Wisconsin Folk Music Project

Really incredible collection of Wisconsin folk musician photos from the state Historical Society's Wisconsin Folk Music Project. Check out a bunch more.

It would be really great to visit the Mills Music Library at UW-Madison to check out their archives of recordings, photos, and documents.

Daytrip?

Honey Creek

The baby's getting anxious and cramped up there in A— womb. Figuring there are only a few weeks left to do whimmy things, we loaded up the car today with vague plans and ended up at the sprawl of cornfields, cow pastures, and unincorporated towns near Honey Creek.

Our only real goal was to wander around and check stuff out. See what was there.

We got a dizzying history lesson from Frank and Nancy down at Stir Crazy in Rochester. They spent a good half hour dropping names of the famous people who've been to their coffee "shoppe". Not bragging, just proud. Tony Romo and Jane Hamilton, like that. But more than anything, Frank seemed gladdest of the fact that he hangs his hat (a Yankees one, which you'd assume to be a punishable offense so close to Milwaukee) in the same town that sprung up Ginger Beaumont, the first guy to ever bat in a World Series game.

See, when my daughter asks me what I did for fun before she was born, I'm glad I'll be able to show her photos like these and just say, "Not a whole lot. Wondered around, checked things out. Saw what was there."

(View the rest of the photo set)

forward

Flatlanders (the Illini) would come up to help mine the southern part of Wisconsin. This was early on, the days of roadhouses, rolling uninterrupted farmland, ghosts, and trees grasping for the clouds.

Being of less hardy stock than those indigenous to our counties and towns, these feeble flatlanders would head back to where they were from at the peep of cold.

Our people, solid as steel and with icicles suspended in our blood, would rush in and take over the dwellings left abandoned by our southern neighbors. We'd inhabit them like badgers and continue mining throughout the brutality of winter. It had to be done. And we did it. Deep freeze or not.

That's how we became The Badger State.

Have you heard that story?

I love, love, love this land. How could you not?

(More photos from my weekend trip.)

western wi

I'm going to hang on a limb here and say that you don't really give a good goddamn about living unless you can see the beauty in feeling the beauty of riding a motorcyle at 65mph over the rusted out green bridge that takes you over the sandbanked Wisonsin River, into Iowa County, Wisconsin, while Neil Young's "Everybody Knows This is Nowhere" plays on your ear buds.

Beyond that, two highlights of our 3 days of inter-generational boy biking were as follows:

1. On the ride up, seeing a turtle that was as big as a medium pizza on the road's center line. Later, there was debate about whether it was alive or dead. Someone claimed to see a stream of blood coming from its mouth, but its shell wasn't cracked and it was face up, so I'd imagine that it was just out for a hike. Marsh-jumping, let's say.

2. A heavily bearded Amish man was walking up the wrong side of the highway, so he was walking against traffic, toward me. As I passed, he flashed me one of these: