“I don’t know those songs,” replied Cash, “but I got a few of my own I can play for you.” Dressed in his trademark black suit, his jet-black hair a little longer than usual, Cash draped the strap of his Martin guitar over his right shoulder and played three songs, all of them decidedly to the left of “Okie From Muskogee.” With the nation still mired in Vietnam, Cash had far more than prison reform on his mind. Nixon listened with a frozen smile to the singer’s rendition of the explicitly antiwar “What Is Truth?” and “Man in Black” (“Each week we lose a hundred fine young men”) and to a folk protest song about the plight of Native Americans called “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” It was a daring confrontation with a president who was popular with Cash’s fans and about to sweep to a crushing reelection victory, but a glimpse of how Cash saw himself — a foe of hypocrisy, an ally of the downtrodden. An American protest singer, in short, as much as a country music legend.

Years later, “Man in Black” is remembered as a sartorial statement, and “What Is Truth?” as a period piece, if at all. Of the three songs that Cash played for Nixon, the most enduring, and the truest to his vision, was “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” The song was based on the tragic tale of the Pima Indian war hero who was immortalized in the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo, and in Washington’s Iwo Jima monument, but who died a lonely death brought on by the toxic mixture of alcohol and indifference and alcoholism. The song became part of an album of protest music that his record label didn’t want to promote and that radio stations didn’t want to play, but that Cash would always count among his personal favorites.

The story of Cash and “Ira Hayes” began a decade before the meeting with Nixon. On the night of May 10, 1962, Cash made a much-anticipated New York debut at Carnegie Hall. But instead of impressing the cognoscenti, Cash, who had begun struggling with drug addiction, bombed. His voice was hoarse and hard to hear, and he left the stage in what he described as a “deep depression.” Afterward, he consoled himself by heading downtown with a folksinger friend to hear some music at Greenwich Village’s Gaslight Café.

Onstage was protest balladeer Peter La Farge, performing “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” A former rodeo cowboy, playwright, actor and Navy intelligence operative, La Farge was also the son of longtime Native activist and novelist Oliver La Farge, who had won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1930 Navajo love story, “Laughing Boy.” The younger La Farge had carved out an intriguing niche in the New York folk revival scene by devoting himself to a single issue. “Pete was doing something special and important,” recalls folksinger Pete Seeger. “His heart was so devoted to the Native American cause at a time that no one was really saying anything about it. I think he went deeper than anyone before or since.”

Cash never pretended that music could stay immune from social, but he tried his best to “not mix in politics.” Instead he talked about the things that unite us like the dignity of honest work. “If you were a baker,” he told writer Christopher Wren in 1970, “and you baked a loaf of bread and it fed somebody, then your life has been worthwhile. And if you were a weaver, and you wove some cloth and your cloth kept somebody warm, your life has been worthwhile.”

Raised in rural poverty on the margins of America, Cash empathized with outsiders like convicts, the poor and Native Americans. But his identification with Indians was especially deep — even delusional. During the depths of his early ’60s drug abuse, he convinced himself, and told others, that he was Native American himself, with both Cherokee and Mohawk blood. (He would later recant this claim.)

At the Gaslight, once he had listened to “Ira Hayes’ and La Farge’s other Indian protest tunes, including “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow” and “Custer,” Cash was hooked. “Johnny wanted more than the hillbilly jangle,” Peter La Farge would write later about meeting Cash at the Gaslight. “He was hungry for the depth and truth heard only in the folk field (at least until Johnny came along). The secret is simple, Johnny has the heart of a folksinger in the purest sense.” In fact, Cash had written an Indian folk protest ballad of his own in 1957. “I wrote ‘Old Apache Squaw,’” Cash later explained to Seeger. “Then I forgot the so-called protest song for a while. No one else seemed to speak up for the Indian with any volume or voice [until Peter La Farge].”

Cash, like many in the 1960s, could see that everything that was certain, rigid and hard was breaking apart. Social movements were blossoming. But the thunderous American choir that was singing “We Shall Overcome” and “We Shall All Be Free” drowned out the cry of the loose-knit Native movement. As Martin Luther King and other leaders steered their people toward legislative victories that would further integrate them into a society they were locked out of, the rising tide of Native youth activists wanted something different.

“In my mind, Native people could not have a civil rights movement,” American Indian Movement activist and musician John Trudell says. “The civil rights issue was between the blacks and the whites and I never viewed it as a civil rights issue for us. They’ve been trying to trick us into accepting civil rights but America has a legal responsibility to fulfill those treaty law agreements. If you’re looking at civil rights, you’re basically saying ‘all right treat us like the way you treat the rest of your citizens’. I don’t look at that as a climb up.” Rather than pursue assimilation into the American system, Native American activists wanted to maintain their slipping grip on sovereignty and the little land they still possessed.

By the early ’60s, the burgeoning National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) was attempting to stake its own claim for their equal share of justice. With the expansion of fishing treaty violations and the breach of two major land treaties that led to the loss of thousands of acres of tribal land in upstate New York for the Tuscarora and Allegany Seneca (the story behind La Farge’s “As Long as the Grass Shall Grow”), the NIYC, led by Native activists like Hank Adams, responded by adapting the sit-in protest. Rechristened as the “fish-in,” the NIYC disputed the denial of treaty rights by fishing in defiance of state law. Fish-ins were held in New York and the Pacific Northwest.

The fish-in tactic worked in helping build some public support, but it did little to stop the treaty violations. Instead, the U.S. government ramped up its efforts to crush any momentum the Native movement was building. Oftentimes their tactics were brutal and violent. “This was the time of Selma and there was a lot of unrest in the nation,” remembers Bill Frank Jr. of Washington state’s Nisqually tribe. “Congress had funded some big law enforcement programs and they got all kinds of training and riot gear-shields, helmets. And they got fancy new boats. These guys had a budget. This was a war.”

By 1964, the Native American cause had attracted the interest of another celebrity. On March 2 the NIYC gained national attention as actor Marlon Brando joined a Washington state fish-in. Already an outspoken supporter of the civil rights movement, Brando’s very public support and subsequent arrest for catching salmon “illegally” in Puyallup River helped to boost the Native movement. Brando’s involvement with the Native cause had begun when he contacted D’Arcy McNickle after reading the Flathead Indian’s book “The Surrounded,” a powerful novel depicting reservation life in 1936. Brando’s involvement in Native issues led to government surveillance that lasted decades. His FBI file, bursting with memos detailing possible means of silencing the actor, quickly grew to more than 100 pages.

