Kevin Skinner opens today in Las Vegas, the first step on the next stage of his journey out of rural western Kentucky and into the larger world. His victory in America's Got Talent brought him to the Las Vegas stage. Before that, there was another victory, a victory of the spirit.
Skinner spent much of his adult life as a farm laborer, taking whatever jobs were available in economically depressed western Kentucky where tobacco and chicken farming provide jobs shorn of all glamor. Chicken catching is not, despite the images that the judges and audience at Skinner's audition might have conjured up, one man chasing a couple of chickens around the back yard.
In a recent interview, Skinner said, "Catching chickens is harder than it sounds: It’s really hot, exhausting work. It’s 100 degrees outside and there’s 30,000 chickens in the barn also putting off body heat. You’re moving fast, your skin is rubbing raw. There’s six guys catching eight chickens at a time until you’re done. It separates the men from the boys real fast!”
I would say it did that, "separated the men from the boys." Every day, there's another barn filled to capacity with chickens to be caught. Sometimes, one is on one's knees, scrambling after squawking chickens. Sometimes, claws and talons slice through protection on one's hands. Bandannas tied across the face don't really filter the air. Airborne contaminants settle in one's hair and clothing, leave traces on one's skin, calling on one's ability to endure, to keep on, one day, the next day and the next.
Kevin Skinner caught chickens for nine years, day in and day out, mind-numbing, backbreaking labor in unpleasant conditions, in a job that can lead to permanent lung damage from gases and inhaling airborne material, severe skin problems and disabling injuries. He helped empty out chicken barn after chicken barn after chicken barn, sending the birds on their trip to your table and thereby putting food on his family's table until a back injury sustained on the job left him unable to work.
If you grow up in and around Mayfield, Skinner's home turf, I'm told, there is a lot of pressure not to be different, to put away dreams for practicalities, to buckle down and get a day job, to get married and raise a family, so that if you can afford a guitar, it's likely to be a $300.00 model and it's probably going to be purchased on layaway. And, besides, " Nashville? Go to Nashville? Nashville's not real life!" He buckled down, yes, and got a job, one in which no one prospers and from which everyone comes home worn out.
But, Skinner took his guitar to work with him at the chicken barns, playing it and singing on breaks and at lunch. "I’d always find myself passing the time by singing. I would concentrate on some lines of my own to write, and sometimes I’d sing cover tunes, like Hank Williams Jr.’s ‘The Blues Man.’” And, when there were no chickens he'd grab his guitar and play for the guys and practice.
Singing and playing his guitar at work places Skinner, for that moment, at the heart of the American folk music tradItion where workers sang to ease the burden of shared harsh manual labor, whether in the cotton fields, or prison work gangs. The progression from folk music, played and sung on front porches and cotton fields, dances and barn raisings, to the stage and its further commercialization by the recording industry in the 1920's defines the development of what we call "country music." Skinner, playing on his front porch, by a bonfire in the back yard, for friends and family, at work, echoes if he doesn't exactly duplicate that old style of American folk musician. I can see the folk music scholar, Alan Lomax, roaming western Kentucky with his rather primitive recording equipment, ambling up to Kevin's front porch and asking to record him, circa 1935.
Straddling the line between folk and commercial, Kevin sings in Las Vegas tonight. I think his ability to sing in commercial venues while tapping into the vibe of rural America's traditional folk musician is an important factor in his great appeal to audiences world-wide. Working hard during the day, refreshing his soul with music during breaks, Skinner would come home exhausted, only to sit on the porch or in the back yard near a campfire, playing and signing, alone or with friends, until time to sleep.
Despite difficult conditions, he was able to keep his music close to his heart, a vital force in his life. This, to me, is his real victory, an unnoticed, unsung victory of the spirit, giving strength to his dream, this victory of the spirit helped propel him to another victory on the stage of American's got Talent.
As I write this last sentence, Kevin Skinner has just begun his first performance in Las Vegas.
copyright e hodges 2009
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