Every travel writer who writes about the United States (I’ve already excluded a number of travel writers, including, regrettably, some American ones) does so in the shadow of Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America. Quoting Tocqueville in articles about the States became such a cliché that Calvin Trillin, when he was filing regular reports from around the country for The New Yorker, started a small club of reporters who vowed never to mention Tocqueville in a story.
But I would argue that writers who go out to look for America (and that includes songwriters) owe a greater debt to the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s than they do to the French political thinker. The Project’s American Guide Series – which covered all 48 states, plus the territories of Alaska and Puerto Rico – showed that every area of the country was worthy of attention, that Arkansas was as deserving of a book as California.
It was not obeisance to geographical relativism but rather a recognition of the infinite richness of the United States. The Guide’s belief in the value of the marginal, the beauty of the unsung – under threat today from the supremacy of the popular (the curse of the Internet) – infused James Morris’s Coast to Coast, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Jonathan Raban’s Hunting Mister Heartbreak. Its greatest champion was Jack Kerouac who, heading back to New York after travels in the West, found grandeur in the Susquehanna River.