Three days after Brando’s arrest in Washington, Cash, fresh off the biggest chart success of his career, the single “Ring of Fire,” and having just finished recording a very commercial album called “I Walk the Line,” began recording another, very different album. When Cash left Sun Studios for Columbia in the late 1950s, he believed his rising star would give him the creative capital to produce and record something a little outside the pop and country mainstream — albums of folk music and live prison concerts. He was alternating folky albums like “Blood Sweat and Tears,” a celebration of the working man, with commercial discs laden with radio-ready singles. “Ring of Fire,” which had reached No. 1 on the country charts and had crossed over to pop, had bought him the permission of Columbia to make an album of what he called “Indian protest songs.”

In the two years since Cash had first met La Farge and listened to “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” Cash had educated himself about Native American issues. “John had really researched a lot of the history,” Cash’s longtime emcee Johnny Western recalled. “It started with Ira Hayes.”

As Cash explained, “I dove into primary and secondary sources, immersing myself in the tragic stories of the Cherokee and the Apache, among others, until I was almost as raw as Peter. By the time I actually recorded the album I carried a heavy load of sadness and outrage.”

But Cash felt a special kinship with Ira Hayes. Both men had served in the military as a way to escape their lives of rural poverty longing to create new opportunities. Plus, both suffered from addiction problems; Cash and his pills and Hayes with alcohol. He decided to anchor the album with “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” And since the song had provided the spark for Cash’s vision, it just felt right that he should learn more about the song’s subject.

Cash contacted Ira Hayes’ mother and then visited her and her family at the Pima reservation in Arizona. Before Cash left the Pima Reservation, Hayes’ mother presented him with a gift, a smooth black translucent stone. The Pima call it an “Apache tear.” The legend behind the opaque volcanic black glass is rooted in the last U.S. cavalry attack on Native people, which took place on Apaches in the state of Arizona. After the slaughter, the soldiers refused to allow the Apache women to put the dead up on stilts, a sacred Apache tradition. Legend says that overcome by intense grief, Apache women shed tears for the first time ever, and the tears that fell to the earth turned black. Cash, moved by the gift, polished the stone and mounted it on a gold chain.

With the Apache tear draped around his neck, Cash cut his protest album. He recorded five of La Farge’s songs, two of his own, and one he’d co-written with Johnny Horton. All were Native American themed. “When we went back into the studio to record what became ‘Bitter Tears,’” Cash bassist Marshall Grant says, “we could see that John really had a special feeling for this record and these songs.”

Yet the album’s first single, “Ira Hayes,” went nowhere. Few radio stations would play the song. Was the length of the song, four minutes and seven seconds, the problem? Radio stations liked three-minute tracks. Or maybe disc jockeys wanted Cash to “entertain, not educate,” as one Columbia exec put it.

“I know that a lot of people into Johnny Cash weren’t into ‘Bitter Tears,’ ” explains Dick Weissman, a folksinger, ex-member of the Journeymen and friend of La Farge. “They wanted a ‘Ballad of Teenage Queen’ not ‘The Ballad of Ira Hayes.’ They wanted ‘Folsom Prison.’ They didn’t want songs about how American’s mistreated Indians.”

The stations wouldn’t play the song and Columbia Records refused to promote it. According to John Hammond, the legendary producer and Cash champion who worked at Columbia, executives at the label just didn’t think it had commercial potential. Billboard, the music industry trade magazine, wouldn’t review it, even though Cash was at the height of his fame, and had just scored another No. 1 country single with “Understand Your Man” and No. 1 country album with “I Walk the Line.”

One editor of a country music magazine demanded that Cash resign from the Country Music Association because “you and your crowd are just too intelligent to associate with plain country folks, country artists and country DJs.” Johnny Western, a DJ, singer and actor who for many years was part of Cash’s road show, recalls a conversation with “a very popular and powerful DJ.” According to Western, the DJ was “connected to many of the music associations and other influential recording industry groups. He had always been incredibly supportive of John.” Western and the DJ started discussing Cash’s new album and the “Ira Hayes” single. “He asked me why John did this record. I told him that John and all of us had a great feeling for the American Indian cause. He responded that he felt that the music, in his mind, was un-American and that he would never play the record on air and had strongly advised other DJs and radio stations to do the same. Just ignore it until John came back to his senses, is what he told me.”

“When John was attacked for ‘Ira Hayes’ and then ‘Bitter Tears,’” explains Marshall Grant, “it just ripped him apart. Hayes was forced to drink by the abuse and treatment of white people who used and abandoned him. To us, it meant Hayes was being tortured and that’s the story we told and it’s true.”

When “Bitter Tears” and its single did not get the attention he felt they deserved, Cash insisted on having the last word. He composed a letter to the entire record industry and placed it in Billboard as a full-page ad on Aug. 22, 1964.

“D.J.’s — station managers — owners, etc.,” demanded Cash, “Where are your guts?” He referred to his own supposed half Cherokee and Mohawk heritage and spoke of the record as unvarnished truth. “These lyrics take us back to the truth … you’re right! Teenage girls and Beatle record buyers don’t want to hear this sad story of Ira Hayes … This song is not of an unsung hero.” Cash slammed the record industry for its cowardice, “Regardless of the trade charts — the categorizing, classifying and restrictions of air play, this not a country song, not as it is being sold. It is a fine reason though for the gutless [Cash's emphasis] to give it a thumbs down.”

Cash demanded that the industry explain its resistance to his single. “I had to fight back when I realized that so many stations are afraid of Ira Hayes. Just one question: WHY???” And then Cash answered for them. “‘Ira Hayes’ is strong medicine … So is Rochester, Harlem, Birmingham and Vietnam.”

As Cash later explained, “I talked about them wanting to wallow in meaninglessness and their lack of vision for our music. Predictably enough, it got me off the air in more places than it got me on.” In reality, however, as Cash noted in his letter, “Ira Hayes” was already outselling many country hits. Ultimately, thanks in part to aggressive promotion by Cash, who personally promoted the song to disc jockeys he knew, “Ira Hayes” reached No. 3 on the country singles charts, and “Bitter Tears” peaked at 2 on the album charts.

