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this podcast is a local production of mississippi public broadcasting and depends on the support of listeners like you if you can please donate today at mpbonline.org and thanks to the mississippi arts hour on mpb think radio where each week we talk to a musician artist author or other creative mississippian working in the arts across the state i'm your host melody moody thortus director of grants at the mississippi arts commission and today i'm speaking with john ruske a musician painter and writer who is most known as a mississippi river guide and canoe builder living in clarksdale john thanks so much for joining us on the mississippi arts hour oh great to be here melody thanks for having me oh of course so for people who may not know you john will you tell our listeners um just a little bit about yourself well i'm a rocky mountain native who got uh who's always loved water ever since i was a kid i've looked for the sparkling rippling reflections off of the water and forever been been entranced by those reflections and by the water and the smells of the mud and the willows probably are my favorite tree but alders also and reeds and the things that grow along the river and all the creatures that live along the river so even when i was growing up in the colorado rockies and later in the great plains and later in the new mexican desert i was i've always been attracted to the water places and eventually i made my way down the waters meandering across the great plains and into the midwest and down the mighty mississippi right down to the state of mississippi where i landed back in the 80s and so i'm dating myself after high school graduation my best friend and i built a raft and floated down the mighty mississippi river and ended up as muddy refugees in on the first big island south of the tennessee border uh in the state of mississippi when you leave memphis you swirl around a big big island uh presidents island it's called where the uh behind which is the uh the industrial harbor for the city of memphis and my first night in the state of mississippi i'd never been here before was uh as a refugee a muddy refu muddy and wet and hypothermic actually a refugee on cat island which is a giant island in the northwestern corner of the state i think in desoto county i love that you walked us through that john so i'm curious if you could tell us a little bit more about growing up and what inspired you what inspired you about the river family trips and different things that you experienced as a young adult my i grew up in a uh in a neighborhood um that bordered rappahoe national forest um up at about 8 500 feet in the front range of the colorado rockies and i'm one in a family of 10 including my parents and so we were left on our own a lot you know the old older kids taking care of younger kids and mom and dad had a lot a lot going on on their hands besides taking care of us and um so there was a lot of uh hand-me-down and uh and oldsters watching over youngsters and as one of the youngsters it was my favorite thing was to uh just disappear and and get get uh away from the house as fast as possible and the best way to do that was to follow the creek bottom down to cub creek following tributaries of cub creek [Music] down into cub creek which is a rocky uh spring fed watershed that drains a big area below spruce mountain and bear mountain and eventually runs into bear creek which drains the 14 000 foot mount evans which is the big mountain you see when you're standing at the uh on the steps of the colorado state capitol and you look west and there's a uh often covered in snow there's a 14 000 foot peak that rises almost due west of the colorado state capitol and but my family in addition to that was outdoor oriented and in my parents partly out of economic [Music] need um took us on a lot of picnics and outdoor trips and one of our favorite things to do is just go go as a family and picnic down on on evergreen lake which is a nearby mountain lake or along a sand bar or gravel bar on on bear creek and when we took family vacations um my parents would load us all all eight of us into a ford econoline van that is not a 15 passenger van it was one of those kind of squat looking vans painted green kind of a kelly green [Music] full of pads and sleeping bags and we'd all just pile in the back of this van and my parents uh my father especially my mother you know it was i think kind of a hairy trip for her but my father loved the the adventure kind of a romantic uh any left adventure and love taking all the kids out and and uh and just going not knowing where you're gonna go where you're gonna end up at the end of the day um kind of like you know a beatnik or something you know on the road kind of tr family trip but for my mother now she had to wipe all her noses and you know find food and and it wasn't the same romantic experience for her although she enjoyed certain parts of it but it was uh you know and we would end up at the end of the day in um in national forests or or blm land just pulling off the side of the road and following a dirt road and um and and camping just wherever we could find it and in some ways john you know it seems like you're still doing that you know finding the camp where you can well um i know you're a musician so could you tell us a little bit about um your experience in that realm well my mother um uh taught me to play piano she she was a opera and play played a piano classical piano and sang opera um and was on on the pathway to becoming a nun when she met my father and um and she taught me to play piano by ear not not by uh by note reading and um we've always had music in in our household my older sister abby she taught me to play guitar and and my older brother ernie i think taught abby how to play guitar and then later in high