In Middle America men are awakening

Art Sinsabaugh: Chicago Landscape #23, 1964 (printed 1966)

One of my favorite photographers is Art Sinsabaugh... and, one of my all time favorite writers is Sherwood Anderson. In 1964 Jargon Press (Jonathan Williams) put together a killer book pairing 15 pieces from Anderson's Mid-American Chants with Sinsabaugh's photos. I have the book, a limited edition of 1550 copies, which is a PRIZE in my collection. I think I once told Andrea that this book made me fall in love with the Mid-West. It's more than a piece in a collection, but an inspiring artifact. When I need a minute to escape, I take it out and flip through the long panoramic pages. I also have a great first edition of Mid-American Chants with a nice corn colored cover, and of course, a few orginal Sinsabaugh photos. Those too hold a special spot in my life...

In the Forward to Mid-American Chants, Anderson writes:

"I do not believe that we people of mid-western America, immersed as we are in affairs, hurried and harried through life by the terrible engine -industrialism- have come to the time of song. To me it seems that song belongs with and has its birth in the memory of older things than we know. In the beaten paths of life, when many generations of men have walked the streets of a city or wandered at night in the hills of an old land, the dinger arises.

The singer is neither young nor old but within him always there is something that is very old. The flavor of many lives lived and of many gone weary to the end of life creeps into his voice. Words run out beyond the power of words. There is unworldly beauty in the song of him who sings out of the souls of peoples of old times and places but that beauty does not yet belong to us.

In Middle America men are awakening. Like awkward and untrained boys we begin to turn toward maturity and with our awakening we hunger for song. But in our towns and fields there are few memory haunted places. Here we stand in roaring city streets, on steaming coal heaps, in the shadow of factories from which come only the grinding roar of machines. We do not sing but mutter in the darkness. Our lips are cracked with dust and with the heat of furnaces. We but mutter and feel our way toward the promise of song."

-Sherwood Anderson. Chicago, 1918.