Later, long after “Bitter Tears,” and after he’d won his battle with drugs, Cash would dial back his claims of Indian ancestry. But he never wavered from his support for the Native cause. He went on to perform benefit shows on reservations — including the Sioux reservation at Wounded Knee in 1968, five years before the armed standoff there between the FBI and the American Indian Movement — to help raise money for schools, hospitals and other critical resources denied by the government. In 1980, Cash told a reporter: “We went to Wounded Knee before Wounded Knee II [the 1973 standoff] to do a show to raise money to build a school on the Rosebud Indian Reservation” and do a movie for “Public Broadcasting System called ‘Trail of Tears.’” He joined with fellow musicians Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson and Robbie Robertson to call for the release of jailed AIM leader Leonard Peltier.

Since Cash first recorded “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” in 1964, many musicians have recorded their own versions. Kris Kristofferson is one of those musicians. He summed up the spirit behind Cash’s now nearly forgotten protest album in his eulogy for Cash, who died in 2003. Cash, he said, was a “holy terror … a dark and dangerous force of nature that also stood for mercy and justice for his fellow human beings.” Four years before his famous concert at Folsom Prison, four years before the American Indian Movement formed, and at the pinnacle of his commercial success, Cash insisted on producing an uncommercial, deeply personal protest record that was a close as he could come to truth. He would always cherish it. “I’m still particularly proud of ‘Bitter Tears,’” Cash would say near the end of his life, while talking about the topical music he recorded in the 1960s. “Apart from the Vietnam War being over, I don’t see much reason to change my position today. The old are still neglected, the poor are still poor, the young are still dying before their time, and we’re not making any moves to make things right. There’s still plenty of darkness to carry off.” 

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Antonino D’Ambrosio is the author of “A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears.”

It would be facile to stumble into convenient, “country mouse/city mouse” clichés about the urbane urbanite who on a whim sheds his sportcoat, loafers and book parties for work boots, shit-shoveling and irony-free trucker hats. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting: Kessler and McAdams were never at home in Manhattan, and longed for the feeling of remove they’d once cultivated at a rented farmhouse in West Virginia that burned to the ground. They’d been looking for a place in Vermont for five years before they found what they wanted: 75 acres of mostly wooded valley with an 18th-century white farmhouse the realtor described as basically a tear-down. It was a full decade between moving there and beginning their foray into animal husbandry.

The rewards, however, have been all that one would expect. Kessler discovered a bounteous and ancient literary tradition associated with pastoralism, which is actually civilization’s oldest profession. And though he knows it “sounds flakey,” he says there’s a transcendent calm that comes from walking with goats, the animal that was first to be domesticated and is, most people are surprised to learn, as warm and social as a dog. “Goat Song” explores both of these themes and more as it describes the day-by-day rudiments of tending, milking and birthing goats, baling hay and making cheese. And it does so with the rich lyricism that emanated from Kessler’s novel, “Birds in Fall,” winner of the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Kessler spoke with Salon earlier this month from his home. He had just returned from Rome, where he’d been finishing up his fellowship with the American Academy there as winner of its 2008 literary prize.

What are you doing today?

I woke up at about 6 and milked the goats at about 7. We have 9 goats now, and 8 kids. I made a quick mozzarella first thing this morning — it only took about 45 minutes. Then I got to muck the barn out. I was basically all done by 10. Then a quick shower, and I started my day.

Ditching it all to move to the country and raise goats is probably the fantasy of about 95 percent of Salon readers. How were you able to make it work and overcome the seeming obstacles that life throws up in front of us?

We had a rent-controlled apartment in the East Village, but we were away from it whenever we could be. Both of us taught at universities part-time, so we had summers and long weekends at this cabin in West Virginia where we learned to grow our vegetables and generally live rurally. So moving to Vermont felt like moving to the suburbs compared to Appalachia; it’s only a four-hour drive from New York. The goats were the final imprimatur. They were also the excuse for never having to go back to New York again because we had to watch the animals. The truth is if we didn’t have other income from teaching and writing it’d be very hard to do this, certainly in the way we do it, which is seasonally and small-scale. It’s not a weekend thing. That said, there are people we know up here we were inspired by who have a day job and as many goats as we do and make cheese.

Why goats and not chickens, cows, horses or rabbits?

We had a neighbor who had two dairy goats, and [my wife] Dona came home once with the milk still warm in the bottle. I always experimented in the kitchen, so first I made a quesa blanca, which wasn’t great but it was OK — certainly it was the freshest cheese I’d ever had. Then I made a chevre and it was a revelation. I’d never tasted anything like it, because to eat a fresh raw milk chevre only hours old is illegal. One of our staples is a chalky log of goat cheese you buy in a store, and to realize we could actually make something so much better than that was astonishing. So the first thing was about the cheese.

But it’s also about the animals. When it comes to cheese, there’s goat people, there’s sheep people and there’s cow people. None of them see eye to eye, and all are biased. The stereotype is sheep people like landscape; they like to see the flock on the hillside, which looks pretty, but a sheep person doesn’t really like the animal itself. Goat people like the animal and make the cheese to support the animal. And cow people like heavy machinery.

I’d always liked goats. There’s a great quote in the 11th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica under the definition of goat: “The goat from all times has been considered everything associated with evil.” It’s been scapegoated, abused, misrepresented and considered devilish and impudent — and all those things appealed to me and were all sort of wrong. They have personality, unlike sheep. Sheep follow a strong leader. There’s no singular for sheep — you’re one or you’re many.

Many people would be surprised to learn goats are affectionate and attaching.

Having goats is like having a flock of dogs. They each have their individual personality. We walk our goats up in the woods just about every day and they follow, they come, they know their names when they want to. If they’re in a good mood or you’ve done something to ingratiate yourself with them they’ll lick you on the cheek. If they’re mad at you they’ll just ignore you. They’re very companionable. If you look at the history of goat-keeping, there’s all these photos of women in Europe along the roadside with a goat on a leash, then there are some rather lascivious sculptures from Pompeii of people having sex with a goat. So humans and goats have had this thing going on for a long time.

What was the best and worst part of the process, from building the fence to mating and birthing the goats, to milking and harvesting hay?

People ask is making cheese hard and the answer is no, but to get clean, fresh, raw milk — that’s the hard part. That takes months. Making cheese takes hours. The best thing is cracking open a tomme [a wheel of cheese]. We were away in Rome this whole winter and we ate a lot of cheese in Italy, but to come home and go down to the cellar and bring up a tomme and open it up and eat it is just an amazing thing. First of all, it tastes incredible — I’m completely biased but it tastes better than anything I had in Italy. We know what went into it — the animals who made the milk, the grass the animals ate, the process of making it, the microbes that went into it. So, having been displaced, there’s this wonderful sense of homecoming — not only coming back to this house in this valley, but then to have a piece of food, to ingest a piece of the landscape in a very physical, immediate and almost primal way.

