Update: We have added an opening act for Buncombe Turnpike. Mitchell HS talent show winner Casey Stockton, who recently auditioned for America’s Got Talent, will do a few songs at 7:00. Tom Godleski, cofounder of Buncombe Turnpike, was enthusiastic about the addition of Stockton. “I absolutely believe that young people should be encouraged and supported.” It’s what CRADLE is all about, too! Spread the word!

We have scheduled our first event to kick off the beginning of the Bakersville “Bringing the Arts Back Home” project! On Saturday, March 10th at 7:300 in the Historic Courthouse, the popular bluegrass band Buncombe Turnpike will play. Tickets are free and will be available at the door starting 30 mins before the concert.

Buncombe Turnpike

I am thrilled that Tom Godleski and Buncombe Turnpike will open up the project because in many ways they represent exactly what “Bringing the Arts Back Home” is all about. Tom writes songs about Western North Carolina,, many from his own experiences. It is so important that we in Bakersville, and everywhere else in the US for that matter, start telling our own stories, singing our own songs, and reclaiming our own creativity instead of simply buying whatever Hollywood, New York, and Nashville create for us. It isn’t that these mass media arts are somehow “bad,” but rather that they shouldn’t be the only thing we encounter.

Mitchell County has talent, Bakersville has talent — but we are regularly told that the talent we have isn’t “enough,” that we should just sit down, shut up, and let the “professionals” do it for us. Oh, we encourage our young people to be in plays, sing in choirs, and so forth, and that is very, very important. But creativity isn’t just for kids! But we can sing, we can tell stories, we can dance, and we can quilt and knit and make furniture and so many other things. And that is what “Bringing the Arts Back Home” is all about: creative self-sufficiency.

Well, enough — on March 10th, we’ll get things going. I hope to see you there, and that I’ll have a chance to talk to you and start getting to know you. I’m looking forward to it!

From Seth Godin’s post “Music Lessons (that work for publishing, too)“:

13. Whenever possible, sell subscriptions

Few businesses can successfully sell subscriptions (magazines being the very best example), but when you can, the whole world changes. HBO, for example, is able to spend its money making shows for its viewers rather than working to find viewers for every show.

The biggest opportunity for the music business is to combine permission with subscription. The possibilities are endless. And I know it’s hard to believe, but the good old days are yet to happen.

This is also the biggest opportunity for participatory arts, I believe. Instead of selling tickets to individual events, sell subscriptions and create a shows for subscribers.

Being creative is better than buying creative.

“It would be better if art were nameless, and that those of us who write about art in books and the reviews and newspapers, always clacking about art, or Art, or ART, were constrained somehow by good taste or a hickory club either to do art in its appropriate human context, and in doing be it, or keep still. For art suffers more than most activities in being withdrawn from the contexts of living. It is categorized as something special.”

Baker Brownell, The Human Community, 1950 

“Modern art activity can provide a new birth and new creative directions of usefulness for such a community. As art activity is developed, the community is recreated The vital roots of every phase of life are touched As the community is awakened to its opportunity in the arts, it becomes a laboratory through which the vision of the region is reformulated and extended And as the small community discovers its role, as the small community generates freshness of aesthetic response across the changing American scene, American art and life are enhanced.”

Robert Gard, Arts in The Small Communities, 1967