More Melancholy Thoughts on the Way We Are Now
by Clyde N. Wilson
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“. . . there’s not a dime’s worth of difference . . .” —George C. Wallace
Bon Jovi has recorded a country song, and the barbarians who now control the music industry in Nashville are promoting “country hip-hop.” It is the end of civilisation as we have known it.
In obedience to our friendly neighbours to the south, your President, sworn to defend you, is striving to prevent the execution of a Mexican guilty of atrocious murder of Americans.
They say I can get a cell phone service that covers Canada and Puerto Rico. I have thought about it, but I don’t think I have anything useful to say to Canada or Puerto Rico.
Speaking of your President, it is reported that Bush’s handlers are already planning their excuse for the Iraq debacle. It was your fault. You did not support the Boy Decider’s world transformation schemes heartily enough.
Speaking of your next President, how many of the aspirants could qualify as a cultivated member of the upper class of Western civilisation such as was normal a few generations ago? How many could carry on a conversation with Thomas Jefferson? Or even Harry Truman or Dwight Eisenhower?
Foreigners think that Bush’s arrogant blustering around the world is intended to promote the interests of the United States. If only that were so!
The blowhard Limbaugh says in a recent bragging promo that he is not a braggart because “if you can do it, it’s not bragging.” His definition of a braggart is as off-base as his definition of a “conservative.”
Observers point out that 20 per cent of Americans still smoke, despite all the information available. That is about the same number who still vote Republican, which is much stupider and deadlier than smoking.
It is reported that the FBI is concerned about a renewed threat of homegrown terrorism. It is on the watch for extremists—i.e., middle-aged white men who talk a lot about the Constitution.
I can easily find in this bit of news clues of a dozen things that are wrong with the way we are now. Speaking of homeland security, recently some staff hacks from a congressional committee of that name were sent South to study NASCAR events. (Yes, your government never rests.) They were told by a boss that they needed to get immunized from various diseases before getting into the dangerous vicinity of Southern racing fans. We all deplore ignorant, prejudiced, hate-filled Southerners.
Our first African American President? Curiously, Obama, son of a privileged African and a white American, has none of the heritage and experience usually associated with the description “African American.”
It is reported that the person known as “Madonna” spends over $100,000 per year on special bottled water. Out! Out! Damned spot!
The one thing to remember about Political Correctness is that its purpose is to punish people for speaking the truth. It is enforced by people who hate truth and wish to dominate others.
It was widely remarked during the 1980s and 1990s that “conservatism” had triumphed in American politics. The evidence for this? Rockefeller Republicans now claim to be “conservatives” while running for office and Trotskyites now control foreign policy and appear alongside Liberals in the media.
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1 Comment by Allen Wilson on 23 January 2008:
Personally, I would get immunised before getting into close proximity of anyone who works in a high level government job in D.C. – which is indeed a foreign country, at least to me.
Country hip hop? Nothing more need be said. That sort of thing is one reason why European and Afrikaans pop music, though often as cheezy, empty, and corrupt as the American, is better over all. There is some real talent left in Europe, if only very little and quite weak. America is almost totally devoid of musical talent. Country was the last significant holdout from the mid-90’s on, but is rapidly going the way other genres have already gone.
Your comment on political correctness should be carved in stone, or framed and hung on the walls of thoughtful people’s homes everywhere.
I’d walk a mile for a Camel, but I wouldn’t drive a half mile to go vote.
2 Comment by MAP on 23 January 2008:
It is said that art is a window into the human soul. But where that soul is only moved by profit, can what it produces ever be art? What the schemers and plotters – in pursuit of yet another money machine – did to country music is a tragedy and an outrage.
3 Comment by robert reavis on 23 January 2008:
” The one thing to remember about Political Correctness is that its purpose is to punish people for speaking the truth. It is enforced by people who hate truth and wish to dominate others. ”
It has been so from the beginning, and their name is Legion.
4 Comment by Grumpy Old Man on 23 January 2008:
Heather Miles has it down:
O tempora! O mores!
5 Comment by James Newland on 23 January 2008:
“It is reported that the FBI is concerned about a renewed threat of homegrown terrorism. It is on the watch for extremists—i.e., middle-aged white men who talk a lot about the Constitution.”
The FBI’s Top 10 Most Wanted List for 1787:
1. Thomas Jefferson
2. James Madison
3. George Mason
4. Luther Martin
5. Charles Pinckney
6. Patrick Henry
7. Elbridge Gerry
8. Daniel Carroll
9. John Adams
6 Comment by James Newland on 23 January 2008:
Okay, so I can’t count
7 Comment by robert m. peters on 23 January 2008:
1. When George Wallace spoke those words, dimes still had some silver in them!
2. What is “hip hop” that I should be mindful of it, in country or out of country?
3. Don’t execute the Mexican who murdered, but keep our border guards in prison.
4. Actually, neither by cell phone nor by land line do I have anything to say to New York or California.
5. Yes, any old version of the stab in the back will do. In Hitler’s final set of rants as the Red Army closed in on his bunker, he blamed the German army and the German people for the mess which he had created. He shot himself and the Nazis who could fled. Bush will go to Texas, and the neo-cons will remain in power, morphing into some other “neo” at just the right moment.