OK, but what was the best part up to the point of tasting the cheese?

Being around the goats. It’s one of those things that, unless you experience it, it sounds very flakey but they’re incredible creatures to be around. Being around them just creates this sense of calm. Dona described it once as being like standing in the middle of a waterfall. They’re the oldest domesticated animal after the dog so there’s this very deep, almost evolutionary relationship that humans have with goats. They’re the first real domestic animal that produced food for us. Their milk is very close to human milk, as opposed to cow milk, which is not. The cry of a kid is like the cry of a baby. That it should develop that way, whether it was selected for that or whether it’s evolutionary to elicit our paternal instinct, I’m not sure. But it’s curious.

The worst part, I could say is mucking out the barn every day, but I actually kind of enjoy it. If you don’t like physical labor this is not for you. The worst is when there’s a sick animal and you don’t know what to do. Watching an animal you think is suffering is hard to do; in fact they might not be suffering, it might just be your anthropomorphizing. It’s hard to come up with a worst, though I don’t mean to sound so damn cheery about it. The bottom line is, they produce a lot of shit, and you have to deal with the shit.

Has raising goats and making cheese helped you with or otherwise affected your craft or your relationship to your writing?

I guess that is yet to be known. A “tomme” means, literally, in French, a “volume,” in this case a volume of milk made into curds. And of course it’s the same word as the English word “tome.” So there’s this conceit throughout the book that I’m making a book and a cheese at the same time. Making a text or a cheese, you’re taking raw materials out of the world and ruminating on them and making art of them. That’s one of the metaphors that runs throughout the book: Making an aged cheese that takes a long time to reach its perfection is somewhat like the process of writing a novel. You need raw material, you spend a lot of time with it, then you leave it and you go back to it. It has to age and refine itself. Not to stretch the metaphor to the breaking point; there’s a similarity to the crafts, but that only goes so far.

Give us the raw milk tutorial.

Milk has evolved to feed infants, whether they were human infants or goat kids or calves or baby mice or baby whales. And it was a perfect diet for the infant to thrive and survive. So raw milk has in it all this really good stuff. It helps the immune system, it has natural antibiotics, as well as things that scientists can’t figure out why they’re there but possibly they’re solely to feed the bacteria that lives inside of an infant. What also is in there are flavor compounds, the aromatic esters that give cheese its particular taste, it’s terroir. All this stuff nature provided with raw milk. What happens when you pasteurize, which is to hold it at 161 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 seconds, is you destroy all the living organisms in the milk — all the things that are good for the infant, including enzymes and vitamins, that are also good for the cheese. But you don’t even destroy all the E. coli and salmonella. It can survive. It usually doesn’t, but it can.

The downside of raw milk is you have to know where your milk is coming from. It has to be fresh, and it has to be clean. But you can buy raw milk cheese all over Europe and it’s not like people are dropping dead from eating raw milk cheese — in fact, studies show people who drink raw milk are a lot healthier than people who don’t.

The book ends before the process you initiated of getting licensed to sell the cheese is completed. Did you, in the end? And how was that?

We got licensed last summer. In Vermont they have cheddar, and “foreign-type cheese.” So we got licensed to sell a foreign-type cheese. The process was kind of amazing. Vermont is really good to people who want to work on the land and sell things from it. They were very strict but very helpful — they weren’t out to bust us. Why they were so good to us is because we’re so small scale. Another state like California probably would not even license us.

We sold some cheese to [Manhattan restaurant] Artisanal, and then the cheese manager there left so we stopped selling there and instead traded with a local community-supported agriculture network for produce and plants. We also sold to a restaurant in New York called Les Enfants Terribles. We sold all our cheese last year, and this year we’re at about half production so most of it we’ll eat ourselves. But we will probably have some we’ll sell here and there, maybe trade locally. And we might showcase down in New York in a couple of places. We’re so small, and everything is done by hand, so it’s not gonna be widely available. And I think that’s why it tastes the way it does.

What people might regard as a simpler life of farming sounds really quite stressful, what with all you describe that could go wrong with growing hay for the animals to eat in winter, baling hay, sick goats and so forth. Is it in fact simple because it’s single-minded, with fewer distractions than urban professional life? Or is that a romantic myth?

If your livelihood depends on it, like it does for most farmers, then of course it’s stressful, but I think it’s all in the mind-set. Because they are around animals or plants most of the time, and their livelihood depends on cycle of seasons, farmers generally are not high-stress people. The ones I’ve met are pretty even-keeled and generally happy with what they’re doing, even though they work their asses off. There’s no one I’ve met who works as hard as a farmer and no one who gets less. It’s absolutely a shame and a disgrace how farmers are treated in this country. Everyone I know who’s farming here has a really hard time.

Do you miss city life — the book parties, the cocktail lounges, the ballet — or have you so overcome Weberian alienation from the modern world that you could no longer give a shit about any of it?

I don’t really miss city life at all. I wasn’t leaving anything behind I felt deeply attached to. In fact, I never succeeded there in terms of being happy or comfortable, or even doing the things one is supposed to do in the city. I’m never lonely here. I’m never longing for life.

This impulse to simplify may be at the heart of Americana music’s most recent, and increasingly popular, revival. The country-flavored band My Morning Jacket has risen from the underground to release one of 2008′s most commercially successful and critically acclaimed albums, “Evil Urges.” Last year, formerly obscure, antifolk weirdo Kimya Dawson earned overnight fame with her soundtrack to the film “Juno.” And, as Petrusich describes in “It Still Moves,” the world of independent music teems with new “free-folk” (or “freak-folk” or “new, weird America”) artists like Devendra Banhart and Iron and Wine who shape old forms into albums that sound ancient and contemporary at the same time.

Structured around a three-and-a-half-week solo road trip that took the author (a 28-year-old staff writer at Pitchfork and contributing editor for Paste) across the American South, from Memphis and Nashville, Tenn., to the Mississippi Delta and the mountains of Appalachia, “It Still Moves” is a contemplative journey through the history of folk, country, blues and rock ‘n’ roll. Petrusich’s tale unfolds in the first person, complete with uncomfortable moments, delicious home-cooked meals, and long, dreamy stretches of highway. She tells stories about legends like Elvis and obscure figures like W.C. Handy, another Memphis musician whose 1909 song, “Boss Crump Blues,” may have launched the genre. Petrusich traces the divergent strands of Americana through the 20th century and into the 21st, finding the tradition alive and well in free folk’s unofficial headquarters of Brattleboro, Vt., where the first free-folk festival was held in 2003.

