The Minnesota Chorale

Hubert Humphrey talking, talking, talking (a torrential talker, Time Magazine once called him) and Garrison Keillor talking so mellifluously every Saturday night from Lake Woebegone (makes even those of us who never did listen to the old radio programs believe, somehow, that we did). Without ever actually saying anything, Betty Crocker has instructed generations of cooks how to make a perfect baking powder biscuit, yes the same kind that Keillor’s Powdermilk Biscuit Band calls “tasty and expeditious.”

 Sinclair Lewis’s words earned him the Nobel Prize in literature in 1926, but Ole Rolvaag’s account of Scandinavian pioneer farmers, Giants in the Earth (1927) didn’t. Prince maybe can’t decide what he wants to be called, but like Bob Dylan and Judy Garland—other Minnesotans who dropped their Minnesota identities—makes fine music.

Minnesota Woman’s skeleton speaks of life 10,000 years or more ago; her conch shell necklace of continental trade networks. Little Crow didn’t want to speak at all, but the war cries of the 1862 Dakota War and the grief and anger of the dispossessed Dakota echo still.

Director Tyrone Guthrie arrived in Minnesota in 1963 to give voice to Hamlet and Willy Lohman in the middle of farm fields, and the Coen Brothers in 1996 put the bite in cold farm fields, appointed a pregnant woman sheriff, and called it Fargo (didn’t they know that Fargo is in North Dakota?) Besides, we don’t really sound like that, do we? Artist Hazel Belvo doesn’t need words. Her painting of Lake Superior’s sacred Witch Tree speaks of nature’s wonders, the same ones that naturalist Sigurd Olson’s books whisper about.

Nineteenth-century Populist Ignatius Donnelly had a tongue of silver, dreams of gold, and a vision of Atlantis. A different kind of populist, a century later, Tammy Faye Baker, with her husband Jim, preached her way onto Christian television, and Mr. Sears, carnival barker of another sort, talked people into buying everything from shoes to houses through the mail. Robert Bly’s Iron John and his band of men drum their inner selves into sound, and Congresswoman Coya Gjesdal Knutson (and don’t call us the Democratic Party, we’re the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party) was singing her way to another election (she really did campaign by singing) when in 1958 her political opponents goaded her husband to whine “Coya, Come Home.” Meanwhile, the Republican Boy Governor Harold Stassen trumpeted his talents and ran for president, then again, and then some more times, and Eugenie Anderson talked her way into Danish affections as the first woman ambassador from the United States

NeeGawNwayWeeDun (Clyde Bellecourt) and other Native Americans of many bands, drummed and sang their anger and their community into the American Indian Movement in the 1970s. The Frs. Phillip and Daniel Berrigan from Duluth, too, spoke justice to power. Minnesota Attorney General Walter Mondale spoke up for indigent defendants in Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), and Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun in 1973 wrote the majority decision in Roe v. Wade (though his grade school classmate and eventual nemesis, Chief Justice Warren Berger concurred). We cheered Alan Page as Minnesota Viking who now referees cases as an Associate Justice of the state Supreme Court.

If you stand in just the right spot on the Mississippi or the Minnesota Rivers, on the Lake of the Isles, on the continental divide outside Ely up north, in the middle of a field of sunflowers or Norway pines or lilac bushes, at Fort Snelling or the Hockey Hall of Fame, you’ll hear this chorus’s song. Not in harmony, not even in the same time signature, but recognizably the chorus of this place.

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