Metarock: Talking About Talking About Music (1): The First Salvo

The Dean of American Rock Criticism

"Unless you are very rich and very freaky, your relationship to rock is nothing like mine. By profession, I am surfeited with records and live music. Virtually every rock LP produced in this country is mailed to me automatically, and I'm asked to go to more concerts than I can bear. I own about 90 percent of the worthwhile rock albums released since the start of the Beatles era, and occasionally I play every one of them, although I haven't heard half the LP's in my collection in six months. All this has a double-edged effect. On the one hand, I am impatient with music that is derivative and see through cheap gimmicks easily. On the other, I can afford to revel in marginal differentiation, delighting in odd and minor talents that might not be worth the money of someone who has to pay for his music."

-Robert Christgau, "Consumer Guide #1," Village Voice, July 10, 1969

One of the priorities Lin and I had when we started this blog was to have a conversation about how much the way we consume music has changed since we both started becoming "music" people in the late 1990s. I'll let Lin speak for himself, but my strongest memories of that initial, exploratory phase almost always involved a local record store (often visited in lieu of attending my afternoon classes) and an old Sony boombox, the pride of my teenage years. I can remember playing my Replacements records at top volume before my father got home from work, sitting on the bed and reading the liner notes and memorizing biographical details about Bob, Paul, Chris, and little Tommy that no one would ever ask me about. I remember listening to Wilco's Summerteeth, turning the volume up and down while my father mowed the lawn, moving back and forth from my window to the driveway. I remember convincing my mother to let me sign up for the BMG service that sent you 10 free CDs if you payed full retail price on two more (and back in those days, full retail price was $18 or more--another reason no one I knew ever shopped at Sam Goody in the mall).

But mostly, I remember when I had no more CDs than would fit in a single copier paper box. They had personalities, it seemed--I knew where the scratches were, and which jewel cases had cracked fronts or broken tines in the little circle that secured the disc. I poured over every detail of every liner insert--no matter how little information there was to find. I had a clear sense of the value of my music back in those days. I knew what the investment meant to me, both in money and in time digging through the stacks. I remember the sheer joy of finding something I had read about at the library, or had been mentioned on one of my music listservs. Months of looking, of slipping away from my parents on vacations to stick my head into thrift stores and little music stores, checking the new arrivals racks at the used store back in La Crosse every week. When I found Camper Van Beethoven's Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart that afternoon in the spring on 1999, it made my week. And I didn't even know what it was going to sound like.

Now, after Lin's visit last week, I have 36,316 songs in my iTunes library. It's about 1800 separate "albums," but would take 1633 blank CD-Rs to contain its epic grandness. And Lin's collection is at least 25% bigger (a fact I chalk up solely to his collection of Orthodox church singing, and that year I was in Nigeria without internet access). Christgau's collection circa 1969 was probably bigger, but mine is almost certainly broader (this was, I'm reasonably sure, before he discovered Papa Wemba and Franco and became America's greatest proponent of African pop music), containing all manner of music from the rock "canon," but also nearly complete discographies for many of the major artists of the rock and roll era and a staggering collection of blues, classic country, and soul box sets. When music became so easy for me to get, my response (as, I suspect was Christgau's) was to become nonsensically cosmopolitan in my tastes. While it's easy enough for me to summarize my basic preferences and my favorite musical themes (I'm going to forgo the word "genre" here, for reasons that will soon become apparent), my collection is probably more diverse that 95% of the people in this country who consider themselves music fans. That said, there are still entire styles of music that are basically unrepresented (ambient and all the various forms of electronica, classical), which means occasionally I'm accused of parochial tastes by people in casual conversations about music. The notion that a man who owns the Complete Hank Williams Collection, a half dozen Fela Kuti records, everything Elton John recorded between 1970 and 1976, the complete Mississippi Sheiks' recorded works, two Conway Twitty albums, four Ice Cube platters and a disc of early M.I.A. & Diplo mixes is a little crazy, but there it is anyway.