school i started playing mandolin i taught myself that i'm kind of a self-taught musician besides what my mother taught me sitting on the piano bench as a five-year-old snotty nosed kid and but the songs that she's saying are still some of my favorite songs the stephen foster songbook was one of her favorites and things like blue tail fly and and uh and american folk classics you know like uh papa patch you know aware of where's dear little johnny where oh where's dear little johnny where oh where's dear letter johnny way down yonder in the papa patch come on boys let's go find him come on girls let's go find him come on family let's go find him way down yonder in the pop-up hat picking up paw paws put him in his pocket picking up papa's put him in his pocket picking up papa's put him in his pocket waiting under the pop-up patch and she would play that with all of us all eight of us who ran the piano and the young young one sitting on the piano [ __ ] and those are still some of the most striking memories of my childhood and we had no idea or i didn't anyways what a pop i was it's just a neat sounding word you know and now decades later i've learned directly what the fruit is because we see it out in the forest the floodplain woods of the lower mississippi river and there was actually a guy who came to us a papa specialist who wrote a book uh called the papa book and um and we guided him a couple years ago out to uh to a location we know where popeyes thrive america's largest fruit and they they do well in the floodplain forest of the lower mississippi hi i'm melody moody tortoise and you're listening to the mississippi arts hour podcast you can also hear the show on mpb think radio every sunday afternoon at 5 00 pm to hear all our conversations with creative mississippians be sure to subscribe to the mississippi arts hour podcast on your favorite podcasting app hi i'm ryder taff portfolio manager at new perspectives a fee only financial advisory and co-host of money talks each week we take your personal finance questions and tell you about a money topic we hope you find helpful money talks can be heard tuesdays at 9 00 am on mpb think radio podcasts can be found on our website money.mpbonline.org or on your smart devices podcasting platform this is an mpb think radio podcast you're listening to the mississippi arts hour on mpb think radio each week on the arts hour representatives from the mississippi arts commission speak with different creative mississippians today i'm speaking with canoe builder and owner of kwampa canoe company john rescue so john before the break we were talking about your childhood and growing up in nature and your love for such things and i'm curious to ask you a little bit about your time at the delta blues museum i know that you served for a time as curator there so for our listeners could you tell us a little bit more about the museum and your time there well the delta blues museum was started in 1979 by sid graves who was a visionary a library director because it started as a division of the carnegie public library in clarksville and sid and the board of trustees recognized the need for an institution like a museum to recognize and preserve and protect the the rich history of the blues and what no better place than than uh perhaps the very center of the blues world uh arguably and and definitely one of the most important locations for delta blues and that is in clarksdale and i [Music] returned to mississippi after that raft trip that fateful raft trip in the 80s about 10 years later with a guitar in my hand and an accordion and ended up volunteering at the delta blues museum under sid's direction and the librarians who kept the library who kept the museum open and as a volunteer in the winter of 1991 and um and when uh and and when the um and and kind of grew into becoming the first employee first as a docent showing people around that never had an employee before and and then as curator when the the need became apparent that uh for for building exhibits and uh creating a system for archiving um the uh guitars and and uh musical instruments and paperwork and photographs and works of art and everything else that the museum had been collecting for decades but no one had ever systematically archived and created exhibits and public uh interaction through and um i thought i had found my heaven on earth when i in uh in the early 90s working with sid who is just a fantastic genius kind of person with a photographic memory and a zeal for life and literature and in music um he wasn't a jew joint he wasn't a guy who'd go hang out in juke joints he didn't play a musical instrument as far as i know and uh kind of kind of probably self-described nerdy kind of person but he had a unquenchable zeal for life and a great storyteller and to this day as one of the most influential people in my life well i know that you mentioned that you knew jessie mae hemphill a famous musician who our live recording listeners will hear during the break so tell me a little bit about that relationship and what it was like um getting to know jessie may yeah jessie kind of took me under her wing [Music] as a as a youngster i think she looked looked upon me as as like uh like someone who needed help or uh or maybe a a a child or or something she uh she she uh um spoiled me kind of with a a motherly kind of attention um uh cooking for me and and uh and uh opening her house to me when um when i just need to get away from clarksdale um i used to go up and visit her and stay at her place up up near como and um i'm near senatobia and um and uh she is one of my all-time favorite musicians her her tonal quality and the rich flowing continuity of her style of blues is so rich and and and vibrant and uh has this continuity to it that that very few musicians are able to achieve and um but i remember her forever uh