.

The sounds of a 50-year old gas and oil driller still in operation.

Sigmund Kozma describing his experiences surviving the 1930 Millfield Mine Explosion that killed 82 miners. Interview courtesy of Justin Zimmerman

Over the next three posts, I’ll explore the above sounds in more detail, focusing on labor, environment, social life, disaster, and protest in the Little Cities. The posts also coincide with a parallel creative project I am working on titled Shawnee, Ohio. The piece assembles these sounds into a performance of collaged archival samples, photos, and videos, with live musicians. As I work on the piece, I continue to think about Berry’s words and deeds. When he concludes that “an art that heals and protects its subject is a geography of scars,” he is speaking from experience. Art stemming from and reflecting place will often be all too human: flawed, fragmented, and incomplete. Sometimes this art will not end up the way it was intended to be. But it will also be rich with knowledge and potential. I feel compelled to “live in my subject,” to add my voice in solidarity to those working as stewards to their own place. I also feel encouraged to create something that moves toward protecting the places my families are connected to, despite their past damage.

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Brian Harnetty

A composer and artist, Brian Harnetty’s creative and scholarly work connects sonic archives, performance, ecology, and place. His pieces transform archival material––including field recordings, transcriptions, and historic recordings––into newly re-contextualized sound collages. For the past decade, this has led to a focus on projects with archives, including the Berea College Appalachian Sound Archives in Kentucky and the Sun Ra/El Saturn Creative Audio Archive in Chicago. Harnetty received a Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Arts at Ohio University, an M.Mus. in music composition from the Royal Academy of Music, London, and a B.Mus. in composition from The Ohio State University. Harnetty’s most recent release, Rawhead & Bloodybones, is on Dust-to-Digital Records. His 2013 release, The Star-Faced One, was MOJO Magazine’s Underground Album of the Year. His current project, Shawnee, Ohio, will premiere in October, 2016 at the Wexner Center for the Arts and is a project of Creative Capital.