Really, I find it all a little alienating. It sounds ungrateful, but there are days I miss being able to identify every CD I own by comparing the pattern of scratches on the underside. It's harder to forge the strong emotional connections I had with the records I listened to three times a day for six months in 1996 when I feel compelled to check out some of my new haul everyday. I rarely get through complete albums anymore--and frankly, as much as I really like pre-war black string band music, I don't think I'll every play the entire four and a half hour Mississippi Sheiks playlist in a single sitting. The irony is that this is all happening just as my life is changing more generally, in a way that makes my vastly expanded musical knowledge less and less relevant to my identity in the minds of most of my acquaintances.

When I was in college, I probably never owned more than 350 albums, but music was a constant part of my everyday self. I deejayed dance parties and on the college radio station, and always insisted on curating the music at dorm room gatherings, even when they consisted on nothing more that six people crammed onto a futon staring down at a case of warm Coors Light. The songs I played when I was with my friends, or when I was at parties, were more than just the songs I liked--they were an attempt to signal what I was all about (and perhaps, get laid in the process). When music is such an investment, as it was for me on my college budget, you don't invest flippantly in the new thing, no matter how big it's getting. You build a collection from the bottom up, with a limited selection that you're sure you'll continue to like (or, as sure as you can be at 20) and that will tell the appropriate story about who you are. But now, just when I have the ability to wow the masses with a truly diverse, exotic, and free-wheeling collection that fits in my pocket, I don't have any more parties to go to. None of the other grad students in my program have expressed any real interest in pop music in the broader sense--most conversations I've had about music bog down in the first two minutes. Someone will tell me their favorite band, and I'll start talking about my new reggae compilation, and then they'll politely excuse themselves. What people want to know about me--as a scholar, as a teacher, as a married guy in his late 20s--has very little to do with my music taste. The only difference between me and the rest of the iPodded masses is the size of my headphones (and no, that's not a metaphor for anything).

So ultimately, this is my introduction to a new line of inquiry we'll be undertaking here at She's Making Whoopee in Hell Tonight--given the inordinate amount of music we all have, and given that this makes us not in the least cool, and furthermore, given that we must have acquired it because we want to listen to it, who do we turn all those files into something accessible, something useful? How do we make the music work for us?

The first tentative steps in this direction will probably focus on how we classify and sort our music, starting with a discussion of "genre." Anyone who's had the ill-fortune to import a record into iTunes knows that the Gracenote database they use to tag the information onto the songs uses an unwieldy, dense tangle of genre nomenclature--a taxonomy rooted in neither how we listen to music nor how artists make it. How can we classify our music? Is it worth trying, and if so, what's the payoff (hint: for me, it's having a way to divide up my music into workable chunks I can listen to on shuffle, the way that I used to listen to the radio. This is how I'm forced to take on all that new music in manageable, well-programmed chunks)? We'll almost certainly be looking at the academic literature on music genre taxonomies going on in various information systems journals (because that's what we do). Stay tuned.

Franco et le T.P.O.K. Jazz - Liberté
The Mississippi Sheiks - Bootlegger's Blues
The Mississippi Sheiks - Sittin' On Top of the World
Camper Van Beethoven - Waka
Camper Van Beethoven - Eye of Fatima (pt. 1)

Oh, and for the dozen or fewer of you who care, Reading Rock: Lost Highway will be back with a vengeance between now and Tuesday, with a new post and those promised .zip files. Holler.

Posted by Brandon

Reading Rock: Lost Highway (6), Bobby "Blue" Bland

Growing up in La Crosse, Wisconsin, there weren't many opportunities for "real" live music. There were the bars, and a few local (mostly cover) bands. My sister was in the high school choir, for what it was worth, and during my middle school years, a gothic/electronica club opened downtown that brought in a band every now and again. The main sources of professional live music were the universities (UW-La Crosse and Viterbo) and the civic center. As was to be expected, the universities tended towards upper-middlebrow culture--jazz, polite folk, anything with harps. The civic center was where the action was.