i i hear her her voice right now as we're speaking kind of a squeaky childlike voice when when she was talking that is not what she's saying but she was talking and uh and uh and the greens and and sweet potatoes that she cooked in her kitchen and fed me a dumb kid in clarksdale who she kind of put it put under her wing well john i know that you've done some extensive writing on the oral traditions in the contemporary blues of mississippi and i know that it's very important to you to keep up with traditionality and how that works and passing down certain traditions and oral histories and i'd love to hear more about why that's important to you why that's a passion of yours and how you've seen that play out in your work yeah definitely well johnny billington became uh my mentor in learning and i'm talking about johnny billington mr johnny who um was a clarksville uh guitar player um who taught kids how to play play the blues and and was the uh the model for what you now see at the delta blues museum in their arts and education program and mr johnny i spent a couple years studying guitar with him although he took he put me on the drums and then the keyboards and and guitar even though i wanted to learn guitar um he's an old style kind of uh of a mentor uh who who uh broke everything down to the basics and uh taught the hard lessons of life and taught them the hard way that probably how he learned them himself but in a way that i and all of the dozens of other people that that he led directly to their musical careers i never made a musical career out of it but um people like arthenese jones um the gas man and um anthony chard big a who's now one of the top performers in the state of uh mississippi one of the top blues performers and um big t terry williams and uh billy gibbons who some people call the prince of beale street was one of mr johnny's students at one time and um and even kingfish christone ingram he he mr johnny i don't think directly taught him but he was taught by others who were taught by mr johnny so there's this multi-generational tradition that that was carried on and mr johnny uh he cited sunny boy williamson and listening to the king biscuit blues program from kffa in helena and what one of the things that mr johnny influenced me with was the that kind of knowledge that comes through doing something that's of value to your community and nothing's more important to the clarksville communities than its music and the blues is the vernacular it doesn't matter what kind of music you listen to today the blues is in it somehow and i i was able to use uh mr johnny's method in teaching [Music] canoe carving the art of carving a a dugout canoe out of a log and then later paddling that canoe and the skills that are involved in in surviving and taking care of yourself on islands in wilderness uh situations on the islands of the lower mississippi river my experience with mr johnny opened up a the world of of sharing and passing on traditions um person to person and the uh the ability to to do that and the uh the importance of doing that well you've certainly done a lot of work to pass things on to the people you come in contact with i know that you work with a lot of young students and you have an apprenticeship program working with young people teaching them how to build canoes and camp and serve as river guides so tell me a little bit about um your your time doing that and and why it's important to you yeah mr johnny said if if you don't share what you know with the kids around you then it's going to die when you die and um and just like music carving canoes the the swinging of sharp shiny objects through the air and the sound that they make when they hit that solid wood it's like a drum bead kind of reverberates through the town up and down the streets and water of course is one of the biggest things that all of us are attracted to but even more so if you're a kid you're going to want to get to water and in the mud and in the sand and then fire is the other great great attractor and um um and just like music you know mute uh music uh uh is like the you know it's like the pied piper you know it and if you hear music uh kids are gonna follow it so there was this natural um natural attraction that um that uh brought the canoe building to life because when i started carving canoes and i it was when i started doing it i was a student myself i was just learning how to do it and uh a guy up on the shores of lake michigan named ralph reese a master canoe builder he he taught me the the method for building voyager style canoe and turned me on to dugout canoes and and i discovered a a whole world there's not there's no books written about doug atkins it's or how to build a dugout canoe very few people practice a tradition anywhere in north america although on the west coast it's more more you might find a few people but in the southeast especially there's i don't know of anyone who's who's carving dugout canoes and and yet it our our uh the history of the southeast and the hundreds of thousands of native people who lived here is uh would not be possible of the the richness of that culture of the mississippian people i'm talking about the people that desoto he was the first white guy to describe them in his journals and and and it's interesting story actually when and this is written in his journals when desoto came to the banks of the river he was met by an armada of of native people mississippians the original mississippians we're talking about here the mound builders and and every day his journals say the uh an armada of warriors um two to three thousand strong would paddle by and canoes on on the mississippi river where where de soto and his men were fearfully camped and trying to get out of by building their own raft they didn't know how to build canoes they were building a raft to get across a