6. Yes, the one said to have appendages which resemble piano legs, the one whose name rhymes with Osama, the one which looks like a jackass eating briers – the Democrats – and Dorian Gray, El Duce, Elmer Gantry, Bob Dole Redux, and Sleepy (now off stage) – Repulicans would flee the room if Dr. Wilson walked in and engaged them in a conversation. Ron Paul makes the latter thereof nervous enough.
7. Yes, the elites know best as to what our interests are, particularly when we are doing the killing, the dying and the paying for them.
8. Limbaugh, there is naught to say about him: a failed politico, a failed entertainer, a failed patient. Just the guy the masses turn to for their enlightenment.
9. If Huckabee becomes Caesar and Imperator, we’ll all be Republicans and none of us will smoke.
10. Dr. Wilson, the FBI is likely watching this forum like a hawk watching a chicken. However, I feel quite safe, because the conversation on these fora is probably too deep for the airhead assigned to us. She’s probably listening to “country hip hop’!
11. Two years ago, about, a group of us was returning after a week of re-enacting, having not bathed too much, save for a dip in the creek. Clad in assortments of gray and butternut brown and smelling of those who had not bathed, we happened upon a van from Ohio with smoke coming out of the engine. We stopped to assit. Friendly we were and quite helpful, too. Colletively, we had enough brains to get the van to a garage in the next town. I bet they fumigated themselves for a week.
12. Yes, there is a certain historical crucible which Senator Obama cannot claim to be the product of, for good or for bad.
13. Dr. Wilson, I was actually unaware that the one who calls herself “Madonna” was a real person; I thought that she was the cyber projection of Whoopie Goldberg’s alter ego. Obviously, if she drinks water, she must be “real,” although “real” does not mean “having substance.”
14. People who hate truth and dominate others: lot’s of them are teachers in our public schools.
15. As much as I dislike the neo-cons – the Trotsky wing and the Strauss/Heidegger wing – they are, in my opinion, merely the water boys for the Rockefeller Republicans, for whom the liberals are but an amusement and foil to use against hapless, would-be conservatives.
8 Comment by Mickey Droney on 23 January 2008:
Mr. Peters,
I agree with all of the above except that, after his term, El Presidente Bush, keeping with his globalist nature, will likely retire to his newly-purchased 100,000 acre ranch in Paraguay, where the slave labor is even cheaper than the current crop of imported Mexicans. A sinking dollar may not buy much in Paris, but it will still go a long way in Asuncion…
9 Comment by PcH on 23 January 2008:
Maybe I should take up smoking…
(I voted for Dr. Paul.)
10 Comment by PcH on 23 January 2008:
robert m peters @ 7
Yes, any old version of the stab in the back will do. In Hitler’s final set of rants as the Red Army closed in on his bunker, he blamed the German army and the German people for the mess which he had created. He shot himself and the Nazis who could fled.
Not that it matters, but Hitler was buying time for the survivors. He also listed specific individuals as traitors in his last will, but had he truly believed that, he would have fired them long before. In some cases, such as Albert Speer’s, the tactic seems to have worked (he wasn’t shot).
11 Comment by roho on 23 January 2008:
#8 is correct…………All WAR Criminals make their way to South America eventualy.
12 Comment by jamesvkruse on 24 January 2008:
RE: #5
As of 1787, Madison was a nationalist and Adams was a monarchist. Take them out and put in Richard Henry Lee and James Monroe. Then as a tenth guy add George Clinton.
13 Comment by James Newland on 24 January 2008:
Madison wasn’t a hard nationalist the way Hamilton was. He was the co-author of the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. It’s true that he objected to Jefferson’s explicit advocacy of the right of secession but he nevertheless was a supporter of states’ rights as a check on the designs of the national government.
I included Adams mainly because I needed another famous name. But I think to describe him as a “monarchist” is too simplistic. Nevertheless, I will happily leave him out. I’m no big Adams fan. I did make him last in line to indicate that he would have been the least sought after of the list I gave.
I have no objection to the addition of the three men you mention.
14 Comment by James Newland on 24 January 2008:
“Bon Jovi has recorded a country song, and the barbarians who now control the music industry in Nashville are promoting ‘country hip-hop.’ It is the end of civilisation as we have known it.”
