A year ago, The Third Ear spent a week in Oklahoma for Switchyard, the “national festival of literature, music and ideas” sponsored by the University of Tulsa. Summoned to the Sooner State by keynote speakers like Greil Marcus (Mystery Train) and graphic novelist Art Spiegelman (Maus), I chatted with the editor of Switchyard Magazine, Ted Genoways; heard from Allen Ginsberg’s psychiatrist; spoke to members of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE); as well as a small galaxy of podcasters, writers, and scholars with a shared obsession: the World of Bob Dylan (another conference, recently absorbed by Switchyard). The world of so-called Dylanologists last year included: a writer for the Daily Show; Stan Lee’s biographer; and, most surprisingly, an internet-monitoring “conspiracy theory” and “cognitive infiltration” expert, the high-priest of “dishabituation”—the Biden administration’s senior Department of Homeland Security official, Cass Sunstein? (Read here, if you’re confused.)
I also visited the Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie Centers; watched musician and journalist Jeff Slate interview and perform with country singer Margo Price; and attended a show at “The Home of Bob Wills,” Cain’s Ballroom.
Along the way, I talked like an Okie and argued for a sense of American Humor in arts and letters, which sums up many of the presentations from last year’s World of Bob Dylan.
By a strange coincidence, in 2023 as in 2024, I narrowly missed actor Ethan Hawke and journalist Nancy Rommelman, who happened to be in Tulsa on unrelated business. Their common denominator is the Oklahoma-based FX series Reservation Dogs—last year Hawke made a guest appearance on the show; Rommelman’s daughter Tafv Sampson, granddaughter of Will Sampson—“Chief” from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest—was the set director.
This year, I walked out of a sleepy arthouse screening of Challengers one afternoon, only to learn that the Circle Cinema was hosting a sold-out Q&A later that evening, to follow the debut of a new biopic about the “controversial,” posthumously-canceled author Flannery O’Conner, Wildcat—featuring director Ethan Hawke. Instead of watching Hawke’s daughter Maya play a Southern Gothic storyteller, then hearing from her father/director afterwards, I watched Zendaya play a sociopathic tennis coach for two hours.
Which is a shame.
The highlight of last year’s visit, my reason for returning this year, revolves around the cult of Leon Russell, and the record company and studio he founded in Tulsa over fifty years ago: Shelter Records, inside the Church Studio.
The Third Ear co-sponsored 2024’s second annual Carney Fest (named after the 1972 Leon Russell album, released the year Shelter Records was founded), to raise funds for current owner Teresa Knox’s Church Studio Music Foundation.
I’ll gloss the history of Shelter Records and Church Studio momentarily (or you can read more about it here), but first a nagging question: Why Tulsa?
How is it that one can stumble out of a movie theater with five people in the lobby to find a major Hollywood director is hosting a Q&A about Flannery O’Conner two hours later? Why does every other dive seem to emanate great live music on a Friday night, with only seven people in attendance—including the bartender? Why does a Poet Laureate of the United States live here? Why is the University of Tulsa home to the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies—why is Dylan’s life’s work archived in an old paper factory downtown? Why did the grand opening of such an unlikely musical pilgrimage site look like this?
How come I keep tracing the steps of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola down empty streets? Why is the lobby of the Hyatt Regency filled with cultural luminaries one year, and SafeTech consultants the next? Why did the Tulsa Arts District—and to a certain extent, Studio Row, the home of Church Studio and Carney Fest—look like a ghost town the weekend of the festival, and five days later, look like this?
Why does the front row at a seemingly hip local festival look like it’s been reading AARP: The Magazine for at least twelve years?
What’s with this place?
An article from Forbes, published hours after I returned from Oklahoma, explains the appeal for artists in Tulsa—if not the quantitative discrepancy between artists and audiences here. The piece touches on two of The Third Ear’s heavenly virtues: Patronage and Preservation.
