Handmade White Oak Basketry Transcript
Title: Handmade: White Oak Basketry in Cannon County, Tennessee
[Opening credits for the film are interspersed with scenes including a basketmaker preparing splits of white oak, basket weaving, and comments about the role of basketmaking in the community.]
Opening credits:
Spring Fed Records
The Arts Center of Cannon County
Sponsored in part by:
National Endowment for the Arts
Tennessee Arts Commission
Produced by Evan Hatch
Directed by Jacob Smithson
Edited by Jonathan Parris
***
- ♪ Do it again ♪
- You take this whole pole and go down half and high and you take that half and you going to split it down another. Then you take that and you quarter it. Then you take, split it down, take that heart out and then you take the rest of it and make it any size you want it. ♪ Do it again ♪
- That's the ways people survived. Just most everybody, if you wasn't a chair maker, you was a basket maker or something like that, you know, you just, you had to pick this and you didn't get much out of it either, you know what I mean? But it was some way of surviving. ♪ My buddy trying to have some fun ♪ ♪ Police kick down the door ♪ ♪ They say nobody run ♪ ♪ You know, I'm long gone from old Kentucky ♪ ♪ I've long gone, got away lucky ♪ ♪ Like a turkey through the corn ♪ ♪ I'm gone, sure as you're born ♪
- I love to work with my hands so much that I want it. I love to make them and I was just doing them because I like to. ♪ Don't worry, baby ♪ ♪ Won't be here long ♪ ♪ Long enough to sing a farewell song ♪ ♪ Like a turkey through the corn ♪ ♪ I'm gone, sure as you're born ♪ ♪ I'm long gone from old Kentucky ♪ ♪ Long gone, I got away lucky ♪
- Traditional basket making comes from an older conception of folk arts and folk life as something that's a survival from the past, from an earlier time when people did things for themselves as a part of subsistence farm life. In earlier times, basket making was among the bundle of skills that many self-sufficient people in Tennessee were competent in doing. Baskets were made for functional purposes. So-called egg baskets were used to carry eggs. Feed baskets were used to carry feed for farm animals. The baskets were made to be used, not so much shown as art objects. Baskets have been better appreciated as symbols of a folk life past and as artistic objects. One of the considerations sometimes raised by people from the arts world is that there's a difference between art and craft. The idea is that craft is something that's repeated, so that there are many different examples of a craft object, whereas arts objects are one-of-a-kind. Sometimes it's maintained that traditional craft makers are somehow not as sophisticated because they tend to repeat the same form. My argument is that the aesthetics are entirely different. In the case of traditional craft objects, the doing of the work, the skills and the individual approaches that the maker brings to it are very often totally unappreciated by observers from the arts world. Traditional basket makers do their work from the tree. They process their materials. Their skill in hand-splitting the white oak weavers is something that schooled artists don't have as a relevant activity.
- There's a running joke about basket weaving classes, when I was in college, as being an easy thing. That's what the football players took. And this is, you know, basketry, white oak basketry tradition here is so much different than what people perceive as basket weaving is because you can go on the internet now or pick up a mail order catalog and order the components to make a basket. Anybody can do that, and quite frankly, it's not that difficult to accomplish once you get those components there. What makes this special is that these people and this tradition is about taking a tree, creating those components and then formulating it into a basket that has their own signature and their own subtlety. There was a perception early on in their tradition that basket makers were poor people. Part of that perception was true that people made baskets to trade for food and other things and it tended to be more of a subsistence, part-time occupation rather than a full-time art form. What came to that was a stigma that was attached to basket making, that once you had an opportunity to get public work, you didn't need to make baskets anymore. There's also a really interesting dichotomy in that basket makers were considered lazy, even though it's an extraordinary amount of work to take this piece from a tree into the art form that you see it as now. People thought that somebody that sat under a tree making baskets was lazy as opposed to going into a factory job.
