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Jack Herranen, Music, & Folk

The Genealogy & Evolution of an Artist "of the Mountains"

In the three decades that folk musician Jack Herranen has been writing, singing, and educating, he has captured, in his music and poetry and critical reflections, the heart and soul of the working class struggles from Tennessee’s southern Appalachia to Bolivia’s Andes Mountains.  He has gone on to dedicate himself to crafting a systemic analysis regarding race, class, the environment, western notions of work, the first world development discourse, misconstrued understandings of poverty and progress, and the differences between political and cultural revolution.

Jack was born in 1967 at the foothills of the Appalachian mountains and calls Knoxville his northern home. The descendent of radical immigrant laborers and natural born storytellers, Jack has, in recent years, searched for his own identity through his music and a deeper understanding of his roots. His great grandfather, Jacob “Jack” Nisula, a labor organizer and Finnish immigrant who passed thru Ellis Island, was a close collaborator of T Bone Slim, the dynamic story-teller and lyricist of the the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World). His verbal history of the times has been an inspiration to Wobbly comrade Joe Hill, Woody Guthrie, Haywire Mac, ultimately fueling the creative fires of artists such as Bob Dylan, Utah Philips, Phil Ochs, Steve Earle, Ani Difranco, and Billy Bragg.

A self-taught musician, while working as a busboy across the street from the infamous Ella Guru’s music club (in the Old City, Knoxville, Tn.), he spent his smoke breaks slipping in to listen to such greats as TownesVan Zandt, Nancie Griffith, Dick Gaughan,and Taj Majal.Inspired at the time by writings of legends from Walt Whitman to Pablo Neruda, his songs began to reflect both the rebellious roots ofhis ancestors and the hard scrabble life of theAppalachian working class, as well as the newly discovered dignity in his heritage of creativity and rebellion and the tattered beauty and grace discovered at the margins of the illusory American dream. [Read More]