The prime mover in the Tulsa arts revival, the epicenter of what was recently an abandoned freight yard, now known as the Tulsa Arts District, is the Woody Guthrie Center, operated by the American Song Archive. The iconic folk singer (“This Land is Your Land”) was born in Okemah, 60 miles southwest of Tulsa; the American Song Archive opened the Woody Guthrie Center in 2013.
Bob Dylan, though born in Hibbing, Minnesota, launched his folk career in Greenwich Village as a self-professed “Woody Guthrie jukebox.” The Woody Guthrie Center caught his attention, and the promise of a similar home for Dylan’s work caught the attention of enthusiasts everywhere.
For years rumor circulated among Bob Dylan enthusiasts of a legendary secret archive including notebooks that many hoped would reveal how Dylan wrote some of his most iconic songs. In this case the legend happens to be true.
—Denver Nicks, Time Magazine
The American Song Archive is funded by the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation, which in 2016 acquired over 100,000 artifacts for the University of Tulsa—handwritten lyrics, chord charts, photographs, notebooks, drawings, paintings, address books, presidential correspondence, musical instruments, gold and platinum records, masters and more—that now constitute the Bob Dylan archives. The Bob Dylan Center opened in 2022.
I'm glad that my archives, which have been collected all these years, have finally found a home and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie.
—Bob Dylan
The Kaiser Foundation not only foots the bill for the Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie Centers, and the University of Tulsa’s archives, it also funds the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (TAF).
“The Fellowship attracts artists in all disciplines from around Oklahoma and the nation to work and live here,” according to Forbes: “That last bit is key.”
TAF artists must live in downtown Tulsa if they want to collect on the $150,000 cash award paid over the fellowship’s three award years, and the $12,000 yearly housing stipend, and the $1,200 yearly health stipend, and the $1,200 yearly studio assistant stipend, and the $1,500 relocation stipend, and the fully subsidized studio spaces, and access to shared art-making facilities.
That’s some juicy patronage, and it seems to have worked—“nearly 80% of fellows culminating the program in 2023 […] have stayed in Tulsa.”
Previous TAF recipients include three-term Poet Laureate of the United States Joy Harjo—whose work is currently included along with that of Joyce Carol Oates and dozens of other writers, in a rotating exhibit inside the Woody Guthrie Center—and Sterlin Harjo, the creator of Reservation Dogs, the TV series (2021-2023) set on an Oklahoma Indian reservation.
Martin Scorcese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023), starring Lily Gladstone of Reservation Dogs, is also set in Indian Territory. During production, cast members visited the Outsiders House Museum, one of several sites around the city dedicated to Tulsa’s previous cinematic claim to fame, the 1983 Francis Ford Coppola film based on S.E. Hinton’s coming-of-age novel, The Outsiders. There are plaques commemorating the cult classic on many a sleepy street corner, where scenes were filmed.
Stay gold, Pony Boy.
Carolyn Sickles, executive director of the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, has a more energetic impression of Tulsa street corners, more like my impressions from last year: “On every corner, I feel like I'm encountering an artist in Tulsa who is not just hoping their projects are going happen, they're making them happen,” she told Forbes.
Sickles remembers arriving fresh from New York to attend an “experimental translation performance”—a live translation of a medieval text, in downtown Tulsa: “there were 75 people out here watching this on a Friday night,” the TAF director marvels.
Sickles arrived on the first Friday of the month, when TAF hosts its First Friday Arts Crawl, drawing a (from my perspective) much-needed crowd.
In other cities, there's usually a lot of those niche interests… of the 25 people into that, maybe five of them make it—I've been to enough experimental music performances in New York, you see your cast of characters—but here, people just show up to things […] I was bowled over by the fact that Tulsa was a place for people with the maximum diversity of politics, income, everything you would think of, and they were all here together on a Friday night, doing something very different from their day to day lives and taking immense pride in it.
