An Illustrated Guide to The Country Music Hall of Fame, Part 1

Tomorrow Kitty Wells, Elvis & more...

Animals

One of my favorite photographers is Gary Winogrand. If anyone is looking to win my favor by getting me a lovely gift, I would like his book of photos from the Bronx Zoo and Coney Island Aquarium, The Animals, published in 1969.

Until I own this wonderful book, I have to make my own animal photos--here is a series of snaps from a 2003 visit to the Barcelona zoo, just a few months before Snowflake the albino gorilla died.

A Visit to Nashville's Hatch Show Print

A sign on the glass reminds the visitor to close the door behind them so as not to let the shop's two cats escape onto Nashville's seven-days-a-week honky tonk Broadway.  Once inside, she is met with high walls papered with broadsides past and present and the medley of a working print shop--stacks of type drawers and carved blocks, piles of posters waiting to be wrapped, and trays of ink and mixing palettes.  This, along with the poster bins, little piles of ephemera, a very friendly staff and a cascade of tourists tramping through (50,000 a year!), makes the famous Hatch Show Print feel like a letterpress lover's endless holiday open house.

Maybe I was a little over-eager when I blurted out to an intern, "I'm so excited to be here!" She smiled sweetly at me.  But I did drive over to Nashville from a recent trip to the Smoky Mountains almost specifically to visit Hatch Show Print and take away a few souvenirs. Ordering posters online when I was a measly three hour drive away seemed so pointless.

When I took my first letterpress classes in New York, novices were encouraged to forget about perfect design and instead sort through the old metal typefaces, wooden letters, and boxes of carved woodblocks, arrange them on the press bed in an attempt at artful chaos and then just get their aprons messy while learning to work with the press.  None of my "designs" were particularly good, but overall motif felt so familiar--colorful but with paper showing through, simple, with the wooden letters making it feel kind of pan-Western. At the time, I didn't realize that what I was attempting to mimic as a beginner was actually a design tradition ingrained in our cultural aesthetic (graphic and musical) and descended from this famous print shop.

* * *

"Advertising without a poster is like fishing without worms." - The Hatch Brothers

Hatch Show Print began its run as the country's longest continually operating print shop in 1879. Originally called CR & HH Hatch after its founders, brothers Charles and Herbert Hatch, the shop's first job was a handbill advertising an appearance by Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, the brother of Uncle Tom's Cabin author, Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the 1920s C.R.'s son, Will T. Hatch, developed a distinctive style of hand carving that remains a main element of Hatch design today. Printing advertisements for local circuses, sporting and music events led to work with the Grand Ole Opry, a wildly popular "barn dance" radio show started in 1925 that has featured decades worth of Country & Western's most popular musicians. The Hatch aesthetic became the imagery of a specific type of American music, and the relationship between the two are inveterate, creating a look that has an oft-imitated "Americana" feel using wooden typefaces and carved imagery.

Country music is nothing if not populist, wending its way through the folk music traditions of Anglo and Irish immigrants in Appalachian, enslaved African Americans and romanticized Western cowboys of the open range to create its many subgenres and encapsulating the stories of the lower classes along the way. It reached an audience in wider America through the introduction of radio, and the musicians of the Grand Ole Opry billed themselves through cheaply produced letterpressed poster art.

Though not so cheap (at least for the hobbyist to practice) anymore, letterpress has definitely experenced a renaissance in recent years. A d.i.y. subculture seems (to me, living in Brooklyn) to have replaced fine art; and ironically or not, people in their 20s and 30s are interested in repurposing pieces of culture from decades past. Maybe love of letterpress comes from an ability to create using a method that has remained essentially unchanged since its advent, and that act of creation feels authentic or honest. It's a medium in which small inconsistencies make something unique instead of flawed.  As technology continues to outpace itself, you can see the human hand at work in a Hatch poster, and that has remained constant for over 130 years.

Jim Sherraden, Hatch's manager, curator and chief designer, and the eight or so employees and interns who work there feel a "responsibility to the heritage of the shop." No new type faces are introduced to the collection of antique metal and wood type and designs from the archive of old blocks are often reused in new designs. Hatch's work is a buoyant, colorful and humorous reference to its history.  With seven presses in use and upwards of 600 new jobs a year, Hatch still reprints ("restrikes") the classic posters for fans to purchase, in addition to using old blocks to print one of a kind monoprints. Hatch Show Press operates by Sherraden's motto, "preservation through production," and is without a doubt a living museum dedicated to a unique slice of the American story.  

 

Check out this video, American Letterpress: The Art of Hatch Show Print:

and visit the Ryman Auditorium's online collection of Hatch posters here.

Hatch Show Print is located at 316 Broadway, and is easy to get to using one of the free Music City Circuit buses cruising Downtown Nashville.

