Tom Isern

Political history is not my cup of tea, but I cannot help being impressed and fascinated by this new book from South Dakota State Historical Society Press: After Populism: The Agrarian Left on the Northern Plains, by William C. Pratt. I’ve known Bill Pratt, professor emeritus at University of Nebraska Omaha, for forty years. His new book is of a conventional genre for historians—collected essays of an old guy summing up a long career. This one far exceeds the usual expectations of a bucket of odd nuts and bolts from the shop.

Somewhere on the prairies, as described by the Wahpeton Times of 24 January 1889, a crowd of young folks sprang a surprise party on an old gentleman they called Uncle Peter. To the bemusement of Uncle Peter as well as Aunt Candace, they invested their home with all the things young people did on social occasions--popping corn, bobbing for apples; engaging in play-party games of the era like “Weevily Wheat” and “Sister Phoebe;” and, this being the Gilded Age, singing, of course.

Twas Christmas Eve upon the prairie / And we hovered round the fire / We could hear the coyote, wary / Seemed as if he’d never tire.

For the kind indulgences of the people of the northern plains, who not only tolerate my essays here on our public radio voice but even speak kindly to me about them, I feel like I owe a gift of the season, and here it is: a set of stanzas by our premier poet, once emergent and now rampant, Bonnie Larson Staiger.

If you’re lucky this Christmas, you may find a Russian nesting doll in your stocking. Its title will be Field Notes.

I’m in love with the idea of singing businessmen—guys like the Williston grocer, F. J. Davis, who, when he managed to stay on the right side of the law, sang the virtues of his fresh fruit and seafood across the counter; or the Great Falls haberdasher Mike Mullin, owner of the Mikehasit men’s clothing store, who wrote a great ballad advising his customers, while “Waiting for a Chinook,” to stock up on warm winter wear from his store.

If you’re a regular listener to Plains Folk, it’s likely we share certain values. One of these is that life is not a purely transactional matter. There are important things that are not reducible to calculation and exchange. On the other hand, you have to make a living. One of the delightful findings of my investigation of folksong on the Great Plains is that it is possible to combine commerce and art. I’m talking about the phenomenon, fairly common in the heyday of prairie balladry, of singing storekeepers. These guys gave their customers both bargains and ballads.

Awakening in winter dark, I felt a peculiar consciousness of a living, stirring thing in the house — something other than the usual snores of a Labrador retriever. I padded downstairs to the prairie kitchen, lifted the towel covering our big Medalta mixing bowl, and checked the progress of my vorteig — my pre-dough, the batter stage of a baking project I had left on the counter for first rise overnight. It was alive, and alluring — I bent over the bowl to take in the scent.

There were a lot of great ballads that originated in points south on the Great Plains and somehow made their way to North Dakota. Bismarck’s renaissance man, George Will, collected folksongs from his father’s seed company employees more than a century ago, and one of the first songs he reported was “The Texas Rangers.” The expansion of the range cattle industry was the context for the migration of many such ballads north.

Sooner or later, I suppose, someone is going to get wise to the hidden storyline of “Sweet Betsy from Pike” and demand the ballad be outlawed from the public schools. Generations of children have sung the story of the hardy traveling woman, Betsy, crossing the plains to California. The continental journey is the first obvious theme of the ballad.