- What we're looking for is a tree that is about the size of a stove pipe. That would be perfect, especially the bottom going all the way up. You get one too small--the small trees work fine, but you've gotta split it finer so you just don't-- normally I try to get one that's about the size of a stove pipe. And this tree here, it's a good looking tree. It's grown really, really good looks like. It's a little bit big. You can see the tree's probably 10 inches, 12 inches through and just a little bit too big to use. We'd have a tough time carrying it out of the woods, so a tree like this right here would be best to leave it alone and let it grow for timber, but it is a good-looking tree. This one that we found, it's a little bit big at the bottom, but we can go ahead and use that and you can see the tree goes up a good way. It's good and straight on up in the tree there, so this is a good tree to take. And maybe we can take this out today and split this one here. This will make a lot of baskets right here.
- We got the tree cut down and you can see the growth rings here on the sapwood.
- [Videographer] Sapwood is?
- It's the white wood. The heartwood is the dark wood and so hopefully it'll split good and if it's not too brittle and hopefully make a lot of baskets out of it.
- By the point of the 1930s and the Depression, lots of local families found basket making as a way to help them get by. Whole families of people in Cannon County used basket making, especially in the winter time or in times when they didn't have farm work, to bring in extra income. Many of the great makers of the past few decades grew up as girls at the feet of their mothers and their grandmothers being taught how to make baskets and contributing to the household income. A number of the local stores in Cannon County would accept baskets in trade for groceries and so the ability of people to get bacon and salt was affected by their ability to bring in baskets and to conduct business in trade with the grocery stores. There were also a lot of local men who got in the business of what was called peddling and they would load up chairs and baskets--often made by their families and neighbors-- and carry them to other parts of the country to sell.
- I'd go around and see the people that made them, made the basket and I'd contract them. I'd say, "Hey, I'll take all the baskets you make and I'll be here on a certain date." They'd tell me when they'd have them and there was a lot of other people that was coming from out of state buying, but I had the advantage of them because I could pick them up weekly. They couldn't drive from Indiana or from Kentucky or you know, every week like that, so they wanted that money immediately. They didn't want to wait a month or two months and so on.
- Various ways of reselling baskets became part of the livelihood for quite a few people in Cannon County. Newspaper documentation in the Great Depression, 1936 and another article in 1938, gives us an interesting snapshot of how important this was. One article contends that over 50 families in the Short Mountain area depended upon basket making for a significant part of their living. So the dependence on basket making to get by among many families became a kind of a stigma for many of the basket makers. Many of the women who grew up with this legacy had social pressure to be ashamed of it because of this association. And later on when textile mills came into the area, when women had the opportunity to get wage labor, to do piece work in sewing factories, they were eager to pursue that. And ironically, this great legacy of basket making was something that many women felt conflicted about. I had more than one basket maker tell me when I interviewed them that they didn't want their children to have to learn how to make baskets for a living. And this was a feeling of shame associated with the craft. There were other makers in the tradition who also had incentives to remain anonymous. Along with the stigma of poverty, the basket tradition also got complicated by welfare programs and so forth, and the fact that many people receiving social support had to live within supplemental income ceilings. This was a dilemma for many of the local basket makers for many years and if basket makers were making income from baskets on the side, they didn't want people to know about it and they certainly didn't want it to place them in violation of a disability check or other social program check. There was a very unfortunate black market that was a part of the lives of some makers. It was often an awkward situation and it wasn't talked about very much, but it was a factor that kept some of the very fine makers in recent decades from being acknowledged and from doing the best work that they could.
- What we're going to do, you always cut everything in half, then we'll hack that to quarter it and continue on until we get it down to pieces that we can split by hand. So we've got it down and we halved the quarter there, getting it down in a little wedge. I call them "pie shapes" or what. And what you want to do before you actually start splitting the wood is cut the heart out. The center part's really tough and just can't do anything with it. And I've lost count as to how many times we've already cut it, but again, you can see that every time we're cutting it in half. And when you get it down to the small pieces, you can actually manipulate the wood because you're actually wanting to try to keep it in the middle and if you can, you can see that I'm trying to get it to come back this way towards me.