In his contribution to the 33 1/3 series (on the Replacements' Let it Be), Colin Meloy (of the Decemberists), who grew up around Helena, Montana, speaks of a similar scenario. While in middle school, he finds himself caught between two worlds--he watches "120 Minutes" and clips concert announcements from the New York Times for Depeche Mode and Echo & the Bunnymen, but when presented with the opportunity, he snaps up concert tickets to a Nylons show, starved for live music. He hates it, but is strangely fascinated by the performance--particularly the sexuality, and the effect it has on a female classmate. From what I can make of it, it's like a second-hand rock experience for Meloy--even if the Nylons are terrible, derivative schlock, seeing their performance crystallizes the power music has for him. If these guys can get the girls screaming, what might Westerberg be capable of?

For me, there were two similar shows, one well attended (like Meloy's) by my school cohort and the focus of youth culture in my town for some weeks, and the other largely unnoticed by my peers. In 1998, I saw Aerosmith live in concert (I still have the tee-shirt--find me on the right day and I'll flash it to you). While, like many a weakly-mustachioed boy, I was a fan of classic rock, this was the Armageddon-soundtrack, Diane Warren-singing Aerosmith. They played the old hits, but the girls, well, they didn't want to miss a thing, and Messers Perry and Tyler ensured them they wouldn't. It was a rote performance--a small scale version of rock stardom for the small stage of a small town. And when they packed up and left, we all sat around in first period algebra and spoke of having our worlds rocked--the way the bass felt in our bodies, the cheap beer that had been spilled all over us, the crowd-surfing (!?!). It was all a lot for La Crosse. But even then, I think I realized it was (as would have any other of the classic rock bands that made up most of my daily rotation those days) a simulacra of what I was really looking and hoping for, a shadow of rock, but not the thing itself.

The better show was the one I saw a year earlier at the same civic center. The B.B. King Big Band and Review was nothing I expected from the blues (a genre I knew exclusively from CDs), although as I've gotten older, I've realized just how typical of the modern blues it is. I sat in the 5th row, surrounded by baby boomers--the youngest non-chaperoned person in my line of sight. Much like the Bobby "Blue" Bland gig described by Guralnick, the show opened with extended vamping by the horn-laden "Big Band," purveyors of a half-jazz/half-jump blues sound that, while pleasant, wasn't anything special. It was bland, generic blues for almost an hour before King came on stage. While it was one helluva show-business entrance, the 45 minute set-as-payoff was both moving and disappointing at once. B.B. is a master showman, and while his singing is not what it was in the mid-1970s, his guitar style has held up reasonably well, and he played those single notes with impeccable phrasing and smooth interaction with his band. But even then (and I'm not shitting you--I did actually think this, or at least as reasonably inarticulate version of this, at the time), I think I realized just how far this music was from the stuff I'd fallen in love with on record. And I still loved it. But for the B.B. King Big Band and Revue, the music had become something different--something that could work for mid-sized audiences in Wisconsin.


This was a transition that, by the mid-1970s, Bobby "Blue" Bland was in the midst of making, and the growing pains were evident. Guralnick clearly thinks the world of Bland and his music (the only other places in the book where his fandom oozes through the cracks are when he talks about Charlie Rich and James Talley), and the man he portrays is having a hard time with the evolution. His band is in flux, he's still playing venues smaller than his stature merited, and his style of music has gone out of fashion (again? The point of course, being that his career has spanned enough eras that this wasn't the first time). His early tracks (which, I should point out, I had never heard before reading this book for the first time several years ago) are a revelation--tough, muscular guitar playing with tight horns--and of course, that voice. It wouldn't be Guralnick if it wasn't transitional music--sort of halfway between Wynonie Harris and Muddy Waters, a non-gospel bridge from the blues to early soul. In any case, it's my favorite of what I've discovered off this little project so far. It's got soul, you can use it to advance a claim about the history of American pop music, and he's the last artist in the "Honky Tonk Heroes" section. Look out for: 1) the complete Reading Rock: Lost Highway, pt. 1 ("Honky Tonk Heroes") .zip file round-up, and 2) the first post from Lost Highway (2), "Hillbilly Heroes."


Bobby "Blue" Bland is 79 years old today. Sing it.

