Elmer Kelton wrote The Time It Never Rained to "give urban people a better understanding of hazards the rancher and the farmer face in trying to feed and clothe them."

Folk music singer, collector, promotor and revivalist Mike Seeger died last Friday at his home in Lexington, Virginia, of multiple myeloma, a kind of blood cancer. He was 75 years old and is shown above with his future wife Alice Gerrard. Seeger formed the New Lost City Ramblers in 1958 as one of the first of many folk song revivalist bands. "That group revived songs of forerunners such as Charlie Poole, Uncle Dave Macon and The Carter Family without applying the mainstream gloss of many folk boom-era acts, and Seeger’s enthusiasm for music that many had considered archaic or quaint was both a lesson and an inspiration for young acoustic acts in the ‘60s, including Bob Dylan and Loudon Wainwright III," wrote Peter Cooper in the Nashville Tennessean. 

Seeger — the half brother of Pete Seeger — was also a record producer. He sought out and then recorded Dock Boggs, a banjo player in southwestern Virginia who had not played actively in decades. He recorded and produced American Banjo, Scruggs Style in 1957, which was the first bluegrass long-playing album released. More recently, he played autoharp on a song included the Grammy-winning album Raising Sand, by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

"Although only eight years his junior, Mr. Dylan called Mr. Seeger a father figure — for helping the under-age Mr. Dylan with his paperwork — and rhapsodized about him as the embodiment of a folk-star persona," wrote Ben Sisario in the New York Times. “Mike was unprecedented,” Dylan wrote. “As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula’s black heart. He was the romantic, egalitarian and revolutionary type all at once.” 

An emporium of Louisiana culture with a sci-fi twist, the UCM Museum is an hour and one giant step from New Orleans. You just crossed over into the Bassigator Zone.

Last week federal agents, armed and suited out in flak jackets, surrounded the home of a 60-year-old doctor in rural Utah. They arrested his wife and then picked up Dr. James Redd when he returned from his morning rounds. They were part of what the U.S. Department of Interior calls the largest bust of those who take Native American artifacts from sacred burial sites on public lands. The day after his arrest, Dr. Redd killed himself, and that has set Blanding, Utah, into turmoil.

Nearly 1,000 people came to Dr. Redd's funeral Tuesday (photo above), writes Los Angeles Times reporter Nicholas Riccardi, approximately one third of the population of Blanding. The reaction in the area (at least among the Anglo residents) is that the federal agents went too far and acted to harshly. "Eighteen vehicles surrounded the Redds' house," San Juan County Supervisor Bruce Adams said in an interview. "Do we do that with child molesters? With murderers?" He added, "I haven't seen a piece of pottery or an artifact that's worth a human life."

Even supporters of the arrest wonder if the federal agents went too far. "The whole point they wished to make is gone," said Winston Hurst, a Blanding native and archaeologist who has long fought against the digging up of ancient graves, a practice known locally as pot-hunting. "It's completely swamped by the ridiculous imagery of people in their flak jackets taking some old sucker, shackled hands and feet, and shuffling him into the slammer." It did take more than ten hours to remove all the stolen artifacts from the Redds home.