That wasn’t my experience, exactly, but I came here to support something called Carney Fest, a week before the First Friday Arts Crawl. Even on Studio Row, though, one had the impression that a Tulsa-sized crowd had just “shown up” to Carney Fest; the locals, few though they were, certainly seemed to “take immense pride in it,” as Sickles says of the TAF. More importantly, in the current cultural climate, for someone visiting from Portland, Oregon, or for that matter, from New York City…
People don't always see eye to eye, and when artists are in a space like this, and they're making provocative, challenging work, it's not for an audience that's already bought into your viewpoint […]
Artists are right on the front line [of the culture wars]. You're not hiding behind a bright blue city. The conversations we have here are changing people's minds or making artists think differently about how they're creating.
We have artists that come here who talk about having faith-based practices and they've never felt like they could share that in any other artists community they've been in. It’s not all one sided around here.
Faith-based practices seem to be a theme around here, something I hadn’t noticed last year. I returned to Orpha’s Lounge—where I once spent an evening worshipping at the altar of Otis Redding with a diverse congregation of barflies. This year I was greeted with a stool-side sermon on astral projection—tipsy New Age testimony, I thought. But the preacher soon started quoting the Old Testament, enjoined by what sounded like a dive-bar Bible study that quickly engaged the entire clientele.
Many of the performers at this year’s Carney Fest—all of whom are on the Church Studio roster—likewise espoused some strange religion. None more so than Leon Russell’s former teenage protege, beloved local artist Ann Bell.
Given to unseemly confessions about her former husbands, the humidity of her undergarments, and what happens to a seventy-year-old’s brassiere after an hour of excitable stage preening, Bell is not only a soul singer but an ordained minister. Her specialty seems to be mixing the pulpit and the stage, the sacred with the profane. Her congregation of “Lifers,” some of them wearing Carney face paint—Church fanatics from the beginning—constitute the original cult of Leon Russell and the Tulsa sound.
Much of Bell’s mission is dedicated to remembrances of local patriarchs. Tulsa institutions like Leon Russell, J.J. Cale, Chuck Blackwell, and…
Gary Busey. Bell launched her career touring with the budding actor, who also played drums for Leon Russell.
Like Gary Busey, Ann Bell, Leon Russell, and many of their younger acolytes on the Carney Fest stage, evinced their own brand of niche spirituality, akin to the sermon I witnessed inside of Orpha’s Lounge—something like Pentecostalism harmonized with New Age pantheism. The center of Tulsa’s musical revival, mind you, is a Church.
Grace Methodist Episcopal, founded in 1915, home to one of the city’s first interracial congregations. As I’ve explained elsewhere, this place is thrice-resurrected.
After surviving the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, the building fell into disrepair until it was renovated by Leon Russell in 1972, when it became the home offices of Shelter Records.
After Leon lost interest in the space (turning his attention to the Paradise Studio in his home), the church housed the Indian Council for Drug Abuse and Addiction, which offered counseling services, as well as dancing and acting classes, to future performers like a young Wes Studi (Geronimo, Last of the Mohicans, Dances With Wolves, Reservation Dogs; the first indigenous actor to win a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Oscars in 2019) and Will Sampson (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
Between the Indian Council for Drug Abuse and its current iteration, the Church again fell into disarray. When the current owner Teresa Knox purchased the property in 2016, she bought a boxful of structural hazards that came with animal carcasses and syringes in the basement; the owners refused to let her see the interior, for fear she would refuse the deal. Knox purchased it sight unseen, and re-opened the Church Studio in 2022, at the tail end of a pandemic. That takes its own kind of faith. Mother Teresa renovated the studio with an eye to preserving Leon Russell’s legacy, through artifacts as well as new artists drawing on his legacy. Carney Fest is Knox’s most recent effort in that mission.