Al Green - Love and Happiness
Bobby "Blue" Bland - Further Up the Road
Bobby "Blue" Bland - I Smell Trouble
Bobby "Blue" Bland - It's My Life, Baby

Rev. C.L. Franklin - The Eagle Stirreth His Nest
Bobby "Blue" Bland - Little Boy Blue
Bobby "Blue" Bland - I'll Take Care of You
Bobby "Blue" Bland - I Pity the Fool
Bobby "Blue" Bland - Cry, Cry, Cry

Charlie Rich - Who Will the Next Fool Be?
Bobby "Blue" Bland - Who Will the Next Fool Be?
Bobby "Blue" Bland - You're the One that I Adore
Bobby "Blue" Bland - Call on Me
Bobby "Blue" Bland - Loneliness Hurts

Posted by Brandon

Reading Rock: Lost Highway (5), Rufus Thomas

Why was Rufus Thomas obsessed with animals? I have looked and looked, and I come to you today with no answers, only questions. And that's the thing about Rufus. Born in 1917 but not famous outside Memphis until the early 1960s, and a major factor in the early successes on Sun and Stax Records, two of the most influential labels in American history, Rufus Thomas bridged two eras in popular music, but never truly became a star in either. The first of the two "Honky Tonk Heroes" in Guralnick's book to have worked exclusively outside the honky tonk milieu (well, not really, if you're flexible on your terminology--the man worked the tent shows, dance halls, jook joints, and "Chitlin' circuit" venues, which Guralnick would probably be quick to point out, weren't all that different from "honky tonks" in most ways), Thomas's career is a pretty efficient metaphor for the creation of rock & roll and soul, and makes him the paradigmatic Memphis man.

Thomas started out in late-era minstrel tent shows in the late 1930s, but by the early 1940s he was a fixture on the Memphis music scene, hosting a popular amatuer show at the Palace Theater, and featuring B.B. King and Bobby "Blue" Bland. He held down a radio show on the celebrated radio station WDIA, the most influential station in the South to feature black performers and on-air talent, and later, the first programmed by African-Americans (Now, sadly, it plays what its management refers to as "light urban"). As Guralanick reports it, he was a one-man racial divide wrecking-crew (which, given the themes we've discussed thus far, would seem to be why he's included in this section)--an Opry fan hosting a show on a Black radio station, but also the "first black jock in the city playing the Beatles and the Rolling Stones" (p. 62). He sang and performed locally, cutting a few sides in the 1940s, but his first hit (and one of Sam Phillips' first Sun Singles) was "Bear cat," a response record to Big Mama Thornton's "Hound Dog" (#3, R&B). This was the transitional moment, in both my telling and Guralinick's--the birth of his obsession with animal songs (me), and the beginning of Sun's move to white artists, at the literal and figurative expense of performers like Rufus Thomas (Guralnick).

But this was not the end for Rufus. He continued his radio work, gigged out locally and toured, and when he and his daughter Carla (yes, that Carla Thomas) recorded a duet for a local record label, Satellite, its success led to wider distribution of Rufus's work and a new name for his label--Stax. He spent the rest of his career playing off the success he had in 1963 with his seminal dance hits, "The Dog" and "Walking the Dog" by touring and playing festivals, recording a number of minor dance hits (nearly always prefaced in name with the phrase "Do the Funky" and suffixed with the name of an animal), and eventually settling into a groove as a local Memphis legend and periodically recording for late-model blues labels like Alligator. He passed in 2001 (but this week, we're forgoing headstone pictures in favor of animal pictures, in fitting tribute).

Why Rufus? Because he exemplifies two of Guralnick's unspoken main points--that black and white music were thoroughly intertwined before Elvis, and that certain crucial performers were living, breathing bridges between the traditions of musical performance and dissemination in the rural South prior to WWII, but also personified the very rise of rock and roll itself--the role of radio deejays and small labels, as well as the radical re-inventions in sound. All of what we're presenting here (constrained as we are by the text) is Rufus's later work (excepting "Bear cat"), but I imagine that with better ears than mine you can imagine how American pop went from the minstral show to "Do the Funky Chicken" in one move.