river and the the every day is a show of force these thousands of native uh mississippians um peppered the the tiny spanish army with arrows and they say that those canoes that they were in that there was 60 to 80 warriors per canoe and the canoes that we build are 29 feet long the biggest canoes that we build in clarksdale are 29 feet long and in a 29 foot canoe maximum can hold 14 people and usually we only have 10 people in a 29 footer so try to imagine a canoe that can hold 60 to 80 people it's probably 50 to 60 feet long which um you know they were the freighters they were the school buses they were the the the minivans and the suburbans of that culture we know by the example of other cultures around the world that still practice a canoe building tradition like the haida gwaii of british columbia and um and it's probably a 50 to 60 foot long canoe uh six to seven maybe eight feet wide and it's and it's beam which is the center of a vessel and and after you can imagine that then imagine the size of the tree that it took and that is alone is a testament to the biota of the lower mississippi valley which hundreds of years later teddy roosevelt who was a bear hunter came to the delta and he said the biggest trees that he saw in north america were in the mississippi delta the giant cypress and and sweetgum and other trees that grew in the alluvial floodplain of the lower mississippi he said they were the biggest trees that he saw outside of the west coast that is in north america and we're talking trees 10 to 12 feet in diameter at their base and reaching up to the sky over 150 feet tall [Music] hi i'm melody moody tortoise and you're listening to the mississippi arts hour podcast you can also hear the show on mpb think radio every sunday afternoon at 5 00 pm to hear all our conversations with creative mississippians be sure to subscribe to the mississippi arts hour podcast on your favorite podcasting [Music] if you ever miss one of our locally produced shows or want to simply hear it again you can find what you need at mpbonline.org or download our podcast app to your smartphone mpb programming is on your schedule at [Music] mpbonline.org [Music] this is an mpb think radio podcast you're listening to the mississippi arts hour on mpb think radio i'm your host melody moody tortoise director of grants at the mississippi arts commission if you're just joining us today i'm speaking with canoe builder and river guide john ruske so john before the break we were talking a little bit about your work to make dugout canoes so i'm curious um could you describe the process a little bit more and what it means to dig a dug out canoe well thanks melody it is a it's a spiritual journey and it's a a long physical journey it's it's as long as paddling the length of the mississippi river the people i've built one dugout canoe by myself and i'll never do that again since then i've been part of dozens of dugout canoe projects that involve many people and often become community carving projects because it is something that you want to share it's like a community garden or something and it's a big physical undertaking it involves a lot of manual labor but it's something you you have to approach respectfully and and artistically and spiritually and this is highlighted by a ancient tradition amongst canoe carvers that involves spiritual preparation um including abstinence and um and fasting and other um religious or spiritual practices that help the the canoe carver focus and clear his or her mind from the clutter that fills our lives and opens your imagination to the ways of water and fluid motion and flowing forms and the canoe necessarily by its function involves flowing forms not only by this by the the way that the grains of wood flow through a tree and then the way that you carve uh you move your your hand plane or your um or or your chop with your ads and axes in in harmony with the with those flowing lines that are the texture and the substance of the wood um but also and perhaps more importantly so in the future of that vessel is the way that it is going to cut the water when you finish your canoe carving and set it in a stream or river or lake or the mississippi river or the gulf of mexico that vessel that you're carving is both a uh an artistic uh object and it's also a functional object and to do to this its success depends on the balance achieved and even more importantly so the the um the way that the wood has been carved on its exterior side that is to cut the water and then to and then to flow through the water and then to allow the water to come back together its tail so i often tell my my canoe carvers my apprentices or the people that i'm carving with to think like a fish and and canoes often end up looking like fishes they have pointed noses and they have sharp ends and in a canoe the uh the shape is symmetrical um four and aft and uh and side to side uh port to starboard to use nautical turns and um you know like a grumman canoe or a plastic old town canoe or almost any canoe that you buy commercially is going to be a mathematically symmetric and a dugout canoe you have a lot more latitude but you in in the back of your mind always symmetry is one of the one of the guiding principles because it uh it creates balance and being on the water is all about balance unless you know you just want to get wet so i'm curious john when you go about this process what kind of wood are you using are you choosing the same kind of tree over and over or are you choosing different trees and why it's a conversation for sure and um that starts with the uh selection of the tree that you're going to use for the the canoe um if you are so lucky you can walk in your own backyard and maybe you've developed a relationship with a particular pine tree or magnolia or cottonwood or cypress which are our most our favorite types of