When Roger Miller sings of smoking found stogies in the 1965 wayfarer ballad, “King of the Road,” his baritone swagger unapologetically weds the romantic liberties of Jeffersonian democracy with the providential urban blessings that would soon come to be known as ground score.

Coined by Deadheads who combed through trampled fields and parking lots after Grateful Dead concerts in search of left-behind drugs, food, money, and other treasures, the term “ground score” now refers to any trinket or token of value that one stumbles upon. For drifters in particular, such as the troubadour of King of the Road, ground scores comprise an object-based underground currency, replacing the spirit of Keynesian economics with the ragtag wonders of a Kurt Schwitters assemblage.

Drifters – and the drift itself – are at the heart of Bill Daniel’s film- and photo-based installations. The hobos and railriders who make frequent appearances in the artist’s work are the most literal drifters of the lot, but a closer inspection reveals that Daniel’s subjects are all united by their slippery conditions of transience.

The early punk rockers who raucously combusted in Texas barrooms during Daniel’s Austin years emerge in his gritty photographs as exiles of Reagan’s camera-ready America, crashing on floors and living out of vans as they crossed the nation with an almost evangelical subversive fervor. Years later, while living in San Francisco’s Mission District, Daniel found kindred spirits in the area’s now-legendary graffiti and street art culture. In addition to their mark-making prowess, artists like Ruby Neri and Barry McGee worked under the principle of roving discretion, their work demanding high levels of elusion and mobility.

The vagabond spirit of Roger Miller’s nomadic king of the road whistles through Daniel’s densely poetic studies of tramps and hobo graffiti artists, saluting their restless independence when Miller sings, “Third boxcar, midnight train / Destination: Bangor, Maine / Old worn out suits and shoes / I don’t pay no union dues.” Daniel hopped his first train in 1987, and spent 16 years riding and working on his visceral and compelling “hobohemia” projects: the video campfire installation, The Girl on the Train in the Moon, and the acclaimed experimental documentary, Who is Bozo Texino?

More recently, Daniel has turned to the transitional landscapes of Gulf Coast cataclysm, where the everyday trappings of home, history, and community were scattered across the land like so much absurdly tragic ground score. Those who lived on the sites of these rubblefields involuntarily assumed the roles of casualty drifters, shuffled bureaucratically into tent cities, makeshift trailers, and overcrowded barges.
The interstitial existences of Daniel’s subjects are reflected in the artist’s own hybrid forms, which similarly live and congregate in ever-mutable states of transition. Gallery exhibitions typically find his fiber prints nailed to the wall, along with Xeroxed flyers, friends’ artworks, and found objects and ground scores from his exhaustive journeys through America’s vernacular underground.

Perpetually on tour, Daniel screens his films and mounts mobile art installations around the country for the better part of each year. His 2006 itinerary, for example, involved more than 75 public presentations at diverse venues, including Bard College; the Surly Girl Saloon; New York’s Anthology Film Archives; the End of the Line Café; Western Ontario University; Asheville Pizza and Brewery; and the acclaimed Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center.

Part tour bus, part sailboat, part movie theater, and part crash pad, Daniel’s wondrous Sailvan serves as the artist’s ultimate paean to wayfaring romanticism. To facilitate his itinerant lifestyle, Daniel converted his 1965 Chevy van into a gaff-rigged schooner that doubles as his projection screen. Pulling up to the site of his scheduled event, the artist hoists three sails from the roof of the van, transforming the hulking vehicle (which Daniel powers with veggie oil) into a fantastic vision of escape and independence. After nightfall, he projects his videos onto the white sails, creating a sculptural cinema in the public sphere. When the show is over, the Sailvan is returned to its unassuming van formation, and Daniel swings onto the highway that leads to his next gig.

“It’s lovely to live on a raft,” young Huck observes in Mark Twain’s Great American Novel. “Other places seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” This raft, which Huck and Jim discover while scrounging the riverbanks for wood and food, allows the two outsiders to experience freedom by granting them access to the currents of the Mississippi River. It is only in that transitional space that the runaways are able to experience the profound sensation of autonomy.

Roger Miller’s vocal swagger echoes this liberating truth when he boasts, “I know every engineer on every train / All of their children, and all of their names / And every handout in every town / And every lock that ain’t locked / When no one’s around.”

Men of means by no means, Bill Daniel and the fringe-dwelling subjects of his uniquely American artworks find their homes in the drifting locomotion of cultural tributaries, political faultlines, and artistic alleyways. Daniel’s impassioned chronicles and reticulated sketches of these transient zones are offered here as narrative fragments and windblown documents from the field.

Ground scores, by definition, are chance occurrences that always benefit the recipient; in his paper visions and celluloid dreams, Daniel opens his pouch of accumulated treasures from the past 25 years, offering viewers the opportunity to chance upon their scuffed, incalculable value for themselves.

Ground Score is currently on view at Get This! Gallery through Oct. 31.