Buckboard Charlie

Program Notes

A couple of years after moving to Marquette (in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula,) I stumbled upon a collection of photographs of the region taken by photographer Russell Lee in the late 1930's as part of the New Deal, showing the harsh life of those living on the logged lands left by the lumber companies (mostly Finnish, Cornish, and Italian immigrants.) One of these folks was simply labeled "Buckboard Charlie": an odd moniker alongside an odd man, scraggly-bearded, unkempt, living in a roughly-hewn house scattered with rusty saws and things. Coincidentally, I chatted the next week with the folks at Citywater (a stellar Pierrot band in Sacramento) about a National Parks commission, about nature and our connection to it. As much as I wanted to capture the beauty of the Upper Peninsula, it seemed like revisionist history to not include the tremendous harm we'd done to it, as well as the people (like Charlie) who did what they could to make this tough landscape their home.

Dead River Falls is named for one of my favorite hiking trails: a series of waterfalls that climb from one to the next, each more impressive than the last, inviting you deeper and deeper into the woods. The Cut-Over Lands recalls the timber lands on which many thousands of hard-nosed immigrants lived: a wasteland of stumps and debris, cold, unforgiving, unsuited for many of those living in the barrenness left by the brutal extraction of the lumber companies. The Upper Hand plays on the weird Michigander thing of using our hands as maps (back of your left hand for the Lower Peninsula, sideways right hand for the Upper Peninsula) and tries to capture the liveliness that visitors always seemed surprised to find in abundance way up north.