- One of the things that sets this tradition apart from other traditions in the United States is its shift from functionality into art form. In the beginning these were tools. It's what you gathered eggs in. It's what you took to the garden and the older baskets really don't much exist anymore because they were functional items. They were functional items that were used until they were worn out.
- After World War II, with synthetic materials, the market for functional objects really changed. We got glass jugs, later on plastic jugs, metal buckets and so forth and the demand for handmade baskets as objects to be used entirely disappeared. There were a few ladies that continued to make baskets. I think Maggie Murphy was the great example. And Maggie Murphy was rediscovered almost as an oddity by newspaper feature writers and so forth. And at one period in time there were out-of-state cars driving by the Short Mountain Store asking for directions to Maggie Murphy's house. And I think that attention to Maggie really challenged a lot of makers into resuming their craft and to making much finer show baskets.
- They took the tradition to places that it hadn't been before, really working to make the splits as smooth as possible and make much smaller splits and a much tighter weave. They evolved from a utilitarian piece into something that was truly an art form. Some people decided that to set themselves apart, they would make a basket as large as they could. Maggie Murphy made one. Albert Thomas made one that was actually so big it wouldn't fit through his front door, so for years it hung on his front porch. Then the other end of that spectrum is that people decided to see how small they could make baskets and they would make miniatures that were the size of a dime with a hoop the size of a dime, but still retained the egg basket shape or the box basket shape and they started calling these high-quality, high-priced pieces show baskets, where we would call them museum quality or collector's baskets, the show baskets is what they called them. And that's where the show basket tradition came from.
- We've got the little piece split out from the log and what you have to do, we're gonna be splitting it along the growth rings, which run this way. I wanna split this one out to separate the heartwood from the sapwood and you can tell the difference, the heartwood is dark, sapwood is white. The bark was over here. Then we'll split it and then we'll get kind of a feel of how good that it's gonna work and how flexible, so I'm just using this as a probe sort of to get it started where I can get my hands in and soon as I can get my hands in it, I'll split it by hand then. This is not trimmed up the best, but you can see how it'll separate and have the dark wood, which is the heartwood over here, and this is the sapwood. So what we do is you get on one of the growth rings that you wanna split, trying to stay in the middle and the reason that everything's always split in half, it gives you equal leverage. Normally, the knife will follow the growth ring down pretty good and then you hold it, hold it with your knee, manipulate the wood, whichever way you want it to go. Right here is how you spray. You hold your knife flat down and pull the wood. I think this is gonna work good. There'll be a lot of wood. You can tell this is just part, started out with a little piece and you can tell how much wood's gonna come out of that.
- [Videographer] Yeah, a lot.
- And the piece over there is twice, three times, probably big as what we've used here, the stump log and you can really tell, it turns out a lot of wood, so.
- In past times, land and forest tended to be more communal areas, so if you needed materials to make white oak baskets, you just went out, you found the trees you needed to find, no matter whose property they were on, you cut 'em down and you took 'em back to your house and made the baskets. As we entered modern times and land ownership became more important and people began to build fences and post "No Trespassing" signs, the availability of materials became one of the largest obstacles in our basket makers-- in continuing the tradition.
- With the timber co-op, they're trying to find a repeatable source for high-quality timber and make it available to all makers who find themselves in need.
- I became involved with the White Oak Timber Cooperative about three years ago through Evan Hatch, who wanted me to help with the project as the woodsman. And, essentially, what I do is go into the woods and find trees that are appropriate for making white oak baskets. I generally will just go out into the woods, scan around, scout out trees that I think would be good candidates for making a pole, for making the white oak baskets. I then harvest the tree and split it down to the point where it's able to be worked for the basket makers in our community, who a lot of times are older and are no longer able to either A, go out into the woods to find the pole or B, split them once they have harvested them.
- Given the time and effort that it takes to make a basket, most basket makers are not in it for any kind of profit at all, so it really has to be a love for the baskets and it surprised me. I know the grandchildren of a lot of the basket makers around here and their relatives and it surprised me that they don't know how to make the baskets. And I thought, you know, what if nobody knows in a few years because a lot of the basket makers aren't gonna be making them for much longer and so I wanted to know just so that that information wouldn't go away.