Salon spoke with Petrusich at Salon’s New York office about her road trip through America, how Lead Belly was the 50 Cent of his time and why we still yearn for the music of yore.

As a young critic who has written mostly about new, independent music, what drew you to such an old tradition?

I grew up listening to grunge and pop radio, and I found it the way a lot of people find it. You listen to enough Led Zeppelin and you eventually hear the name “Robert Johnson,” and from there it’s a treasure hunt through the record store. When I first started hearing that stuff, especially Delta blues, I fell in love with it. And when Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music” was reissued on CD in 1997, I was 17 years old. Through that, I hunted things down. Around 2003, I started hearing a lot of bands in the indie-rock area that were drawing from Americana in really interesting ways.

Why do you think Americana has had such a resurgence lately?

We live in a digital culture now. Things feel less regional, and music feels less regional. Americana appeals in the way that it feels more “authentic,” or a little bit richer, a little bit tied to a place. We don’t see as much of that anymore.

Maybe it’s the same thing that draws people to record collecting — it’s tangible.

I’m no record collector, but I’m kind of a nerd about that stuff. You hold an LP in your hand, and it’s all those clichéd things. It’s big and it’s awkward, it’s dusty, it’s beautiful, and it smells funny. It has the liner notes, and it’s kind of mysterious. All those things apply to this music, too. It feels rooted.

So many of the characters in “It Still Moves” — like Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records, and John and Alan Lomax — are obsessive collectors. Does the impulse to collect and preserve strike you as a particularly American trait?

Yeah. It’s endemic of American culture, whether it’s collecting money or square footage or going to Costco and collecting 65 cans of green beans. It’s funny, because I’ve just started writing about record collectors. I’m following around these 78 collectors. It’s amazing how much preservationist work they do. [In the 1940s] lots of masters [master recordings] were melted for the war effort. Paramount’s were supposedly thrown in the Milwaukee River. All that are left of those songs are those 78s.

Record collectors are a big part of American music history. People think of it as being this niche and a male pastime — Robert Crumb, “Ghost World,” basement dwellers, mouth breathers. But John and Alan Lomax were song collectors. I think they were driven by a love of that music and a desire to preserve it.

You mention in the book that the protagonist of most American road trip stories is male. Most rock critics are also male, as are most of the characters in “It Still Moves.” How did being a woman impact your experience, both on the road and in writing the book?

The story of Americana music is very much a male story, or that’s the way in which it’s been preserved. There were certainly a lot of amazing female blues musicians, but unfortunately they didn’t get to record, and their stories haven’t been passed on in the same way. There were times when I felt almost self-conscious about it. I wanted to write about more women artists, but it was difficult to have access to that information and to those recordings.

About the road-story structure of it, I love “Blue Highways”; I even love “On the Road.” I felt like, why can’t a woman write this book? Why are these stories so overwhelmingly male? So many women I know love driving around listening to records, but I guess that’s not something people think about.

Male road trip stories tend to focus on finding oneself through a journey. Did you experience that?

The trip was cathartic for me. It’s an interesting time to be writing a book about America because we’re at war, and there’s a very contentious presidency. “Patriot” has become a loaded word with uncomfortable connotations. It was interesting to get back in touch with the country at a time when I felt out of touch with it politically. Especially the South, which gets maligned as being backward or conservative by default, which is not necessarily true. I fell deeply, deeply in love with this country.

You often seemed more deeply affected by the landmarks you visited than you originally expected to be.

I went into it open, willing to let these places get to me. And they did. Even Graceland — I had goose bumps. And Graceland’s the silliest place on earth. But you go there and get a sense of the weight and history of it. And Sun Studios — the huge, awesome ramifications of what happened in this little room. It’s impossible not to get emotional about it. Seeing A.P. Carter’s grave on top of Clinch Mountain in rural Virginia, I had tears in my eyes. I didn’t see that coming.

You uncover a great deal about how closely intertwined all genres of Americana are — folk, country, blues, rock. Did it surprise you to learn how much common ancestry they share?

Absolutely. There are a zillion books about Elvis and a zillion books about the blues. But I wanted to rethink it as a single narrative, the story of rural American music. It did surprise me to see that it was all coming from the same spirit and, in some cases, literally coming from the same places or the same seed.

I didn’t realize African-Americans were involved in country music so early on.

It’s funny, I was just listening to some 78s of Mississippi John Hurt, who was called a blues singer. People still refer to him as a blues singer. But you listen to those songs, and they’re country songs. It’s all about classification. African-Americans were written out of country music history, which is tragic, if perhaps unsurprising.

The history of Americana music does seem to be a history of racial tension. Could the music have existed without that?

Probably not. It’s a cliché about the blues that they were born from such impossible-to-comprehend hardship. A huge component of that was racial tension. A lot of great art is born of some kind of tension. It’s unfortunate it had to be that.

You tell a story about the way Lead Belly was marketed as a black murderer to educated, white audiences. The echoes in the current hip-hop industry are unbelievable.

I had a conflicted relationship with the Lomaxes and what they did. I’m grateful, on one hand, that I was able to listen to these songs, which is directly because of them, and also angry about the way in which they worked, specifically with Lead Belly. You read about that and you’re like, “It’s crazy.” But then you pause for a second and you’re like, “Oh God. It’s still happening.”

It’s an old story, that kind of fetishism. It happened with hillbilly music, too. They were forced to dress up in silly outfits and put a piece of hay in their teeth. It’s the selling of “the other.”

One of the biggest controversies in music criticism in the past year came out of an essay the New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones wrote decrying the lack of African-American influences in white indie rock. But after reading “It Still Moves,” it’s hard for me to imagine that any American popular music could be free of black roots. Is current independent music as white as it appears to be?

That’s tough to talk about, and I think that may be why so many people found that article so problematic. I hear a lot of blues in indie rock — I mean, it’s rock. And rock is so indebted to black music that you can’t perform any kind of rock ‘n’ roll without nodding back to that culture.

I think Sasha was talking about the rhythm of it, and that’s a common complaint about alt-country, too. It feels very white. And I get that. It’s music made by white people for white people. There’s something that feels sort of exclusionary about it. But I’m not sure I buy it. When I listen to Califone, I hear the entire “American Anthology of Folk Music.” And that’s a band lots of people would classify as white indie rock. It’s not an argument I would try to make.

You write about two contemporary genres that have firm roots in Americana — alt-country (bands like Uncle Tupelo and Freakwater) and free folk (like Joanna Newsom and Will Oldham). You seem to feel that free folk has been the more successful of the two, artistically. Why?

