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Jack Herranen, Folk Musician
Bio:

"Listen up!  Jack Herranen blends the creative lyrics of Bob Dylan and the musical style of Joe Hill with the politics of Tupac Katari."
~ Chellis Glendinning, Ph.D., author of Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global Heroin Trade,  Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into Empire and the Global Economy, and other books.
 
"Jack Herranen and his musical companions offer a powerful blend of politics and culture in music blessed with both historical memory and a sense of justice keenly needed by emerging global regional movements."    
~Herbert Reid, emeritus professor of politics, University of Kentucky/ co-author of Recovering the Commons:  Democracy, Place, & Global Justice.
 
Folk singer singing of the pain in the veins of Las Americas, and the beauty barely surviving on front porch swings, back porches, garden plots…and plans for revolutionary demands; swimming out of the jumble, like so many others, of the modern day American shipwreck.  The stones spoke in Mexico and the trees wept in Tennessee, and somewhere between the two, freedom… amidst the stumbling and staggering. But liberation ain’t what it always seems. It’s deeper, tangled, and more akin to responsibility than to “rights”. The guitar was floating there in the wreckage, buoyant enough to carry one to the shore. A ballast, a rod to steady one while on the tightrope, on this bridge of rope and wood that is memory. And history?  The whipping wind.  Folk singer, folk singer…  In the early eighties creeping around Daddy’s house, found “Another Side of” by Dylan. Later, gifted with Springsteen’s “Nebraska”. From there the lightning flew, and the thunder rolled. The coat of armor shot through, peppered with little holes where the magic flows thorough. The doors swung open wide and in they came: Octavio Paz, Pablo Neruda, Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, John Steinbeck, Townes Van Zandt, Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Wendell Berry, Ivan Illich, Joe Hill, T-Bone Slim, Henry Miller, Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Patchen, Myles Horton, Don West, Marc Chagall, Emiliano Zapata, Tupac Katari, Bartolina Sisa, Harriet Tubman, John Brown, John Sayles, Wim Wenders, Tony Gatlif, David Riker, Walker T. Ryan, Jim Jarmusch, John Cephas, Phil Wiggins, Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Florence Reese, The Carawans, Bill Monroe, Ralph Stanley, Mother Jones, Pete Seeger, Utah Philips  …to name but a few.

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In the three decades that Jack 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 poltical and cultural revolution.
 
Jack was born in 1967 at the foothills of the Appalachian mountains and calls Knoxville, Tennessee, USA his northern home.  The descendant 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), whose 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 Townes Van 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 of his ancestors and the hard scrabble life of the Appalachian 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.
 
Taking to the road in his late teens, Jack wandered the northwest and southwest of the United States where he encountered the wisdom that lives within many of the disenfranchised who wander our country. These men inspired him to “follow his gut instinct and internal moral compass” and heed his call to find his deeper connections to a life of art, radical memory, and renewal.  For a handful of years in Oregon, in the early nineties, Jack co-founded and played with a politically oriented acoustic quartet called the Mad Farmers (whose namesake was a body of poems by the Kentucky based writer/farmer/philosopher, Wendell Berry.)
 
Working with homeless vets, street kids, and Latinos in Arizona - selling Christmas trees for two months a year through the mid to late nineties - and looking for a place to heal some of his past family wounds, Jack sensed a call from south of the border and ended up in the historic Mexican city of Guanajuato. It was here that he met and fell in love with his wife to be, Valentina Campos, a Bolivian artist exhibiting her paintings of the maternal spirit of the Andes.  As a survivor of the dictatorships in Latin America known as “la Guerra Sucia”, Valentina led Jack out onto a tightrope which would test the integrity of his music and words.  Herranen would soon reckon with history; with what the Uruguayan storyteller/writer Eduardo Galeano referred to as “The Open Veins of Latin America”.
 
Jack arrived in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1999 when a nascent democracy was emerging among the indigenous majority of the country. His first glimpse of the capital, driving down the 2,000-foot winding road from the airport, was a city under martial law.  It was an auspicious time to land in the Andes as, over the next three years, the now famous Cochabamba Water Wars were won and the US-backed governments were displaced by a popular movement that eventually elected the world’s first indigenous President, Evo Morales.
 