- The great masters of this Cannon County tradition have been older women for several decades now. And unfortunately we've seen a lot of the wonderful basket makers reaching the ends of their lives, and it brings concerns about the future of the tradition. In reality, I think we have to acknowledge that this tradition is not what it was in the past and it's facing the prospects of dying out completely. Repeatedly in the past decades, when I've asked the master basket makers in Cannon County whether or not they're teaching their craft and whether or not young students are coming up to carry it on, I've not received very positive answers.
- The basketry tradition is in danger of extinction, currently. And I say that having done everything that we could as an organization to combat that. But the fact of the matter is that to take a piece of wood and to turn it into a basket is extraordinarily hard work. And the return on the investment of time is not very great.
- One of my biggest challenges is educating the public onto the value of the craft. And I think that's what basket makers face, blacksmiths face, weavers. My daughter weaves, my son makes knives. We have to educate people to say, "Look, here's why there is value in what we do."
- We go to shows and they have no idea. They can see the wood and they can see you stripping and doing all of the work and still have no idea that it's a white oak basket. And once you've lost that, then people just have no idea that how important at one time they were to us.
- I think that the same, what's happening to baskets now is really happening to all crafts and I think there's a cycle like this that happens throughout history, ever since the Industrial Revolution. For a time there's an interest in everything technological and all the scientific advancements have got people fascinated. And then there'll be a reaction against that and people wanna move back to the simpler crafts and the simpler way of living and the back to the land movement.
- I think that it's important for us to preserve American traditions and arts and crafts that were part of this country's history. I guess it's kind of scary to think that commercial trade and manufacturing would interfere with that and put an end to it-- things like baskets or wood carvings or paintings. I think there should be an urgency to protect those things.
- We've got a lot of young people who have gone to some of these older basket makers and sat under them, and learned from them and studied their craft. And even them--and these are some basket makers now that may be in their 40s, 50s or whatever-- and then I see their children taking up that craft. So to me, there is a seed of hope for those crafts.
- I think in this culture that's so technological, there is a resurging interest in handcraft and people are beginning to realize the value of something that's made by hand and not made by a machine.
- It won't die because I think, you know, just as soon as people start to tire of technology and they start to see all the negative effects that it brings about to life or the too much of it, there'll be another upsurge in, and I think all of these skills will be picked back up again.
Song: “This Little Light of Mine” accompanies photographs of the following as the film closes:
Maggie Murphy
Albert Thomas
Gertrude Youngblood
Mary Davis
Trevle Wood
Josey Jones
Mary Prater
Ida Pearl Davis and Thelma Hibdon
♪ This little light of mine ♪ ♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ This little light of mine ♪ ♪ Gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ This little light of mine ♪ ♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪ ♪ Well, everywhere I go ♪ ♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Everywhere I go ♪ ♪ Gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Everywhere I go ♪ ♪ I'm gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪ ♪ On Monday, He gave me the gift of love ♪ ♪ Tuesday, the peace came from above ♪ ♪ Wednesday, He told me to have more faith ♪ ♪ On Thursday, He gave me just a little more grace ♪ ♪ On Friday, told me to watch and pray ♪ ♪ Saturday, He told me just what to say ♪ ♪ Sunday, gave me the power divine ♪ ♪ Let my little light shine ♪ ♪ This little light of mine ♪ ♪ Gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Well, I'm gonna let it shine ♪ ♪ Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine ♪ ♪ The light that shines is the light of love ♪ ♪ Shines on darkness from above ♪ ♪ It'll shine on me ♪ ♪ It'll shine on you ♪ ♪ It'll show you what the power of love can do ♪ ♪ Shine my light both bright and clear ♪ ♪ Shine that light far and near ♪ ♪ Every dark corner that I find ♪ ♪ Let my little light shine ♪
Closing Credit: A film by The Arts Center of Cannon County.