I say that as an alt-country apologist, because I like a lot of that stuff. But it devolved into this Starbucks-y background music genre that was not very interesting. Sometimes it was straight revival country music, and sometimes it got too precious for its own good.

Free folk was more interesting to me because I felt it was reflecting the new American landscape in a way that was really successful. Here are bands that are taking this acoustic, rural music and tweaking it with a broken synthesizer or some kind of crazy, very contemporary-sounding beat. To me, that felt like the aural equivalent of when you’re driving down the highway, looking out the window, and you see these beautiful mountains and old cabins, and then there’s a Wal-Mart. It made sense to mix the two, and I never thought alt-country did that.

Did you notice that juxtaposition of new and old while you were on the road?

That totally surprised me, the extent to which you find these little enclaves. It could have been 1945 in some of these towns. And it’s functional. It doesn’t feel like a theme park. It’s the way people live. Then you’d get on the highway and start to see the gas stations, the Ruby Tuesdays and the Targets. For me, it made sense. It’s sort of like playing a banjo and then playing a keyboard. That’s why free folk feels contemporary, in an honest way. That’s the way we live now.

Is Americana more about the music itself — the instruments and sounds — or the feeling it imparts?

To me, Americana is more a feeling than a specific set of parameters. As soon as you start trying to say, “It’s this song structure and it’s this instrument, and this style of singing,” you’re going to run into problems.

When I met with the then president of the Americana Music Association, I asked him how he defined Americana, and he said, “I know it when I see it.” I think that’s true in a lot of ways. It’s music that has a deep connection to the landscape that supports it. It’s community-oriented, regional, often rural music about everyday life and everyday people . But I think that definition is expanding. With alt-country and free folk, it becomes more difficult to contain the music, which is a good thing. This is a crazy, broad, wild country, and it makes sense that its music reflects that.

OK, so I didn’t actually win a radio contest, but I called Yearwood’s publicist to ask if I could tag along, and I’m here as a fan as much as a journalist. Or maybe it’s some combination, because, while exclaiming with contest winners over how tall and pretty Yearwood looks, and how delicious her deviled eggs taste, I’m also trying to find answers to some pressing questions. For example: Given that Yearwood has led an awfully interesting life, why’d she choose to write a cookbook instead of a memoir? Is it weird for her to be married, as of 2005, to Garth Brooks since she’s very successful but he’s very, very, very successful? And finally: What exactly did I do wrong the other night when I tried the recipe for Uncle Wilson’s Baked Onions?

Yearwood, as you may or may not know, has a gorgeous, powerful voice. The winner of three Grammy awards and two female vocalist of the year Country Music Awards, she’s had nine No. 1 singles, and 11 of her albums have gone gold or platinum. Though she doesn’t write her own music, since releasing her first album in 1991, she has cultivated a consistent tone and focus. Has your man left you heartbroken and you just wish everyone would quit telling you to get over him? Yearwood’s been there, as she sings about in “Everybody Knows.” Have you ever given your man his walking papers, then wished you hadn’t? So has she, in “Believe Me Baby (I Lied).” Have you found yourself endlessly revisiting what you and your man used to have even though it’s long finished? Yearwood feels your pain in “Where Are You Now.” And yet, in the midst of all this man-inflicted torment, do you sometimes feel flashes of you-go-girl empowerment and optimism for the future in spite of the fact you’re not a Size 6? Well, have a listen to “I’m Still Alive,” “Real Live Woman” or “Not a Bad Thing.”

Lest it seem presumptuous to read autobiographical elements into her music, Yearwood, 43, actually invites this, telling us during the cooking lesson that she chooses songs “that feel like they’re mine. I like songs for the same reason you do, songs that sound like someone was spying on your life.” To be fair, Yearwood does sometimes sing about love gone right, especially about the promise of an early relationship, and she even sings the occasional song that has not much at all to do with love but focuses more on, say, the pleasures of country living. She’s most well-known for her first No. 1 hit, “She’s in Love With the Boy,” which is one of the songs Yearwood will perform for us later today, but first there are meatloaf, green beans with ham, and brownies to attend to.

In person, Yearwood is warm, energetic and quick-witted. “You guys didn’t really think I cooked, did you?” she asks as she shows us how to make several recipes; meanwhile, the same recipes, already prepared by Viking employees, are brought out for instant gratification sampling. As we watch and chew, Yearwood offers cooking tips and other banter — “Mom said never open an egg over your recipe,” she says cheerfully before proceeding to open an egg directly over the mixing bowl for the meatloaf. She also reassures us that she washed her hands right before the demonstration, tells us that when a recipe calls for room temperature butter and she’s forgotten to get it out ahead of time, she’ll cut it up and set it on the windowsill, and explains, “I’m about using as few dishes as possible. You know how that is.” Oh, and the pressure cooker is, she says, “just a wonderful invention, and they don’t really explode anymore.”

More than once, tabloids have razzed Yearwood about her weight, and there’s something refreshing about a celebrity whose reaction to such criticism isn’t to become a Jenny Craig spokesperson but instead to publish a cookbook featuring multiple recipes that start with melting a stick — or two — of butter. And, although she has spoken publicly about her weight struggles, on this day, Yearwood is downright trim; in fact, with her long, straight, very blond hair, navy blue sweater, fitted jeans and jewelry, she looks kind of like the head cheerleader 25 years out of high school if the head cheerleader had aged as well as possible without medical intervention. At the same time, she’s not so skinny that you doubt she actually eats, let alone cooks. “I love potatoes — they’re my favorite food,” she announces, mentioning shortly afterward, “I like a gooey cookie.” And she’s only more effusive in the pages of her cookbook, where she writes, variously, “I love cheese!” “I love any salad that has bacon as an ingredient!” and, “So to answer the burning question, can you make an entire meal out of sausage ball appetizers? Yes!”

The idea of writing an autobiography did come up, Yearwood explains, but she wasn’t tempted because, as she later tells me in an interview, “I don’t interest myself that much. Maybe in 20 years, I’ll have something to say, but at this point, I feel like it’d be Part One.”

A cookbook, on the other hand, seemed like fun to her. Raised in small-town Georgia by a teacher mother and banker father who both were avid cooks — the cookbook is dedicated to her late father, Jack, who died in 2005 but shows up in photos making yeast bread, barbecued chicken and collard greens — Yearwood decided the project should be a family affair. Her mother, Gwen, and sister Beth are credited as co-authors and, indeed, the title and many of the recipes come from a 40th birthday gift they made for Yearwood after she moved to Oklahoma: a binder they called “Georgia Recipes for an Oklahoma Kitchen.”

