I met Joel Rafael in person at a music conference, where we commiserated over inadequate technology (the Conference App Which Shall Remain Nameless.) But he got my attention through Facebook with beautiful pictures of Bird-of-Paradise flowers, and a spectacular desert skyline.

Me: I’m looking at that picture over your shoulder.

JR: Let’s see… Charles Banks Wilson is the painter. And the original painting was commissioned by the Oklahoma State Historical Preservation Fund and dedicated at the Oklahoma State Capitol in July of 2004. This Republican congressman had requested a painting from Charles Banks Wilson. He’s a famous Oklahoma painter. There’s several paintings of his already hanging in the Capitol and they wanted to commission one more painting basically before he died.

He said, “I’ll do a commissioned painting. I don’t paint like meadows with buffalo in them anymore, so whatever I paint, you just have to accept it. It’s up to me.”

And they said, “no, no, we just want one of your paintings.”

So he painted this, and then when he delivered it, he told them: “There’s two conditions. One is that it will always have to hang in a public area. It can’t be in some back room somewhere, and you can never paint the cigarette out of Woody’s mouth. You got to leave the cigarette in his mouth.”

So they had a dedication a bunch of us went to the capitol – it was right during the festival – and Arlo was there that year, and he sang “Pretty Boy Floyd” in the State Capitol of Oklahoma, which was kind of cool.

Me: That’s very cool. Until listening to your album Woodeye – and I’ve been really smitten with that CD for the past two days – I was never familiar with that song, “Pretty Boy Floyd.” Yeah, I know.

JR: Here’s another big painting… I played a festival in Italy around the same time as the centennial of Woody’s birthday, and the festival I was playing was called the Sarzana Acoustic Guitar Meeting, and it was mostly luthiers. But there were some performers there too, and they had me there because of my co-writes with Woody. And it was in a, they call it a fort, but it was basically like a castle, an ancient castle in Sarzana. I walked across the drawbridge – because literally there was a moat around it – across the drawbridge and into the main part of the castle.

It’s a big open kind of area, and that’s where they had the whole festival set up with chairs and a stage and everything. And all around the edges of the area were these paintings like this one hanging up: all artists like Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Woody Guthrie one this guy was painting. It wasn’t done yet – he was working on it. I was just in awe.

And then the promoter came walking up, and I said, “Wow, this is amazing. Is he selling these?”

And the promotor said yeah, he’s selling ‘em for 300 euro apiece.

(me, in my mind: That’s pretty cheap.)

JR: And I thought, well, that’s pretty cheap. Then the promoter said something in Italian to the painter, whose name is Franco Ori. And Franco Ori looks back at the promoter and says something in Italian, and then the promoter says, “He’ll sell you this one for 100 Euros since you’re the Woody Guthrie guy.” So of course I bought it.

Me: Oh, hell yeah. How did you get it home? (Folks, this painting is massive.)

JR: he finished it that day, and I was there for a couple of days, so it was dry by that night or the next day. And so he took it off the frame and rolled it up for us.

We drove from Sarzana, Italy across Southern France to Spain where I had three shows. A friend that we stayed with in Southern France helped us send it home, and it got home the day after we did.

JR: My whole thing is that creativity is creativity.

me: Me too. My statement is: All these things are all the same. They’re different vocabularies. Sometimes you gotta use paint. Do you paint also?

JR: Yeah, I dabble with it. I’m not a painter, but I do dabble with it. I’ve taken watercolor classes before.

me: Watercolor’s so hard. I can’t.

JR: Yeah, it’s so different than acrylic or oil. You got to use the paper. Watercolor’s all about the light, letting the light shine through and using the water to make the paint grow at. But here’s something my art instructor said…

(Joel gets up to show me a photo on the wall.)

Here he is. Can you see him? He’s no longer with us and his name is Doug Durant. He was my drawing instructor at the community college. And we became really good friends. One of the things he pointed out is that literally everything you look at in our lives is a representation of art. The faucet in your bathroom, somebody designed that. Somebody drew that and made up what the shape was going to be and how that was going to look. Your furniture, just everything around you was designed by an artist.

And so art is so critical to our world, but here in the United States, it’s always the first thing they cut when they’ve got to cut the budget, it’s the first thing they eliminate, but it’s so essential to everything. It’s all around us, 24-7, a light switch, a handle on a door. They were all created by a designer. People take stuff for granted in the political times we’re living in right now, the things that we take for granted, are the things they’re going to take away.

me: And that’s what folk is, in my opinion. Folk is preservation; it’s why those things we take for granted will be able to survive our current political environment – because those things reside within people.

I say all the time that we hold our emotions in items. And so when I’m writing a song, I’m adding things like this teacup that belonged to my grandmother, this rock I found, because those are where my emotions are hiding. So in the song format, if I’ve done my job correctly, the person listening will know: Maybe she doesn’t have the teacup from her grandmother, but she might have something else that means the same to her. You understand the job that tangible item is doing.

JR: Right. The energy of ancestors.

me: That continuum is the one thing I feel is so lost in mainstream American culture – not our real American culture, which is more of a patchwork blanket made up of real stories – but the American culture that thinks art and music are dispensable.

Well, it’s like my friend John Trudell said, the big lie is that civilization is civilized because it’s not. It’s the opposite.

The history of this country has been a violent one, and it becomes so evident when we’re going through the kind of stuff we’re going through now.

Read the whole amazing interview here: Joel Rafael – Bringing Woody to the World and Back

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debora Ewing writes, paints, and screams at the stars because the world is still screwed up. She improves what she can with music collaboration, peer-review at Consilience Poetry Journal, or designing books for Igneus Press. Follow @DebsValidation on X and Instagram. Read her self-distractions at FolkWorks.org and JerryJazzMusician.com.