Editor’s Notebook: Some unexpected Kentucky magic outside of Derby Week

On Friday morning, Kentucky Oaks Day, I was greatly entertained by a column in the Courier-Journal by Eric Reynolds bemoaning the corporatization of the Kentucky Derby. 

The opening line, “The Kentucky Derby has been kidnapped and dressed in a seersucker suit,” gives you some idea where he’s headed. 

He then follows with this banger: The Derby has become a “gleaming, overpriced, overmanaged product sitting inside Churchill Downs like a prize hog at auction, fattened up for people who don’t know the difference between Central Avenue and a country club valet line.”

As Reynolds points out, this is nothing new. As though legalized gambling handed over on a platter by the General Assembly wasn’t enough to satisfy Churchill Downs Inc., every corner of Derby Week has been glitzed and monetized to something all too recognizable, a corporate product priced to the shareholder class, and not many others.

It’s nothing some good tax reform couldn’t cure, but that’s a topic for another day. 

The Bucolics Project

Because at the start of Derby Week last Sunday, I was reminded that in between the slick, overwrought Derby pageantry, there are smaller, more beautiful Kentucky moments to be found.

My husband and I walked into the Meeting House at Shaker Village at Pleasant Hill for a performance of “The Bucolics Project,” featuring the poetry of Maurice Manning. This had nothing to do with Derby week, and we had no idea what to expect.

Manning is a poet who also teaches at Transylvania University in Lexington; his first collection, “Lawrence Booth’s Book of Visions,” was given the Yale Young Poets Award, and another, “The Common Man” was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. 

In 2011, he wrote a collection titled “Bucolics,” which is a series of conversations between a field hand and an unexplained omniscient entity called “Boss.” Brendan Taaffe, an artist and musician from Vermont, picked up the book and was transfixed. He reached out to Manning and said he wanted to create music for the poems. He got a research grant to go to Berea College and study its archive of the field recordings of traditional Appalachian music. And over a decade, he wrote music based on the works of Eastern Kentucky musicians like Jean Ritchie, Morgan Sexton, Addie Graham, and the Coon Creek Girls. 

“He would send me a digital recording of the source song, and I would get an idea of the musical structure, how many verses and the time signature,” Manning said. 

The results were sublime. On a perfect, sunny spring day, breeze and birdsong floated through the Meeting House as we listened to Taaffe and four singers harmonize to Manning’s words. Of particular note was the voice and dulcimer playing of Sarah Kate Morgan, who teaches traditional music at Hindman Settlement School.

Manning said it reminded him of a crucial moment from his past: sitting in the Meeting House to hear James Still read from the classic “River of Earth” to banjo music.

“I thought, this is a new way to experience the literature,” Manning said. “The audience is hearing it and not reading it, but it’s even more dynamic because of the instrumentation and also being in the Meeting House, which is like its own acoustic instrument.”

Taaffe has now created an album, and a limited edition book of the project, which he explains in greater detail on his Substack.

Even at its corporate worst, the Kentucky Derby supports and uplifts the commonwealth’s horse industry, from Lexington’s breeding operations to the racehorses of Churchill Downs. It’s important. But as it floats further away from the average Kentuckian, it’s worth remembering that there are many other showcases of our extraordinary culture. We just have to seek them out.