Music Reviews:
Authentic Voices
by Scott Prinzing

Chris Cunningham is one of the most prolific Montana artists I know. In his thirty-some years, he has recorded well over a dozen CDs and produced for several other Montana artists. His biggest success has been the acoustic duo Storyhill (formerly Chris and Johnny) with fellow Bozemanite John Hermanson.

Success comes in many forms. In Storyhill’s case, it means a dozen CDs, over 50,000 copies sold, and an e-mail list of over 10,000 fans nationwide. All that success and I didn’t even hear about them until their live double-disc, Reunion in 2000.

In the five years between the end of Storyhill and their most recent studio album, Dovetail, Cunningham released two CDs with his Bozeman group Sixth Sense, a live album with singer/songwriter Justin Roth, and three solo albums.

Madly Out the Cabin Door is the latest—and best—of his solo work. Michael Blessing co-produced as well as provided the cover art for this album that gets better with each listen. While Cunningham’s cherubic smile might bring to mind the boy next door, his songwriting has a depth that belies his years. Once more of an introspective, relational writer, Cunningham has begun to write more in the first person perspective of others.

“The Interview,” is sung from the viewpoint of the host of all of the radio shows that he has appeared on; the dedicated fan sings of an artist’s music being one’s life “Soundtrack”; and, thanks to “Bombardier,” pre-dawn snowplow operators have an anthem.

Still, the attraction to Cunningham’s music continues to be his unmistakable voice—rich, warm, pure, and distinct—singing with a genuine connection to his songs.

Madly Out the Cabin Door
Chris Cunningham, 2003
(www.chriscunningham.net)

The first time I met Stephanie Davis at a performance in Billings, I ended up running sound for the show. Her honest songs, traditional storytelling, and authentic voice drew me in as she sang Western swing and cowboy songs. It wasn’t until later that I learned this fourth-generation Montana rancher from Columbus had a connection with country music megastar Garth Brooks (opening act, band member, songwriter).

Stephanie Davis is also a cowboy poet. Her third release on her own Recluse Records, Crocus In the Snow, is the first to showcase her poetry. “The Spotted Ass” is posted on her website but her recital of it (from Garrison Keillor’s public radio show A Prairie Home Companion) is worth the full price of the CD.

The rest of the album is her most varied collection of Western originals yet. There’s humor (“You’ve Been a Friend to Me”), heart wrenching (the Vietnam vet lament “Ikey”), gospel (“Turning To the Light” with the aforementioned Keillor), rockabilly (“Yodel Blues”), talkin’ blues (“Talkin’ Harvest Time Blues”)—all with her unmistakable slight twang, not unlike a more mature Nancy Griffith.

Sometimes just her and her guitar, sometimes with top-notch Austin musicians like Grammy-winner Lloyd Maines on steel and Dobro, but always the perfect treatment for the song at hand. The album itself is as worthy of a Grammy Award as any I’ve heard lately.

Davis is pictured on the cover in her reclusive writing cabin on her Montana ranch. That’s likely where she wrote “Some Things Cost Too Much,” which touches on her stint as a songwriter in Nashville, “Writing for a Company.” But, as she sings in the opening cut, there’s “Somethin’ ’Bout Montana,” that “Makes it where I gotta be.”

Crocus In the Snow
Stephanie Davis, 2003 (www.stephaniedavis.net)

Scott Prinzing won’t take his Discman along when backpacking in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness this summer, but his wife brings her backpacker guitar, so there’s always music.

Book Reviews:
Cars, Cattle & California
by Clark Whitehorn

Guys, this one might not be for you. This is the literary version of the “chick flick.” I know the p.c. police might get lathered up over the phrasing, but my wife’s enthusiastic response to the book in contrast to my ambiguous one suggests that some books don’t translate well across gender lines. After discussing the relative merits of Kim Green’s comic novel, I was put in mind of Wallace Stevens’ poem, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Bird. There might not be thirteen ways to read this book, but I’d argue there are at least two, according to my family.

Jen Brenner, a San Francisco editor, leaves her job after receiving a wayward e-mail criticizing her abilities and takes a job at a small Montana newspaper as an investigative reporter. The story from then on, from my perspective, is her discovery that Montana men are desirable and available. There is a small subplot about a mill dumping toxic waste in the river and destroying a quality fishery, but that’s little more than a contrivance to move the relationship story along, or so I would read it.