The result of this labor of culinary love manages to be glossy and even kind of beautiful at the same time that it feels genuinely down-home. The lush photographs of the food, including shots taken for the book at a Yearwood family picnic, are interspersed with older photos from when Yearwood was growing up. Individual recipes are accompanied by personal commentary from the Yearwood ladies of both the practical and the more conversational varieties. For instance, accompanying the Baked Ham With Brown Sugar Honey Glaze recipe, “From Gwen: If you don’t want or need a whole ham, you can bake half a ham, but choose the butt (meatier) end rather than the shank end.” Or, also from Gwen for Mama’s Cornmeal Hushpuppies: “The idea for adding jalapeños comes from Herb’s sister Patty.” Having read through the cookbook at length, I have to confess I still have no idea who either Herb or his sister Patty is, but it’s hard not to be charmed by these sorts of details. In fact, as you peruse, you may find yourself wishing you, too, were a Yearwood.

Given that the closest most of us can come is just to eat like one, I attempted three of Yearwood’s recipes before venturing down to Nashville: Garlic Grits Casserole (tasty, apparently, because my husband ate four servings), Easy Peach Cobbler (delicious, and also in danger of being submerged under its river of melted butter) and the aforementioned Uncle Wilson’s Baked Onions. With just three ingredients, all of them pretty hard to wreck — onions, bacon and butter — Uncle Wilson’s recipe seemed a sure-fire hit, but when I made it, the onions were about to disintegrate after being in the oven for well over an hour, yet the bacon still wasn’t fully cooked. I was prepared, for the sake of research, to forge ahead and eat them anyway when my husband wisely if inelegantly warned, “You don’t fuck with bacon.” So instead I threw them in the trash.

Back at the Viking superstore, an audience member raises her hand to mention that she too had trouble with a recipe — in this case, with the caramel icing Yearwood’s mom learned to make “as a young teacher in Dawson, Georgia, [when she] boarded with Mrs. Mary Lou Alexander.” Yearwood offers consolation and advice; the icing, it turns out, is probably the most difficult recipe in the whole cookbook.

Yearwood tells us she’s game to answer any of our other questions. “It can be about food or music or me or my husband,” she says. “Anyone? Bueller?”

Her husband — ah, yes, we have arrived at the subject that makes Yearwood’s life story both more interesting and more complicated. Whereas Yearwood, having sold 10 million albums, is by any measure a success, Brooks has sold a hundred million — putting him in a category with only a few other performers, such as Elvis Presley or the Beatles. That alone would seem to create a complex dynamic in a marriage for two people in the same field, but there’s more — in fact, there’s enough back story to fill a novel.

Yearwood and Brooks met at a demo session in Nashville in 1988, and knew immediately they’d like to work together in the future. Three years later, by which point Brooks had become a country star, he invited Yearwood to tour with him as his opening act. Brooks had been married since 1986 and had three daughters with his wife; Yearwood was married and divorced twice, without having children, by 1999. After Brooks divorced in 2000, the two began dating. Not surprisingly, rumors have circulated about exactly when they became involved, and some of the songs they’ve collaborated on — particularly 1997′s “In Another’s Eyes,” which Brooks co-wrote — seem awfully fraught with meaning, with lyrics such as: “In another’s eyes I’m someone who/ Loves her enough to walk away from you/ I’d never cheat/ I’d never lie/ In another’s eyes.”

Both Yearwood and Brooks appear more than a little ambivalent about their fame: Brooks retired in 2000 at the age of 38, arguably at the peak of his career, saying he won’t record or perform until 2015, when his youngest daughter is 18. They live on a ranch in Owasso, Okla., where Yearwood’s two best friends are a dental hygienist and a physical therapist; she and Brooks shop regularly at Wal-Mart; and they faithfully attend Brooks’ daughters’ soccer games. Yearwood calls herself the girls’ “bonus mom.”

Yearwood takes her husband’s staggering success in stride. “I have fans, and he has followers,” she tells me. “It’s a different sort of phenomenon. And I get it. If somebody’s excited to meet me and they go, ‘Well, we were hoping Garth was gonna be here,’ I don’t take offense because that would be the natural assumption. Most of the time it’s that. Occasionally, someone will come up to us and say, ‘You know, Garth, I like you, but I really love Trisha.’ That happens enough for me that it keeps my ego in good shape.”

As it turns out, this is, almost verbatim, what one of the radio contest winners, Candyce Havenstrite, says at the cooking lesson. Havenstrite, an interior decorator who lives in Murfreesboro, Tenn., won the chance to attend the cooking lesson with Yearwood by calling in to a morning show on her drive to work and correctly answering a multiple-choice question about what makes the dirt in Georgia red. (If you’re wondering: iron ore.) Today, Havenstrite’s here with her 9-year-old daughter, Samantha.

About Yearwood’s music, Havenstrite says, “I just like that it’s so real and from the heart, and she has a phenomenal voice.” But that’s not all. “I like seeing her have a whole new life, how she’s happy and content.” Also divorced, Havenstrite adds, “It gives me hope.” Which isn’t to say Havenstrite’s at all surprised Yearwood and Brooks ended up together. “Many, many years ago, I saw her perform on Jay Leno with Garth, and they had such a connection.”

Bonnie Manzeck and Denise Evert, two stay-at-home moms from Milwaukee whose daughters are in school together, echo this sentiment. “I expected it,” Manzeck says of Yearwood’s current marriage. “Any time you saw them, you could see the chemistry.”

Like Havenstrite, Evert is impressed with Yearwood’s air of authenticity. “You could be friends with her,” she says. “She seems so real and genuine and down-to-earth. She looks so pretty and cute with jeans, but not like a diva.”

Listening to her other fans, I’m struck by the thought that Yearwood herself is a lot like her cookbook — that in the age of the vagina-flashing no-talent 20-year-old celebrity, she’s a bit of a throwback to a less sordid time. She’s open enough to be accessible and glamorous enough to be intriguing, but she’s also discreet enough to remain mysterious. We like her not just because she’s lived a real and complex life, including her two divorces, but also because she’s never posed for a magazine in her underpants while talking about those divorces.