Oh, and that last sentence is not an attempt to denigrate Thomas's work or imply his stage act or his act is "modern minstrelry"--because it's not (even though when "Do the Funky Penguin" hit, he sometimes wore a giant penguin suit). He was simply a malleable performer able to work in a pop/soul vein to appeal to new audiences--just as the grittiest of delta bluesmen often performed (if rarely recorded) pop songs and sentimental music alongside their more "gritty" material.

Take it away, Rufus...
Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog
Rufus Thomas - Bear Cat

B.B. King - 3 o'Clock Blues

Rufus Thomas - The Dog
Rufus Thomas - Walking the Dog
Rufus Thomas - Do the Funky Chicken
Rufus Thomas - Push and Pull
Rufus Thomas - Do the Funky Penguin

Rufus and Charla Thomas - Cause I Love You
Carla Thomas - Gee Whiz

Posted by Brandon

Inauguration Rock

Woody was really fucking good, too. He was really an amazing songwriter. My generation grew up, everybody sang "This Land Is Your Land," it's just some of us knew what it was about and others didn't. I happened to grow up knowing what it was about. But all the other kids I grew up with sang it in school the way Ronald Reagan quoted "Born in the USA."

-Steve Earle, on Rolling Stone.com, March 30, 1999

When people find out that I'm a political scientist by trade, they often assume that I care deeply about the daily ins and outs of American politics--the grimy details of committee meetings, the spectacle of the campaigns, the public performances of the politicians themselves. But to tell the truth, I don't much care for American politics.

Sure, I keep up on political news and often go so far as to read commentary about, say, the details of confirmation hearings or of the difficulties associated with shutting down the Guantanamo Bay prison for detainees. I know the names of my congresswoman, my state senator, and all nine members of the Supreme Court. I also know, based on 50 years of public opinion research in the U.S., that this makes me a member of a tiny elite, one of the few people able to articulate an ideological picture of the political issues of the day and able to hold consistent (in my case, liberal) views across a whole range of political issues. I'm not one of the people Donald Kinder, an American political scientist at the University of Michigan, was speaking of when he said that “when confronted with policy debates of great and abiding interest to political elites, many Americans can do no better than to shrug.” But that doesn't mean I know all the names of the House sub-committee chairs, either.

I bring this up because many of my friends were shocked to discover I had no intention of watching any of the inauguration festivities today (or yesterday). I understand the "historic significance" of it all, and why so many of my broke, lefty friends got on buses and hitched rides to go out to D.C. this weekend. But, for better or worse, my hoboing days are over, and precisely because of my academic training in political science, I'm increasingly cynical about the possibility of--1) a truly post-partisan president (and really, do we want a post-partisan president? Americans tend to be more averse to open ideological confrontation than Western Europeans, but a lack of easily distinguishable ideologies is what makes party politics in America so frustrating. How do you hold the ruling party accountable for its failings if so much of what they did was "bi-partisan"?) and 2) the radical changes we need to address the multiple crises of global warming and healthcare (can Obama put options that have never recieved support by either party and that are likely to be unpopular in many districts back on the table? Or will conflicts over local interests doom yet another massive federal project to failure?).

Enough about that. though. Despite my political cynicism, I'm a positive, idealistic man at heart, and nothing warms the soul like actual liberal principles once more having a voice in Washington. Without going into the history of it all, I'm thrilled that I got to see Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen (and of course, Pete's grandson Tao Rodriguez) perform the complete "This Land is Your Land" with the Lincoln Memorial in the background. Truely a song for America at this moment, if not likely to be an outline for Obama's radical politics. And, through the magic of the interwebs, I've got the audio of the performance (ripped from Youtube, so not the highest quality, but still...), as well as a pair of classics-Woody's original recording, and Springsteen's live version, from the 1976-85 live box set.

That Machine Kills Fascists, indeed. And now we have a president who understands that "Islamofascism"
isn't a meaningful concept, and may make some real headway in ending the terrorist threat--by making
America a true supporter of democracy the world over.

Pete Seeger, Tao Rodriguez, and Bruce Springsteen - This Land is Your Land
Woody Guthrie - This Land is Your Land
Bruce Springsteen - This Land is Your Land

Posted by Brandon

Whoopee in Hell Mix #6: There will be machinations unforeseen...