My wife thought it was a wonderfully comic view of urban Montana life. From the Subaru Brenner drives—a vehicular cliché in modern Montana—to a vegetarian restaurant where she occasionally dines, this is a story of a new breed of Montanan who probably couldn’t differentiate between a moose and an elk. Although fictional, Brenner certainly represents the migratory and population relocation patterns that have transformed much of the West in the last thirty years into landlocked but homogenous versions of California culture.

Is That a Moose in Your Pocket? Kim Green, Bantam Dell, 2003

Maybe my hang-up with Green is the Montana she offers isn’t the one my imagination has come to expect or want. Perhaps that is why the rugged elegance of Ralph Beer’s essays appeals to me. Here I am instantly at home with stories of the redemptive powers of Montana’s legendary landscape and the toughness of the people who settled this land. Beer, a lifelong rancher and storyteller, has collected thirty-three of his essays in this moving tribute to Western rural life.

These essays, though, are not simply about cattle and horses. Collectively, they are the story of life’s daily challenges set against a backdrop of the rural West. And sadly, they are an elegy to a lifestyle gradually being eclipsed by the ranchette, the Subaru, and the ubiquitous coffeehouse chain where people in a hurry stop for mochas and lattés and cappuccinos, but where no one seems to have the time to chat about the weather, the branding, or the haying.

In the concluding essay, “At Rest,” Beer describes standing near the Radersburg Cemetery wrought-iron gate and being haunted by “those of my blood people who once lived here.” He calls on memory to preserve the people who once thrived in these lands, and gently admonishes us not to lose the stories of those who have made Montana’s past worth remembering. It is an admonishment we should heed.

In These Hills, Ralph Beer, University of Nebraska Press, 2003

Clark Whitehorn is publications director at the Montana Historical Society and father of Noah, who dad hopes will retain his endless joy in discovery and first steps.

The average Montana camper’s freeze-dried stroganoff seems absolutely decadent after watching a porcupine get skinned and gutted with a lid from an old tin can, then stir-fried with hot rocks on a bark slab. This uncommon approach to outdoor living is only one of the many unique sequences found in Thomas J. Elpel’s Wilderness Survival Video Series. Elpel is a primitive living expert from Pony, whose three videos Three Days at the River, Mountain Meadows, and Mountain Lakes, effectively espouse “the art of nothing”—going into the wilderness with nothing, no knife, no matches, no food, no sleeping bag—and living for several days using only found materials!

The survival skills that Elpel demonstrates will definitely make anyone who has camped out appreciate a pop-up tent, warm sleeping bag, and efficient cookstove. Although the basic needs that must be met are always the same—fire, shelter, water, food, and tools—each of Elpel’s videos presents a slightly different skill set. Fire, for instance, is made using a mullein and sage hand drill in Mountain Meadows, a cottonwood bow drill in Three Days at the River, and, with a nod to the relatively more modern technology of the trappers and pioneers, flint and steel in Mountain Lakes.

Other tools in the series include glass-knapped knives, a JO stick, tin can and nail knives, a pinebark pot, discoidal stone knives, and digging sticks. The food ranges from porcupine to ground squirrel to mountain suckers to insect larvae, plus a huge variety of edible plants from wild onions to glacier lilies. Elpel, also the author of several primitive living books, recommends his Botany in a Day for safe identification of green trailside snacks.

These three videos are very simply shot and edited because Elpel also acts as his own cameraman, setting up the scene and then stepping in front of the camera to demonstrate. His low-key but knowledgeable presentation and the sheer interest of how things are accomplished easily overcome any aesthetic shortcomings. As an added bonus, brief scenes of Montana wildlife seen on each trip are intercut throughout the videos, and include deer, bears, and many birds.

In Three Days at the River Elpel takes along his daughter Felicia, and in Mountain Lakes his daughter Cassie. In addition to helping film it, and some on-screen demonstrations, the two teenaged girls also give an amusing reality check to the proceedings, suggesting they’d rather have a burger and fries or a piece of cheesecake in place of some of the fare Dad serves up. In addition to survival skills, Elpel also imparts some common-sense philosophy on maintaining Montana’s wilderness environment.

Mountain Meadows (2002) camping with almost nothing but the dog; Three Days at the River (2002) with nothing but our bare hands; Mountain Lake (2003) a survival fishing trip.
HOPS Press: www.hollowtop.com Mountain Press: 800-234-5308.

Les Benedict earned a degree in film from Montana State University–Bozeman. He wrote, directed, photographed, and edited educational films for fifteen years in the U.S. and Africa.