Our day of food, friendship, fandom and female empowerment concludes with Yearwood singing several songs, mostly off her latest album, “Heaven, Heartache, and the Power of Love.” And this is another great thing about Trisha Yearwood — she may have found domestic fulfillment at last, but she hasn’t forgotten, as the title of the album implies, what heartache is like; she’s still making music for every mood you might find yourself in, from wounded to elated. Accompanied by two musicians, she’s standing about 12 feet from me, which feels decadently intimate, like I’m that obscenely rich guy who paid $7 million to have the Rolling Stones play at his 60th birthday party. Yearwood’s voice is loud and strong and beautiful, and when I glance around the amphitheater, I see digital cameras held high. Between songs, Yearwood good-naturedly notes the cyclical nature of her career. She says, “You start out playing in kitchens, and you end up playing in kitchens.”

A few years before the big weight loss my best friend moved 30 miles away to a small town and a gorgeous house. She started going to the local pub for what used to be our Friday girls night out. After a few weeks she invited me to come on down and join her. I could crash at her place if I stayed out too late and my husband was quite cool with that. He’d come along sometimes, have his own boys night out, or just stay home and relax.

I make friends easily. From life experience, education and just being a voracious reader I can converse at least a bit on just about any subject and am an avid listener. Some of the young ones there would look to me as “Mom” or big sister. Gruff and tough biker guys would talk to me when their dad — or their favorite bike — died. We sing, dance, laugh, play a little pool and get a little raunchy now and then. It’s your basic “Cheers” bar.

After a couple of years this evolved into me being “Charlie.” I walk in the door and I can hear the ripple in the room. I chat with a friend here, hugs and kisses there, half an hour with these folks, 10 minutes there, a dance, a game of pool. I just float where the spirit moves me.

My friend changed her ring tone for me to “Get the Party Started.”

What’s the problem?

Glad you asked.

As I got to know people there, made friends, this Charlie thing just evolved with no intention on my part. Things started to change a bit and the “Peyton Place” aspect came out in full force. “Why didn’t you say hi to me?” “Took you long enough to notice I was here.” “Oh, she thinks she’s all that.” “What, I’m not good enough for you to talk to anymore?” People would actually sit and stew if I didn’t acknowledge their presence in the first 10 minutes I was there.

I’ve never been the popular girl and I just don’t know how to deal with this. My every action and interaction have now seemingly become the favorite sport in the pub. Trying to spend time with those feeling slighted only gets me the “You’re throwing the dog a bone” attitude. It seems their whole pecking order in the pub revolves around how soon I acknowledge them and how long I talk to them.

I got a bit miffed one night when a rather petulant friend pouted at me for taking so long to “even see she was alive!” My answer, “I didn’t notice you coming up to greet me when I got here,” was a huge mistake.

Oh, big mistake. Huge.

I’m just a bit bewildered about how I became so important to their lives. How, to them, with a glance someone is perceived to be “in” or “out.” If I don’t talk to them I’m mad at them. If I decline a dance with Joe he’s not good enough for me. If I spend an hour holding a friend’s hand while he’s crying about his marriage failing I become a home wrecker. If someone compliments me on a new blouse or shoes I’m a rich girl with my nose in the air. (Honey, other than great leather boots and expensive bras, everything else is — to quote Gretchen Wilson’s song “Redneck Woman” — from “the Wal-Mart shelf half-price.”)

How in the hell did I end up back in high school???

I’m just the girl next door.

Charlie

Dear Charlie,

Get a piece of paper and a pencil or a pen. Think of all the people in the bar with whom you have issues. Write their names down. Write the issue next to the name — just a few words that express the emotion or the tension. For example:

McNulty. Owe her $5?
Wilson. Forgot to buy a round?
Everready. Jealousy?
Owen. Broken promise?

Etcetera. Hates my guts? Wants my boots? Owes me money? Insulted my dress?

Put it all down. Then get out your phone book. Write down each person’s phone number next to the name.

Then call them up. Call each one of them. Say to each one that you enjoyed seeing them the other night but it was too noisy and crowded to talk. Say that you have pressing business at home and you might not be able to come down to the bar for a while. Say that another reason you are calling is that you had promised to do whatever it was you had promised to do and you’re sorry you haven’t gotten around to it yet. Or say that you hope what you said wasn’t misunderstood. Or say if only there were more time, but life is just so hectic. Or say, “no offense intended.” Or say that you were too drunk to know what you were doing. Or say that you fear you used poor judgment. Or say, “I just called to say I think you are a slob.” No, don’t say that. Be nice. Be nice and make it short and leave it on a high note. Say that once you get these pressing matters at home cleared up you hope to see them again at the bar in two or three months.

Then stay away from the bar for two or three months.

When you come back to the bar, announce that you are running for mayor.

The foregoing was the concrete suggestions part. The following is the speculative part.

It is alluring to be the center of attention. But partaking of a certain kind of social euphoria brings danger. The danger is that others’ expectations become central. You lose touch with your own needs.

Your own needs are not interesting to people in a bar. They have needs of their own. At first, you met their needs. But then Charlie started to have needs of her own. Nobody wanted Charlie to have needs of her own. Charlie’s entourage was not interested in meeting Charlie’s needs. Who has needs? It’s a bar.

When Charlie turned out to have needs of her own it looked like Charlie was trying to change the rules. People got upset.

In a nutshell it is the danger of fame. As I said, this is the speculative part. Fame is a set of asymmetrical power relationships. The crowd’s desire flows only toward the object of fame. The object of fame’s desire flows only toward his object of desire. That is the thing he is creating, the thing that he holds like a shield between him and the crowd. The desire of the one flows toward a private object of desire; the many are thus voyeurs, watching as the object of their desire pursues his own object of desire. Soon, though, his object of desire, having been discovered and brought to light, becomes their object of desire too. That is the commercial product he offers them: his object of desire embodied as a commodity.

The allegiance of the crowd shifts without warning. If they become bored, the crowd will drift away. So he must work all the time to produce. Thus he is driven to create ever greater spectacle. Either that or he must make peace with the shifting allegiance of the crowd. That would be preferable, from a psychological standpoint.

That is the situation you are in. You can no longer serve the crowd exclusively. Your own needs have arisen. You must tend to them. You have to back off and let the crowd wander for a bit, or they will devour you. But you can come back in a few months and run for mayor.

The meditation on the nature of fame is not wholly relevant to your case. But it is something to think about.

So write the list and make the calls. Stay away from the bar for two or three months. Let things settle down. Then come back and announce your candidacy.

The Best of Cary Tennis

“Since You Asked,” on sale now at Cary Tennis Books: Buy now and get an autographed first edition.

What? You want more advice?