Neighbor Featured Artist #16: Dane Hinkle

Musician Finds Ending and Beginning in Greeneville

We’ve had occasion, on previous visits to this page, to talk about the arts most often associated with the mountain South. While furniture making, pottery, and quilting all combine practical need with beauty, the Appalachian art that most directly reveals the soul is music. No color or shade of human emotion is beyond the range of musical expression. Joy and sorrow, love and hate, anger, despair, and exhilaration - all are the feelings carried forth in words and music. The intensity of these feelings is part of the unique signature of music in the mountains. The folks who make such music most often sharpen and polish their talent on countless porches, church gatherings, camp sites, and bonfires throughout Appalachia. But the genuineness and appeal of that music is bound by no feature of geography.
Since coming to Greeneville, it has been my privilege and pleasure to get to know Dane Hinkle, and to be a witness to the emergence of an artist. Dane has roots in Greene County that are both deep and wide reaching. His father, Charles Hinkle, is retired from the Greeneville Police Department, and has been a touchstone for his son in more ways than one. Dane Hinkle was born in San Francisco but raised in Greene County from an early age. Rather than following his father into law enforcement, he became a firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service, battling the dangerous and unpredictable blazes that plague the American West. Eventually, Dane worked his way into the elite Chena Hot-Shot Crew, a team of international firefighters, and also served with the Alaska Smoke Jumpers, who parachute into remote areas to do their work. At first, the danger was part of the job’s intoxicating appeal. Dane notes that the combination of adrenaline and sleep deprivation produced experiences of heightened sensation and awareness. Colors were more intense, and all senses were sharpened. “It was an interesting feeling,” he says. “During training I learned to call it ‘the black door’.” One close call that occurred while in that state proved to be the one that erased “all the fun” from firefighting. Dane ran out of a flare-up but has no memory of how he ended up where he was found. “I just know the helicopter pilot told me that he circled around when he saw us but that I was a mile away from my first location when he picked me up.”Some of Dane’s fellow firefighters weren’t so lucky. It’s little wonder that he returned to Greeneville in need of healing. One of the places he found it was in music and art.
“There’s a parallel between opening up your creative self and those ‘black door’ moments,” says Dane. “When I realized that, it made it easier to get comfortable with the flashes of inspiration I’d get.” Noting that his father had channelled some of his police career stress into oil painting, Dane took up the brushes and discovered that he had, in fact, inherited some of his father’s talent. from his international experience, he produced miniature stone sculptures reminiscent of Japanese netsuke from the local fossiliferous limestone. He also found himself beginning to write songs. Two different but related traditions influenced Dane’s first efforts, which, along with gallery director James-Ben Stockton, I was fortunate enough to hear. One influence was the combination of music and social change in the 1960’s, especially Bob Dylan and the Beatles. “There was a little something about Bob Dylan. There was electricity in the air during his time,” says Dane. Inspiration also came from the folk music/storytelling tradition of Appalachia. Dane, who worked on the crew invloved in the 2003-2004 renovation of the Andrew Johnson Homestead, found out that Johnson’s often dirt-poor constituents were sometimes called “mudsills”. This touched a chord in his heart. “I’m trying to reinvent some music where the lyrics have deep meaning. My songs are sometimes emotional and sometimes cynical but the music itself is always easy to listen to. It comes from the elements of real life.” This approach has generated songs with titles like “Softly in Time”, “Cotton Candy Sunset”, and “Ashes on Molly’s Grave”. Dane thinks of his style as the offspring of folk music and the blues.
“Dane is a Renaissance man,” says gallery director James-Ben Stockton. “When we first go to know him, we were delighted and impressed with his visual art, his paintings and sculptures. But quite often, he’d drop by in the late afternoon or on the weekend to play and sing for us a song he was working on. For someone who appreciates art enough to work with it professionally, it was a true privilege to observe and participate in art ‘in the making’.” For Dane, the nurturing of his gifts has been a layered process. “I started on the harmonica first,” he says. “When I first sat down with a guitar, I probably knew three chords but I built from that.” His first recordings were mostly vocals and guitar, done on borrowed equipment. Then he bought the elements of a digital recording studio, which enabled him to add in bass and harmonica for a richer sound. “I spent the better part of a year learning how to use the studio - I think I read the manual for three days before I even turned it on.” At the same time, he has expanded his live performances to include regular Thursday night appearances at the General Morgan Inn from 6 to 8:30 in the evenings. “Doing both, making my own recordings and continuing to perform live, has kind of nudged me in the direction I’d like to go, which means putting a band together. My studio lets me layer several tracks together where I play all the instruments. To do that on stage means you need more musicians.” This ongoing creative process continues to provide healing for that bruised and battered man who left a firefighting career to come home. “Now I’m working on combining the music with spending time outdoors, staying active to build up my energy and find new sources of inspiration. It’s like doing and thinking at the same time helps you be better at both. James-Ben explained to me that it was like working an experience out through your body and then expressing it by letting it come out through your hands. A lot has happened since I came home. I guess you could say that Greeneville is both a launching pad and a landing strip at the same time.”
Music is one of the hardest art forms to describe in words. The best way to experience Dane Hinkle’s music is to hear it. For live performances, look for him each Thursday evening at the General Morgan Inn. Be sure to check out his web site, www.mudsilldane.com. Dane’s music is available from over 30 sites and has been downloaded from as far away as Europe. To find both his CD’s and his paintings and sculptures, they are available locally at James-Ben: Studio and Gallery Art Center, which is extremely proud, in the case of Dane Hinkle, Artist, to have been present “at the beginning.”