The River in Sound & Image
A collection of video and audio recordings capturing life along America’s waterways. Watch, listen, and explore the voices, landscapes, and histories that shape river communities. Browse the latest from our archives—moments of conversation, soundscapes of river life, and stories told in the voices of those who live them.
Recent Video
Stories from the river in moving pictures
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A Race Against Time
While Dotty gets a full-body exfoliation (goodbye, rotten wood), the rest of us are practicing the fine art of pretending everything is fine. Twelve days left. No big deal. Plenty of time to rebuild, rewire, reimagine, and lose the last remaining shreds of sanity. Everything is definitely under control. It’s fine. It’s fine.
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7 Days
Cue the long shot, the slow pan with the droning riser – the part where everything hangs in the balance.
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The Sound of Splintering Hope
The crunch you’re hearing? That’s the sound of optimism splintering. Turns out the motor was attached mostly by friendship and damp wishes. We’ve got 29 days to fix this before the expedition launches. Tools are flying. Spirits are… wobbly.
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Wires, switches, and the magic in between
Electrical pleasures. There’s something satisfying about making sparks flow the right direction. Cockpit panels cut and painted, switches installed, plugs soldered, lights tested. We even got our running lights lit so we can legally (and safely) be dumb enough to float after dark. Every switch was a chance to dream—Mood Stabilizer, Rat Deter, Eel Mode.…
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We just lit the fuse.
It’s getting real. We just launched our spring Kickstarter. We need you on board. The arts are under attack, and projects like ours—focused on memory, justice, and stories from the margins—are in the crosshairs. Grants we’ve counted on for years have vanished. So now we’re turning to our community. To you. Over time, I’ve gotten…
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Sometimes you open a hatch and find a whole civilization.
This week’s adventure started with one of those innocent “hey, let’s check that” moments. We opened the forward locker where we store life vests—and accidentally disturbed a long-standing treaty with several insect nations. We didn’t set out to launch an eviction, but when the sawdust starts falling and the structural integrity looks questionable, it’s time…
Recent Audio
Recordings and soundscapes from the river’s edge
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Stay A Little Longer
On warm nights drifting down the river, we’d often sit on the deck with the lanterns lit low, a transistor radio tucked in the corner, and a scratchy country tune bouncing off the water. Bob Wills. Spade Cooley. Hank Penny. We’ve gathered some of those sounds for you—audio recordings from the shantyboat, including “Songs Drifting…
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Songs Drifting From a Shantyboat – a Playlist
Music drifts across the water on warm summer evenings, mingling with the lapping of waves and the hum of distant voices. These songs echo the slow rhythms of river life—familiar tunes carried along the current, playing from a shantyboat radio or a dockside porch.
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That Was Weird: Rediscovering The River
Join Archives & Collections Catalyst, Marla Novo, and Abbott Square Music Coordinator, Gabriel Kittle-Cervine, for ‘That Was Weird: Stories from Santa Cruz’, a fresh take on Santa Cruz History with the MAH’s first ever podcast. This month, we sat down with Wes Modes, a local artist, activist, and community member with a great care and…
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The Tillers – Shanty Boat at Payne Hollow Kentucky
By and by, I’ll be coming up on Payne Hollow, the holler where Anna and Harlan Hubbard settled out after 5 years spent floating their shantyboat down the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers in the 1950s. I’ve heard great things from my shantyboat friend Faith about Paul who was the Hubbard’s young friend and is…
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WAMC Albany: Searching For Hudson River Stories On A Shanty Boat
WAMC Public RadioBy Lucas Willard Listen Now to the WAMC Public Radio story: A recreated mid-century shanty boat is traveling down the Hudson River in search of stories. “A Secret History of American River People” is a project by a California-based artist Wes Modes. Modes took WAMC’s Southern Adirondack Bureau Chief Lucas Willard…
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BBC Slow Radio – Life on a shanty boat
A 20-minute watery odyssey – idling down the Tennessee River with the best thunderstorm in a tin shack you are ever going to hear… and some frogs…
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BBC Outlook – Building my own ‘shanty boat’
Wes Modes has spent the last few summers sailing along the great rivers of north America, collecting stories from the people who live on their banks. Wes travels in his homemade houseboat – or shanty boat – called Dotty.
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BBC Between The Ears – The Shanty Boat
In a rich tapestry of watery atmosphere, frustration, intimacy, fear and pleasure, we hear a slipping, sliding adventure, where the smell of pancakes, the slap of water and the smoke of cigars wafts over the waters of Americas great rivers.
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Looking Back at the War Against the Dakota People in Minnesota
I was reminded of these interviews recently, and how little I know when I heard a radio story about the U.S.-Dakota War.The conflict engulfed the very area in which I interviewed the Dakota men. I hadn’t asked Arthur or Art directly about the conflict, though we alluded to it when we talked about the Ft. Snelling Indian concentration…
Oral History Archive
Want to go deeper? Explore hundreds of hours of recorded interviews, featuring voices from river communities.