Our semester starts in six days. My vacation has not been as productive as it might ought to have been--visions of a finished article and a dissertation chapter danced in my head twelve days before Christmas, but what I've got is a 3/4 finished article and zero words and a lot of notes for a chapter. It's going to be a long road this semester. I've got 40,000 words to write between now and August (maybe even a shade more), and that's not counting my new little project (She's Making Whoopee in Hell Tonight--perhaps you've heard of it? Probably not).

But a new semester means a new schedule, and although there's not as much time on the bus as this fall, I find myself on the look out for some new tunes as I get ready to do the monthly complete iPod wipe and reload. Two of my biggest recent acquisitions have been a pair of multidisc compilations by forgotten (but dearly beloved by the cognoscenti) country music stars of the 1950s and 1960s--Johnny Horton, the king of the Texas rockabillies (and singer of historical songs from our collective childhoods), and the grand eccentric Charlie Rich (more on him in a week or so, as we move on with Reading Rock). When placed alongside old friends like the Gourds and Son Volt, and paired up with new (and soon to be rocking Milwaukee) finds like the Gaslight Anthem (this, by the way, is my first-ever link to a band's Myspace page. I feel like I've finally made it as a blogger), it's going to be a happy bus ride. I think my wife might even like it.

So, if you're a lifelong schooler (half teacher, half student, all broke...one more degree to finish) like me, enjoy the rest of whatever winter break you may have. If you're a working stiff like the rest of the world, go buy a box set of old country or some concert tickets (you've earned it--and surely, you're making more money than me...), and download you some good music.

Alt. country + classic country + soul = happy travels.

Whoopee in Hell Mix #6: There will be machinations unforeseen...

1) She Left me for Jesus - Hayes Carll
2) God's Got It - Old Crow Medicine Show
3) Kansas City Star - Roger Miller
4) Hallelujah Shine - The Gourds
5) 3 Dimes Down - Drive-By Truckers
6) Medicine Hat - Son Volt
7) I Feel so Good - Richard Thompson (yes, this is its second appearance)
8) The Golden State - John Doe w/Kathleen Edwards
9) 6 o'clock News - Kathleen Edwards
10) Harvest (Neil Young Cover) - Rufus Wainwright
11) All For the Love of a Girl - Johnny Horton
12) Whiskey River (Album Version) - Willie Nelson
13) Dance, Dance, Dance - Crazy Horse
14) Sixteen Tons - James & Bobby Purify
15) Stand by Your Man - (The Magnificent) Candi Stanton
16) Shut Out the Light - Bruce Springsteen
17) The '59 Sound - Gaslight Anthem
18) Lookin' Out My Backdoor - Creedence Clearwater Revival
19) Mister Garfield - Johnny Cash
20) Si Tu Dois Partir - Fairport Convention
21) L'Encre de tes Yeux - Francis Cabrel
22) Feel Like Going Home (demo) - Charlie Rich
23) Skinny Love - Bon Iver

Get tracks 1-15 here, and 16-23 here.

Posted by Brandon

Reading Rock: Lost Highway (4), Deford Bailey

Now, Deford Bailey is where things start to get interesting. Not only the first African-American to appear on the Grand Ole Opry, but the first man to play, so the story goes, on the night that the Opry got its name (December 10, 1927), he's so little known that I can't predict if our visits for this post will go up (because people have heard vaguely of him and are curious) or will plummet (because people have not heard of him and are not curious). A harmonica player of the first rate (even if I can't really make any guess as to his influence on the titans of post-war blues harmonica, the Little Walters and James Cottons of the world) whose trademark was an imitation of a train engine that formed the backbone to his best-known song, the "Pan-American Blues." He was a fixture on the Opry in its formative years, before being kicked off in 1941 during the ASCAP/BMI war, when unable to perform his signature material, he came into conflict with Opry management.

