(You can view this an extension of Brandon's post here , since it touches on many of the same things. You should note, as well, that I only have 250 tracks Orthodox singing, which is more than enough for almost anybody.) I've spent the last two weeks acclimating to my new place, new city, new time zone. This trip moved me a thousand miles. I left with a backpack and two bags: everything else was given away, sold, or stored. This includes my [...]
With many apologies for our extended absence (life intervenes...) The introduction to the next section of the book, "Hillbilly Boogie," gives us essentially the story I've been building us up to all along. With the coalescence of rockabilly as a commercial form of music, and most specifically with the arrival of Elvis, "the focal point of a revolution in taste and style," (94), we arrive at a great "widening" of the appeal and cultural significance of popular American music. This is the beginning of the era of what our good friend Bob Christgau calls the "monoculture"--that [...]
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 L P 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 Beatl es era, and [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Our semester sta r ts in six da ys. M y v acatio n has n ot been as pro du ctive 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 articl e and zero words and a lot of notes for [...]
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, 1 927), 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 cu [...]
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 [...]
Hank Snow, another of the Nudie Suit -wearing, honky tonkin' stars of early post-war country music is, for Peter Guralnick, a pair with Ernest Tubb. Both were profoundly shaped by their early exposure to Jimmie Rodgers, and worked to maintain his legacy (most notably at the Jimmie Rodgers Country Music Festival, annually in his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi). Both served long apprenticeships prior to "making it" in mainstream country, including unsuccessful stints in Hollywood trying to fit the Gene Autry mold. Both encapsulated the "Golden age" country sound, a sound that was the face of [...]
Hi. This is the first post from me, the up-to-this-point-merely-nomina l second blogger here. Call me Lin. You can see two bylines at the bottom of each post: one will tell you who wrote it. I am going to admit that I'm at a bit of a loss about where I want to go with my writing here. I did a Christmas post that was delayed and then forgotten about due to airline incompetence. It's still out there, and might eventually go up, but I make no promises. I was hoping it would be like a Doctor Who Christmas [...]
My wife is from Fort Worth, Texas--a city of great country music tradition and heritage, the long time home base of Bob Wills and the Light Crust Doughboys (singers of the immortal "Pussy, Pussy, Puss," still the best double entendre record ever released by a country act, Brad Paisley's " Ticks " included)-- Light Crust Doughboys - Pussy, Pussy, Pussy and for a while the base of the most important of [...]
I'm far too young to have any direct memories of Ron Asheton (in fairness to the dead, we shall not speak of The Weirdness ), guitarist/bassist of the Stooges, but that doesn't mean he hasn't had a sort of profound impact on my life. While there were lots of prosaic if personally memorable moments in my early 20s that consisted of little more than cases of cheap beer, a dartboard, and Funhouse , the story I'll tell you all today is probably about the most uplifting thing anybody who never knew the man can [...]
One of the projects I had in mind when I started posting here was something I was calling "Reading Rock," for absence of a better name (no, really--I'd love a better name). I've learned a great deal about music from reading books, from my first encounter with Lester Bangs's version of Astral Weeks (which is not, I suspect, V an Morrison's version--as I understand it, when he played the whole album in November at the Hollywood Bowl, the songs were re-worked [...]
So I realized today that I hadn't left the house in almost four d ays. This is not ideal. In my non-teaching life, I'm a writer (well, a dissertator--which means I'm a writer), and a variety of self-imposed deadlines are fast approaching. I have a scholarly article on Nigeria's ruling party (the People's Democratic Party--an ironic name if ever there was one), and the first chapter of my dissertation, both of which need to be done by the end of the month. so I'm at the desk, suffering from internet-induced ADD, getting [...]
One of my favorite things about country music is that, eve n as the music (and its audience) has changed drastically in the last 25 years--away from being the actual purview of the Southern working class, and towards a suburban music sung by performers as familiar with rock idioms as with "classic" country, it has become a fertile site for academic research and commentary. Country music is now a means for getting at American culture more generally. Books about Country's role in shaping/defining notions of class, it's theological implications, and as a bellweather of Southern history [...]
(Elvis's own Long Black Limousine, a 1960 Lincoln Mark V) One of the once common but now largely forgotten motifs of early 20th century American music is the journey to the graveyard, accompanying a family member/loved one on their "final" journey. The most famous of these songs is the Carter Family's "Can the Circle Be Unbroken," which Mark Zwonitzer (in his excellent Carter Family bio Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone ) te [...]
The first time I heard Richard Thompson was in January of 2000, at my friend Andre's house in Massachusetts. At the time, I was taking a month off from my Freshman year of college--our school offered a January term during the eponymous month, but I had transferred in some AP credits, and I figured the time could be better spent traveling. This was the first time I'd really traveled in the normal way on my own--I had been on lengthy camping trips with no real adult supervision, but I had never boarded a plane on [...]
The desktop widget that updates me on the weather says it's -8° right outside my window. I was outside once today, to help my wife scrape her windshield and make sure her car started (it did, thank god). It's one of those days--the 25 mph winds, the bitter cold--when they would have canceled school when I was young er. Of course, it's not a school day, and in any case, my school year is over. So, as you've noticed, we've had our first post from my good fri end and [...]
I've been on a bit of a Carl Perkins kick the last few months. I mention this now because 'tis the season on music blogs across the interwebs to write one (or both) of the two classic end-of-year posts: the "year in review" best albums/single post, and the Chrismas post. We'll be doing a Christmas post or two, but I'm not prepared to sum up the year in music. There are several reasons for this. First, I was overseas until the middle of July, which provides me with a pretty ironclad alibi for having missed [...]
She's Making Whoopee in Hell Tonight...
Album Review: alt-J – An Awesome Wave
Azealia Banks – ’1991′ & ‘Van Vouge’
[LISTEN] Gotye (Passion Pit Remix)
Big Boi & Theophilus London (feat. TRE LUCE) - 'She Said OK'
