Heart of the Country is a new work by Josh Dodds that blends storytelling, soap opera and campfire songs to chart a path from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s impoverished childhood in the Texas Hill Country to the lives of those riding the blinds of history.

Re-interpreting Karen Finley and Jerry Hunt’s proposal for a television opera about Johnson’s life, Heart of the County is less a biography of Johnson than a counter-mythology that plays on the gaps and imaginative leaps that make up the cultural consciousness of a political figure and their times. Gathered around the fire, campers share tall tales and songs about Johnson and the people who met him, swapping coins with voices etched into QR codes on the back.

If coins are a re-enactment of sovereign power, Heart of the Country explores how they can be reconfigured to affirm and extend our indebtedness to one another and how speculation can contribute to a process of reimagining value. Around the campfire, the currency of stories, songs and ad hoc coins starts to dismantle the absolute value of the minted coin and its economic certainties and opens onto a vision of democratic participation where value is negotiated and debt is fugitive.