Polka music doesn't need reviving. Thanks to Mark Halata, the Tex-Czech tradition never died out, and double-time dancing pounds on.

A photographer returns to his hometown in southern Virginia. The textile mill and tobacco company have closed, but plenty of local spirits and shades remain.

"Normally there's not many people around here, so I usually have to play by myself," said Ryder Cude, a 15 year old Texas fiddle player. "But every now and then, I can find a jam session in Seymour or Knox City where I can go play with some people."

If you live in a small town, too small to have its own marching band or even it’s own junior high school, growing musically can be tough, as well as lonely. Wade Goodwyn reports for NPR on a music camp for Western swing (that's jazz with pointy toed boots and Stetsons) in a tiny Texs town.

The Bobby Boatwright Memorial Music Camp, named for a hometown fiddler who went on to make it professionally, is held in Goree, TX (pop. 320), in what used to be the local junior high building.
As Goodwyn explains, the camp is doing more than teach old fiddle tunes. Drawing adults and youngsters from many small towns in the region, it’s a revival meeting of cowboy culture and a celebration of family life on the north Texas plains.

Says Tammy Trainham, wife of the mayor and prime mover behind the music camp, Goree ”was dead — graveyard dead…We're trying to rebirth a town."

The deadliest catch, it turns out, is shrimp. The Seattle Times reports that over the past decade, 55 fishermen have died in the Gulf chasing shrimp over the last decade, surpassing the 12 who died fishing for crab on the Bering Sea. (Remember, the fantastic television series, The Deadliest Catch, is about the crews plying the Bering Sea.) 

"I am shocked," said Buddy Guindon, a veteran Texas shrimper, when informed of the study results. "It certainly doesn't get near as rough down here as it does up there."

After shrimp, the next deadliest catch is for Atlantic scallop, with 44 deaths; then the Alaska salmon harvest, with 39 deaths; then the Alaska cod and Northeast groundfish harvests, 26 deaths each. Researchers surmise that Gulf shrimpers are too often entangled in nets and pulled overboard.

• Farm subsidy payments are becoming a big deal in the race for the U.S. Senate in Kentucky. Western Kentucky is big farm territory (corn, soybean and wheat). Republican candidate Rand Paul says he is generally against farm subsidies, suggesting later that cuts to the richest farmers should be made first. 

Paul has been moderating his views over the past few months. Most recently, reports Bill Estepp with the Lexington Herald-Leader, Paul is vague about what level of subsidy he favors. Paul said, "I'm not sure, exactly. I mean, I think we'll have to look at it and see."

• The New York Times visits southern Louisiana to ask if the way of life along the Gulf Coast is dead and whether Cajuns will have to move again. Cajuns moved here in the 1700s from Acadia, in what is now eastern Canada, after refusing to pledge their allegiance to the British Crown. 

"What they got in return for their tolerance of living in what early cartographers called No Man’s Land was a world-class bounty of seafood and freedom in an environment of striking natural beauty," reports Susan Saulny. "Now that is in jeopardy."

Cajuns like their independence and several told the reporter, "Nobody's moving." Good for them.