When I wasn't going to bluegrass festivals, on the weekends, I was going to folk art shows.

I went to Howard Finster Day, in Summerville, and visited Paradise Garden, I went to Folk Fest, in the North Atlanta Trade Center, where I saw Woodie Long and Dot, and I went to a show in the City Hall Annex, held as part of the Cultural Olympics, called Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South.

This was just like the Passionate Visions of the American South show the New Orleans Museum of Art mounted, except it excluded white folk artists.

Try to imagine a folk art show, held in connection with the Olympics, that excluded black folk artists.

I liked all the folk artists in the show.

I liked the idea that folk art was getting a spotlight on it, in connection with the Olympics.

The folk artists themselves don't distinguish between white folk artists and black folk artists. Indeed, they don't distinguish between folk artists and artists.

As Howard Finster said, about the label outsider,

As far as I'm concerned, ther ain't no outsiders of anything. If you're an artist, you're an artist. If you're a mechanic, you're a mechanic. If you're a farmer, you're a farmer. Ain't no outsider farmers, ain't no outsider mechanics. That's just something that someone's got up to class things. I ignore it.

The someone who gets up something to class things has an axe to grind. The dealers, collectors, critics, and patrons who publish a coffeetable book like Souls Grown Deep: African-American Vernacular Art of the South have an axe to grind.

It's off-putting, to me.

It's, well, racist.

I felt like there was a movement afoot to appropriate, or co-opt folk art for black folk artists, as if poor white trash folk artists weren't authentic folk artists because they were white. And had what--white privilege? Making paintings out of roots and mud and dogshit? Did the dogshit distinguish between white and black folk artists?

A cigar don't have a thing to say about who smokes it.

When a fiddle player steals another fiddle player's licks, someone who recognizes the theft will say, "There ain't no shit like dogshit."

I started calling myself a vernacular writer.

I am waiting for someone to call black street poets vernacular writers, as if only black street poets are authentic, and a white person who writes in the vernacular is an impostor, who wants to be black, but can't, because he is the wrong color. He's a copycat, a johnny-come-lately, a fake. To be a real vernacular writer you have to be black.

Well, I have the business card.

I have the web site.

I've been Jack Saunders, Vernacular Writer, since 1996, and was a vernacular writer before that, I just didn't call myself one yet.

I will thank the Souls Grown Deep show for showing me that.

Thank you, Jane Fonda, for raising my consciousness.

I am self-taught, I write in the vernacular, I have been excluded by the establishment as unschooled, crude, unpolished, raw, one grant applicant pre-screener judged a writing sample I sent as 0, on a scale of 1-10.

If there has ever been an outsider in American letters it is I.

If I finish writing Underground Writer Makes Good I will have written 275 books without having one published by New York or reviewed in a national publication or sold in a bookstore in the mall or taught in a university writing class.

Sitting there at a home-made card table making a spectacle of myself.

Bobby Bradford said, "If a man came in here carrying a Coke bottle, I wouldn't laugh until I heard him play it."

He didn't say if a black man came in.

He would give the man with the Coke bottle the blindfold test.