My uncle once surprised me by telling me that farmers don't grow crops. "Farmers grow soil," he explained. "Soil grows crops." I'm three generations away from my own family's subsistence farming, and so the idea was news to me. But I began to see in my uncle's point of view the important theme of contributing.  By my uncle's standard—and by Wendell's—any farmer who thinks of growing crops as simply taking from the soil will have nothing but dust before long. Cultivating soil is an act of continual giving. As long as we want to eat, we have to give good care and material...

  When I visited the Berrys at their farm in 2012, I thought I had come prepared for everything. I had duplicate copies of the poems that Wendell had agreed to read. I had two different audio recording devices in case one failed. But after reading “A gracious Sabbath stood here while they stood…,” Wendell caught me off guard. “How are they going to know who they are?” he asked, referring to the “they” mentioned in the first line and throughout the poem he had just read. I shrugged. I hadn’t ever paid attention to that detail; I just loved...

The following is a transcription of an interview with Eric Bibb about his participation in Celebrating Wendell Berry in Music.  How about your choices regarding instrumentation and players for the album—what were you thinking there? ERIC: My thoughts from the beginning were that this was about getting your fingernails into the soil, and that it had to reflect a rural sensibility. The instruments I chose—like guitar, banjo, mandolin, dobro—are all connected to folk music, the stuff that you could find on somebody’s back porch when neighbors are sitting around. The idea of neighbors seems really prevalent in Wendell’s writing, and so the...