"A victim of the licensing battle between ASCAP and the newly formed BMI in 1941, Bailey was told he could no longer play on WSM the tunes that he had played on the air for over 15 years and had made him famous. Instead he would have to play completely new ones on WSM [ed - the Opry's 50,000 watt station]. He did not fully understand what was going on and his simple reaction was that he would leave the show if he could no longer play his tunes. As a result he was terminated from the program; and although the licensing battle between the two groups was resolved a few months later, this effectively ended his performing career. He continued to play his harmonica on a daily basis and enjoyed entertaining friends and patrons of his shoe shine shop, but he seldom performed publicly after this." (http://defordbailey.info/biography)

Circa 1930

Following his (unwilling) exit from the Opry, he essentially quit public performing. He continued to run the shoe-shine business he had established with family in Nashville, and led a private life. He appeared several times at Opry "old-timers" events at the end of his life, urged on by friends interested in gaining him his (due) recognition from the Opry establishment, but aside from the 8 sides he cut in 1928 (in the very first recording session in Nashville!), he never again recorded professionally (a friend and amateur historian, David Morton, recorded conversations and harp playing in the 1970s, and these recordings are available here).

***

When I first came across Bailey's music in 2006 (thanks to Cantwell and Friskics-Warren's Heartaches by the Number: Country Music's 500 Greatest Singles), I found it nearly impossible to track down, even with the best web, torrent, and p2p sources at my disposal. I'm happy to report now that thanks to the exposure of the documentary "Deford Bailey: A Legend Lost," produced by National Public Television and aired on PBS in August 2005, and the amazingly comprehensive site maintained by Bailey's friend and biographer David Morton, that his music and his story are far more readily known now than even just a few years ago. And this, in a way, is one of the main reasons Lost Highway remains compelling (and in print) today. Guralnick's influence in helping to publicize Bailey in the late 1970s must have been important in reviving his legacy as a performer. Equally, it contributed to a greater awareness beyond the academic community (and a greater attention in the academic community, if the publication record is any evidence) to the influence of African-Americans and their culture and music in the development of "white" hillbilly and country music.

The importance of this was struck home to me when I was preparing the first of these posts, on Jimmie Rodgers. Looking for the Youtube link I eventually posted, I was surprised to find in the video comments section a very tense discussion going on about the "black" influence on Rodgers' songs and style. There were, to be sure, simplistic (if forgivably so, given the obvious connection of Rodgers; style, phrasing, and lyrics to the blues of his time period) arguments that Rodgers was "stealing" the blues. But there were also, much to my shock, a series of posts violently "defending" Rodgers from claims that he was influenced by black culture, arguing that country music was a "pristine" form of folk culture descended from the balladry tradition of the British Isles, transplanted to Appalachia. Now again, forgiving the first error (Rodgers was not Appalachian), there's truth to the "balladry" argument as well--there are strong connections in style and lyrical theme in early country that go back to Europe. No one disputes this. But the notion that Jimmie Rodgers was not influenced by contemporary African-American musicians he met and heard is patently absurd. That anyone would need to make this claim is also absurd (both in terms of readily available knowledge of his biography, and in terms of the obvious sonic debt).

The same, of course, is true for Bailey as well. Deford's formative musical experiences were with the same sorts for fiddle music being played in Georgia by Fiddlin' John Carson. These songs were were part of a shared pre-blues and pre-country musical tradition of "reels and breakdowns" (p. 51) that crossed ethnic and racial lines in the South, and that provided the raw material for both emerging styles. This relationship was encapsulated by one of the commercial releases RCA made of Deford's recording of "John Henry." Unlike the vast majority of records at the time, it was released as both a "race" and "hillbilly" side, with an African-American playing on one b-side, and a white harp player on the other.

Guralnick's book goes to great pains to make the reciprocal link between black and white Southern cultures in musical terms during the pre- and early post-war period. What the pay-off will be (and given that rockabilly and Elvis are up next, I have my suspicions) of this musical intersectionality will be the subject of many of my future posts in Reading Rock: Lost Highway.

Deford Bailey - Pan-American Blues
Deford Bailey - John Henry
Deford Bailey - Ice Water Blues
Deford Bailey - Davidson County Blues
Deford Bailey - Alcoholic Blues & It Ain't Gonna Rain No Mo'( these last are from the Morton recordings. I couldn't find the original version, although it looks to be available here. If I can find the original versions, I'll replace them.)