Found: The Legend of Ole Yellow

By J. Charles Rivers

Photo by J. Charles Rivers

An Introduction:

March 3, 2012

There is no doubt that we've had an unseasonably warm winter on the east coast, but it was today that I had my first real whiff of warm weather. How does the old song go? "The winds of March that make my heart a dancer" (I'm partial to Etta James). It was so warm that I took to an iced coffee and a stroll this afternoon. When I had that first sip I could taste Martha's Vineyard and, to me, that is an indescribable second of joy.

For the past seventeen years, I have had the great fortune of spending my summers on that high profile yet strangely low key island off the coast of Cape Cod that both Presidents Clinton and Obama have made their summer retreat. I was also lucky enough to spend six of those years working at a toy shop in Edgartown (think Teddy Kennedy, Chappaquiddick). It was the basement of a larger "department store" called The Fligors; the store and the family that ran it were undoubtedly a Vineyard staple.

In the summer of 2005, Carol and Dick Fligor had decided that after 45 years in the business it was time to retire. Although the toy store had disappeared the year before due to sad circumstances I won't bother with here, I had the priviledge of being one of the Fligor's last employees as they emptied out their massive inventory.

It was just around that time in ancient history that "the blog" was starting to pop up on people's radars. I, annoyed that anyone could start self-publishing their thoughts all willy-nilly on the internet, decided I would do an anti-blog. I was going to keep a daily electronic log of my experiences that summer and send them to a select few contacts in my inbox. When those few responded via email (what we today call "commenting") I would make their words part of the entry, as if the reader were actually contributing to the piece. Genius, wasn't it? Yeah, roll your eyes. I thought I was being clever.

The brain child was called IN SEASON and was some of the most fun I've had on a writing project. Perhaps this summer, "The Blue Valise" will play host to IN SEASON all over again. But, coincidentally, this afternoon as I was digging through my closet/office I found a bright yellow bag from The Fligors, which I affectionately called "Ole Yellow." I thumbed through IN SEASON to find the entry I devoted to this Vineyard institution and with an iced coffee in my hand and a heart a-dancing, I just had to share.

From IN SEASON

July 20, 2005

A near museum quality Fligor's bag. Photo by J. Charles Rivers

On some occassion within this journal, I know I've mentioned the coveted Fligor bag: a bright yellow paper-handled shopping bag exactly 18" across and 20" deep. It's so yellow that walking down Summer Street toward Main Street you could see a Fligor shopping bag crossing Water Street almost two blocks way. I took to calling it "ole yellow" early on in the game. I figured something that could drive women absolutely mad upon first sight had to have an affectionate nickname.

Here's a description: In hunger green lettering it said "THE FLIGORS" bright and bold. Right under that in a smaller font size it read "OF EDGARTOWN." The dead center of the bag was an artist's rendering of the entire Fligor "compound" as viewed from Winter Street as if you were walking toward North Water Street.

Under the artist rendering were three blocks of text. On the far left it said "CAROL AND DICK FLIGOR (508) 627-****." In the center it read: "ESTABLISHED 1960" and to the far right it said: "27 NORTH WATER STREET, EDGARTOWN, MA 02539."

toward the bottom, center it read boldly: "OPEN YEAR ROUND." The bag had two thick green strips running along the top and bottom. This made it very preppy looking and when in Rome... As I've mentioned before, these were the bags to be seen walking off the ferry with.

When I first worked for Carol five years ago one of the facts of my training was bag distribution: "Ok, Justin if the customer spends under five dollars, what do we give them?"

I would parrot back, "the smallest bag we've got."

"And what if it's big?"

"That larger paper bag." The paper bag was just that: same yellow, same green designs, same words, smaller bag, and just paper, no handles.

"Now how much does a customer need to spend to get the shopping bag?"

"Sixty to infinite amount of dollars."

"Nothing under sixty dollars gets these bags." This woman was worth millions of dollars and she lost sleep over paper bags. I even spied Carol in the street peering into a customer's bag just to make sure the contents added up to sixty dollars.

When she lost her mother's ashes four years before I met her, she apparently didn't find the remains to be valuable enough to put in an ole yellow. I'll never forget the night she called down to me: "Well Justin, we've found mother." Later, I asked her where she was. "Oh she was in the attic in a wooden box I wrapped in an 'A&P' bag."

"She wasn't good enough for a Fligor bag, huh Carol?" I laughed. Looking back on it, I feel like that was a crass statement, but I was told Carol and her mother had a complicated relationship.

Carol laughed, then sighed: "No, I guess not...No. No Fligor's bag for mother."

London Fashion Week Sketches

A cup of coffee and  Damien Florebert Cuyper's snap sketches of people-in-the-know arriving at London's fashion week are making settling into the work week after a holiday weekend a little more colorful.  

 Image from The New York Times