Rolling north out of Denver I knew that I had not left busking behind. For someone whose future seemed destined to be under the fluorescent lights of classrooms or of the offices of some other public heirarchy, busking did combine the two occupational conditions that both teachers and office workers most crave:

I was my own boss, and I worked outdoors.

In Bismarck, North Dakota, VISTA had assigned me to the planning department of an inter-tribal agency, a job that can be summed up in a single phrase: preparing proposals for grants. Since community colleges on Indian reservations were a brand new concept in 1978, and since North Dakota had five, my task was to look for all kinds of grant programs: federal, state, and foundation; for buildings and grounds, teachers and equipment, arts and culture; large and small, long- and short-term.

Twenty years later I travelled through Bismarck and could only wish that the cafes with outdoor tables had been there during the Carter years. As it was, nothing about the state capitol, least of all the prolonged winters, invited busking during my residency. And as busy as I was, that was a moot point.

However, my first daily, time-consuming task was to monitor the Federal Register for any and all grants for which the United Tribes of North Dakota might qualify. While on the lookout for those few, I saw them all--including an offering of the National Endowment for the Humanities called Youthgrants.

By this time I knew that any grant takes months to process, and no VISTA volunteer needed any reminder that our gigs were up in one year. In the parlance of my new profession, we kept our resumes current. With an assignment ending in November and hopes of gaining a graduate assistantship that wouldn't begin until August, I would have at least eight months to bridge. My attempt to prepare for the crossing was a 26-page proposal addressed to NEH titled Minstrel in the Streets.

The overall plan was to busk cities of the Southwest through the winter and then land in South Dakota where I would write a book about the experience, all before the start of SDSU's fall semester. Indeed, the document still survives in dog-eared, discolored fashion along with my graduate thesis and other papers devoted to 19th and early-20th Century Americana.

As happens with most anyone in or beyond middle-age reviewing his or her own youthful creations, I flinch, cringe, and sometimes laugh aloud at the naive supplication--"(I) will take inexpensive lodgings...and eat in inexpensive restaurants"--and high-flown idealism, as in the proposal's subtitle: "A Sociological and Philosophical Probe of Public versus Commercial Art and Entertainment in America Today." Whew!

Must say, though, that this fellow who today seems like another person had his moments. For a sample, here's a section titled "Significance," which owes much to The Dairy of Samuel Pepys 1660-1669:

The history of street music may be best appreciated when taken in context with the history of an old English instrument called the recorder. While it is believed to have originated as early as the 12th Century, it did not become prominent until much later when the small children of poor families in the quickly over-populated city of London took them into the streets with cups. Busking, as the practice was called, may therefore be aptly considered the herald of urban society, and thus was street-music also born into the world.

When the recorder's popularity among Baroque composers was overcome by a more versatile and audible flute developed in Germany in the early 18th Century, it nevertheless remained popular in the streets. Street music and the recorder, moreover, were quick to merge and emerge, as evidenced in the writings of Charles Dickens, in their most celebrated context of Christmas carolling, perhaps the oldest surviving tradition of public art and entertainment.

In recent decades and throughout the remaining fifty weeks of the year, however. the ever increasing and apparently inescapable traffic and clamor and danger of city streets has rendered the street musician as yet one more endangered species.

In light of the above, the life of street music may be considered an environmental concern, for public art and entertainment may be considered as a natural expression of, by, and for the people...

If I may interrupt my younger, Lincoln-impersonator self, not until years later in the middle of a Kurt Vonnegut novel did I first see the expression, "canary in a coalmine." May not have made a difference to NEH, but I have have since used the metaphor with some success in appeals to town councils, chambers of commerce, letters to editors, and opinion page columns to establish street-music as an environmental indicator of the quality of life in the marketplace.

...Street music, one may then conclude, could be vital to America's effort and will to achieve the regeneration (rebirth, if you will) of its cities.

Some of which may be overstated, and some of which may be understated. A grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities will allow the project director to probe these theories, in proof or disproof, and will provide him with the time necessary to prepare his findings for publication.

For all of that, the "project director," that young fellow who no longer seems like someone else now that this older fellow wends the way through the passive verbs and stilted phrases of grant-writingese to a message that could well serve as the preface of this work 26 years later... For all of that, my request from NEH to help me establish "the relationship of street music to the vitality of American streets" was $2,000.

According to the "application face sheet," I proposed to add $840 to the budget, the estimated tips I would gain on the streets of Santa Fe, Tuscon, San Antonio, Austin, New Orleans, and wherever any geographic tips from savvy buskers in those towns might lead me. If $70 per week for 12 weeks appeared low, anything more than that would allow me to prolong the tour, perhaps allow me to take a bus by night rather than hitchhike by day--or "arrange rides via college and university ride boards"--from one town to the next.

Looking back on it, such provisions and such low numbers--even when adjusted for inflation--are likely why I never heard from the NEH. They simply didn't believe that I was serious. Fortunately, the grants I prepared for United Tribes had more success, and when I signed on to work in North Dakota for a second year, I pretty much forgot that I ever made the Youthgrant application...

Until 1989. That was when an early, landmark battle in America's now-raging "Culture Wars" erupted over an exhibit of the work of photographer Andres Serrano, subsidized in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. For days the story was on the front pages of newspapers, and for weeks the pros and cons of censorship and the meaning of the First Amendment were debated in op-ed columns and letters to the editor. At issue was one photo of a crucifix submerged in a jar of urine, titled "Piss Christ."

Everyone I knew and anyone I read or heard was quite vocal with opinions pro, con, and mixed, but it was a rare issue on which I kept my mouth shut. The only detail that jumped out at me was the amount of the NEA grant, and my only reaction was in the irony of a score I'd rather not keep:

So what if this project is delayed a couple decades? I have worked outdoors. I have been my own boss. No point in being bitter now, is there?