Some old-time songs mentioned as relevant to Bailey's musical development:
(Fare You Well) Old Joe Clark (here, by Fiddlin John Carson)
Lost John (here, by Burnett & Rutherford)

And the "hillbilly" and "race" b-sides:
Bert Bilbro - Chester Blues
Noah Lewis (who also recorded with Sam Chatmon) - Like I Want to Be

And please, please do take a small moment and poke your head in here, at the Morton site, to here some of the audio clips of Deford (musical and interview) he's posted from his private collection of personal recordings.

Posted by Brandon

Last Week #1

One of the organizing principles of this site, to my mind, is that the way music interacts with our lives is important and that we short-change the power of music by always talking about it abstractly, without some reference to the general social context and/or the individual subjective setting. The way we think and feel about music is important. To this end, I'm going to attempt a weekly feature about the music in my life over the past week. Starting now.

Since I've been in the process of packing and thinking about how I should be packing, I haven't been picking up much new music or listening to unfamiliar artists. The one exception: 's "Assassins: Black Meddle, Pt. 1." This is a metal album and is therefore somewhat incongruous with the other music that has appeared on this website, namely old country and blues; partly this is due to my lack of posting (my taste in music tends to run harder than my co-blogger's).

(Image from MTV's Headbanger's Blog)

Eventually there will be some posts up here detailing metal more, but for the simple purposes here, I'll limit myself. I like a lot of metal, though I feel like I don't know nearly enough about it. I tend to prefer the doom- or prog- ends of the genre and I don't care very much for black metal. On the latter: this is an admittedly overly simplistic view, but it's because I like things like melody and discernible intelligent lyrics. So, I don't have much black metal in my collection, perhaps the only "true" black metal is a comp by Emperor and a couple Dimmu Borgir albums, which I usually only break out when I am unhappy with the neighbors.

Emperor - An Elegy of Icaros

But on Nachtmystium: I was reading a year-end list of top metal albums on Pitchfork and the author (Brandon Stosuy) listed this album as his favorite of the year. He wrote,

...on Assassins, from the Pink Floyd-nodding opener to the extended three-part "Seasick" finale, Nachtmystium took their post-black metal to someplace more powerfully anthemic, crusty, and straight-up catchy than ever before. The perfectly paced instrumental interludes create a tension before the various explosions (even the saxophone makes sense). Songs like "Your True Enemy" and "Assassins" are unstoppable rock songs with real hooks and atmosphere to spare...

It's the "straight-up catchy" part in there that intrigued me. I read his review then jumped over to my favorite metal blog, Invisible Oranges, to see what they say. The reviewer there really didn't like it, which made me want to get it even more--polarizing music may not always be good, but usually it's interesting.

(typical metal cover art: death, and an unreadable band name)

And it is, kinda. I don't love it and I don't hate it. There are parts that I really like -- most of "Assassins" and the use of the non-metal interludes, for example. There's nothing really egregious about the album, I think, just a general lack of wow. I do disagree with Pitchfork about "Your True Enemy," though: I think it's one of the weaker tracks.

Nachtmystium - Assassins
Nachtmystium - Your True Enemy

--
This week I signed up for last.fm. I ran their installer which uploaded my listening history. The problem, which I didn't know ahead of time, is that you could only upload once from a music player. For the last four months I've used version of winamp that I have associated with music on an external hard drive, but the client uploaded the history from my previous winamp use. This isn't a big deal, but according to last.fm, my most listened to artist is Roy Orbison. I do love Roy Orbison, but his placement doesn't reflect my actual listening habits. So I've been listening to songs that would make my top-15 artists more indicative of reality. So, I've been going with a lot of Nick Cave and The Hold Steady. For the former, this might be the first time I've listened all the way through "B-Sides and Rarities." Hit and miss like most compilations of this sort, but the highlights are as good as anything on his proper albums.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Running Scared [Roy Orbison cover]
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Helpless [Neil Young cover]
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - There's No Night Out In the Jail

Posted by Lin