In 1972, after playing piano in the elite cadre of Los Angeles studio musicians known as The Wrecking Crew, backing everyone from the Beach Boys to Frank Sinatra, Russell returned to Tulsa to start his own company with producer Denny Cordell, Shelter Records. He nearly killed himself tearing down the old choir loft inside the former G.M.E. Church, converting the preacher’s chambers into an isolation room, and adding the personal touches which today make Church Studio such an eccentric recording facility.
Boasting a world-famous Neve console used by Phil Spector and John Lennon, quirky echo chambers with names like the “Blue-verb” and “Carney Room”, plus sundry other anomalies, the studio is haunted by the echoes of Leon Russell, Tom Petty, J.J. Cale, George Harrison, Jimmy Buffett, Freddie King, Peter Tosh, Wolfman Jack, and many more. Along with the traces of those still living—Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Willie Nelson—and countless other artists who once frequented Russell’s Shelter Records, or record inside the Church Studio today.
The most recent artist to record here was Mike Campbell, who (unfortunately for me, but understandably for him) commandeered three-and-a-half floors of the building to make a music video for his upcoming album, leaving only the lobby, bar, and basement shelves accessible to visitors. Campbell, Tom Petty’s former songwriting partner from the Heartbreakers, was slated to headline this year’s festival with his own band, the Dirty Knobs.
Petty and Campbell signed their first recording contract across the street from the Church Studio, at the Ranch House Restaurant (now the Freeway Cafe), when they were a Gainesville, Florida-based outfit called Mudcrutch. En route to Los Angeles to court the Rolling Stones’ first label, London Records, Petty opted to sign with Leon Russell and his partner Denny Cordell instead, here at the beginning of Route 66.
“He was sold on us, and we were sold on him,” Petty said of Shelter producer Cordell, in Warren Zanes’ Petty: The Biography.
London Records looked cool to us, but the guy over there was an executive. Cordell made records—records that were a big deal. Shelter was this label run by a couple of renegades, artists, and guys who were actually out there finding music and cutting records. We didn’t need to deliberate.
While success came gradually, and the original lineup of Mudcrutch disintegrated, Petty convinced Shelter Records to retain Mike Campbell, as they nurtured what would become one of the most successful acts in pop history, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, in Tulsa and L.A.
Through that whole period, I never ended up writing anything with Leon. Nothing. I just watched these legends come in and out of the picture. They talked to me, told me things. I got to watch them in the recording studios. I don’t think Leon really knew what he wanted to do next, but he was great to me. I learned a lot from him. I saw a lot of things that maybe you shouldn’t do, and some things you should. Cautionary tales were in every other room I passed through.
The formative period Petty speaks of was fifty years ago. In the wake of Tom Petty’s death, Mike Campbell returned to the Church Studio on the semi-centennial of the Heartbreaker’s founding, at Carney Fest in 2024. Before the headliner could begin, he reaped longwinded praises from the president of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, the current mayor of Tulsa, and the former mayor (who graced the audience with a short display of his harmonica skills). An impatient crowd eyed the approaching thunderstorm, grumbling that the pomp and circumstance might yield to music. As Campbell finally accepted the mike, a finger of lightning rent the Oklahoma skies, and Carney Fest 2024 came to a woefully premature end.
The crowd was disappointed, but not devastated; fatalistic. After all, “here, people just show up to things.”
As an a priori encore, Mr. Campbell’s first and last words of the evening:
Being here, and being treated this way just touches my heart. I love you all very much, and when we come back out we’re going to make it worth your while. And it did, for me and Tom, and Denny Cordell, it did start right there at that Church.
But uh, we’ll explore that later…
I suggest you do.
"Who is Leon Russel? Leon Russell Found Shelter: Learn about the artist who inspired a generation." (thechurchstudio.com)
“Tom Petty’s Journey at the Church Studio.” (thechurchstudio.com)
“Church Studio: Testimony and Confession, The colorful history of Leon Russell and Teresa Knox’s Tulsa Sanctuary,” The Third Ear.