During his first two years in Bolivia Jack befriended several well known artists and musicians, played in clubs and at cultural and political gatherings, making a unique mark though his rough Spanish translations of North American folk music classics such Florence Reese’s “Which Side Are You On?” and Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty”. It was during this time that he became friends with one of Bolivia’s most beloved musicians, Gerardo Arias Paz. Gerardo sent him to the site of the colonial city where the largest silver mines in this hemisphere literally bankrolled several European empires and laid the foundations for modern day globalization as we know it: the haunted city of Potosi, Ariaz Paz' birthplace. The wealth was accumulated at the horrifying cost of literally millions of enslaved indigenous and African slaves’ lives. It was there that he rappelled further down into those “Open Veins”.
 
Upon returning back to La Paz, he began to craft what might be his most important original composition to date, “Desde Appalachia Hasta Posoti” (From Appalachia to Potosi).
 
“From the coal towns of Kentucky, and eastern Tennessee/
Down thru Guanajuato, and on to Potosi/
The mines may be for silver, gold, tin, or coal/
But history remains the same, put the poor man in the hole.”
 
It is in the midst of this “radical direct democracy” that is blossoming that Jack has since discovered the meaning and value of many of the disparate threads that have woven his life together. He naturally developed musical relationships and deep friendships with campesino neighbors, labor organizers who are part of a local Factory Workers Federation, and young radical artists and students around Cochabamba, Bolivia.  This is where he has now put down his own roots permanently, in Torokawa, a primarily Quechua farming village on the outskirts of Cochabamba.  He has in particular served as an informal cultural liaison for the Cochabamba based Factory Workers Federation and la Coordinadora (the coordinating Committee in Defense of Water and Life) which served as the organizing  catalyst for the infamous Cochabamba Water War.  Now is his time to bring forth a deep appreciation for the heroes and artists of the struggles in both North and South America, as well as the simple folk both here and there that he lovingly refers to as Appalachian Campesinos and Andean Hillbillies.  His recorded music and performances are an expression of this commitment.
 
In 2004 Jack convened a circle of musicians at the legendary Ninth Ward Pickin’ Parlor  in the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. Mike West manned the helm of the mixing board while also wielding the banjo. His wife Katie Euliss accompanied on stand up bass (both of whom make up the hardworking working class group Truckstop Honeymoon and still head up the Pickin’ Parlor in its post-katrina locale of Lawrence, Kansas.) Jake Wagner (mandolin) , Kate Wagner (harmony vocals), Tom Marron (fiddle and harmonica), and T.J. Jones (percussion) forged the collective that has come to be known as the Ninth Ward Conspiracy.
 
Their first album was born when Joe Hill's "The Little Red Song Book" was dropped in Jack's lap at a kitchen table in western North Carolina.  In the heat of the New Orleans' summer of 2004, the Ninth Ward Conspiracy gathered in for what were blessed, haunted sessions recapturing the spirit of 1905 when a working class movement was born in the USA to emancipate the working class from the bondage of capitalism.  The album is titled "To Fan the Flames of Discontent: The Living Songs of Joe Hill and the Wobblies". 
 
Building on the inspiration that now was coming north from the south, just before the hurricane in 2005 The Ninth Ward Conspiracy recorded an album of Jack Herranen originals entitled “Beneath the Killing Floor”. Though the master files for this recording were lost in the hurricane, along with Mike West's and Katie Euliss' home in the Holy Cross Neighborhood, the musical spirit was relocated to Lawrence, Kansas in the months that followed.  So, in early 2009, the Conspiracy converged on Lawrence to lay out what will be their third album, another of Herranen’s originals, to be entitled “You’re Not Broken”, scheduled for release at the end of 2009/early 2010.
 
Jack is setting out now to adapt a body of poems written by the southern revolutionary poet Don West, covering a life of hard times, poetic dignity, and working class struggles from the early 1930s on thru the 1980s.