woods to use cottonwoods they grow fast and are easy to find anywhere around the state in cyprus a little less so you know you got to live in the right right uh parts of the county to find cyprus it doesn't grow as as commonly as it used to but it is perhaps the best wood in the southeast to use and in the western states um western red cedar is a favorite wood amongst canoe builders but in the south i'd have to say louisiana bald cypress is the best wood but regardless the um everything has a spirit in it and it's the the uh the first challenge for the canoe carver is to to find the right tree um for the journey ahead and um you know there's certain physical attributes that you need to look for a long uh clean of of uh of uh branches big branches or forks in the wood you know you want a long section of trunk at least three feet wide and four feet is even better and that is in diameter but most importantly is the is the feeling you get from from any particular tree whether it be dead or alive there's a spirit that is contained that is living i should say in that in that uh uh tree trunk and it's and it's uh and its uh forks and its branches and its crown of uh branches that reach up into the sky and the trees are like the bronchi of the uh of the earth there are they're the lungs so they're the uh they're the the ones that allow us to breathe because they create oxygen and in turn they um they uh each one has has has a has a its own unique character and spirit and anyone who spent any time near near in the woods knows exactly what i'm talking about well we found that as canoe carvers that that spirit stays with the wood even after you drop a tree and cut it up into a 20-foot section that is usable for for a canoe carving project and we know this because we um come back to that that log that is now sitting on the ground in your canoe carving area day after day for weeks on end and sometimes months and um and sit quietly with our sketchbooks or our journals or maybe just in a prayerful meditation and certain feelings um images or smells or memories um come dancing through your imagination and if you allow your pencil to flow freely on your page you're going to find something that is striking about that log that came out from that tree that catches your attention again and again and um and then and then if you ask other people to do it and we do this with groups of school kids and um and adults alike but kids you know have special kind of fluidity in their imaginations and they find that the same thing they find they find uh that there are is something um living within that tree that they see and and express on the piece of paper they have in front of them and then sometimes we discover that we're seeing the same thing and that's the way that the uh we uh discover the the spirit in the log is what we call it and we're actually doing that right now in downtown clarksdale with a cypress tree that we dropped along the banks of the sunflower river not far from quapaw canoe company and we're looking for that spirit within the log and and it's the the the and it's a community thing because the the um the spirit that's true it's kind of like the naming of a of a of a vessel the the name that or or a nickname is a good example you know like a nickname for a person that the nickname that works is the nickname that holds you know the nickname that sticks the the the true nickname is the one that sticks and uh and uh we find the same thing with the with our canoes that the true spirit is the one that everyone looks at oh yeah you're right you know there's you have a feeling that that is a frog you're right look i see that that blue heron in there or or dragonfly is another one and um and um so it's it's uh we're tapping into the universal subconscious psyche that's flowing and forever flowing that all artists tap into but as canoe builders it involves many hands and many uh many many uh minds all coming together in in some kind of uh of uh harmony uh kind of like a barn building and um and that uh ever flowing um stream of the subconscious becomes apparent in this practice and once we uh discover that then it's time to sharpen the tools axes and edges and and scorps and and hand planes and um and uh elaborate that that uh um spirit out of the uh the shavings of wood that you carve from that vest from that tree and make a functional vessel well john as we wrap up our conversation today can you tell our listeners out there where they can find out more about quapaw canoe company and the work that you're doing in clarksdale well quapaw has a website at [Music] island63.com and [Music] there are there's artwork and maps and a lot of descriptions on it but you can also go to a thing called the quapa dispatch and that is a newsletter that i've been writing for the past 20 years and you can read about our adventures on the river and see photos of the canoes that we have built and are working on in that dispatch [Music] hi i'm melody moody tortoise and you're listening to the mississippi arts hour podcast you can also hear the show on mpb think radio every sunday afternoon at 5 00 pm to hear all our conversations with creative mississippians be sure to subscribe to the mississippi arts hour podcast on your favorite podcasting [Music] hi i'm dr jimmy stewart professor of internal medicine and pediatrics at the university of mississippi medical center on the original southern remedy we answer questions about all aspects of your health and share some of the latest medical information in the news you can listen to the show on wednesdays at 11 on mpb think radio or you can subscribe to the podcast by searching for southern remedy on your preferred podcasting app this podcast is a local production of mississippi public broadcasting and depends on the support of listeners like you if you can please donate today at mpb online