This could make for an interesting discussion, Dr. Wilson. Country music used to be considered the lowest form of music in America. Up on top you had classical Symphonies and Opera. These were considered High Art. Below that you had Popular music and Jazz (Rogers and Hammerstein, Benny Goodman, etc.). At the bottom of the heap was Country/Folk/Bluegrass music, which was considered vulgar (in the sense of issuing from the lowest class of Americans) and simple.
Today we have even lower forms of music vying with Country for bottom honors. Is that reason enough to raise Country up to “respectable” status, or should we just recognize that it’s not the lowest conceivable form of music?
15 Comment by PcH on 24 January 2008:
#14:
Old country music is to be esteemed for the very reasons it was considered low.
And it depends on who is doing the considering. The people who thought old country was low are the lowly who thought themselves lofty and who hated the ordinary folk they wanted to dominate.
16 Comment by Mickey Droney on 24 January 2008:
Anyone who has watched bluegrass legends like Bill Monroe, Flatt and Scruggs, Ralph Stanley, Ricky Skaggs, etc. perform, know that the music is anything but simple. The chord arrangements may be basic, but the skill it takes to pick the banjo, guitar or mandolin like that is amazing, not to mention the beautiful harmonies and fiddle parts. Also, if you have ever heard a Jerry Reed or Chet Atkins piece, you know that guitar parts like that take as much skill as any other instrumentation in any other genre of music.
17 Comment by Mickey Droney on 24 January 2008:
Todays pop-country is mass marketed crap, but the older stuff is some of the best comtemporary music of any genre. Jimme Rodgers, Bob Wills, The Louvin Brothers, Lefty Frizzell, etc. were amazing musicians who wrote great songs. Hank Williams, Sr., the godfather of the entire movement was known as the “Hillbilly Shakespeare.” He was an obviously flawed man, but his voice and lyrics are so stark and raw, they will send chills down your spine.
Our more worldly and cultured neighbors to the northeast must be disbelieving that Hank’s turn of a phrase could be accomplished considering that he hailed from a rural town in God-forsaken Alabama and had no formal education. Kind of reminds me of Dr. Wilson’s post a few months ago about current elites who don’t believe that an unsophisticated rural bumpkin like Shakespeare could have authored such great works.
18 Comment by Virgil Caine on 24 January 2008:
Amen to Messrs. Droney and Newland. I would just add the high lonesome, cattle pasture wail of the “King of the Hillbillies”, the immortal Roy Acuff, to the canon. Tune up some “Night Train to Memphis” and especially “Wabash Cannonball”, and then leave the hick-hop, or (as Ray Charles put it “they shouldn’t have dropped ‘C’ when they named that stuff they call RAP”) and Kaballahdonna behind on the wings of “The Great Speckled Bird” towards the Circle they will never be able to break.
Happy Bobby Burns night, his misappropriation by leftists notwithstanding, on the morrow to one and all.
19 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 24 January 2008:
@1: I have seen a number of good American musicians recently. Most of them either perform from the repertoire of great European art/baroque/classical music and are faceless to their audiences, or else play ethnic folk music and are confined to Poletown street corners and Irish pubs where their groupies cheer them on over long drinking sessions. Dr. Wilson is right on the money with this remark, which echos his post on the decline of film talent. If we can no longer sing or act, there is no civilization left to speak of.
20 Comment by James Newland on 24 January 2008:
I don’t disagree that disdain for the so-called “lowest class of Americans” is elitist and out of line. Much of that, of course, has to do with the North/South War and the disdain that city folk have for country folk everywhere. However, I do think some music is better, or higher, so to speak, than other music. Country is a very simple form, even if certain arrangements can require great skill on the part of the instrumentalist to play. I happen to love bluegrass banjo picking, but I would never put Foggy Mountain Breakdown in the same class with Beethoven’s Ninth or the great Sacred Music of the Church.
The only reason I posted what I did was that it seemed to me Dr. Wilson was raising Country music up to a level it didn’t really merit in order to (rightly) bash contemporary noise. To say that the corruption of Country music represents the end of civilization as we know it is to suggest, at least in my mind, that Country music represents some kind of apogee of civilized art. I just don’t think that’s the case. I think the corruption of Country music merely represents the corruption of a lesser form (please note again that I am not saying “worthless form”) by forms that are so far beneath it on the scale as to be near rock bottom.
21 Comment by Virgil Caine on 24 January 2008:
Them’s fightin’ words Mr. Newland. You with your’n Ludwig, Wolfgang and other High Falutin’ Huns. (Insert downhome tongue in cheek)
I concur that Foggy Mountain Breakdown is “not in the same class” as the great man’s ole No.9. I prefer Handel’s Messiah, but I’m no conissewer.
I’m curious where you rate Aaron Copland’s finest works: Quiet City, The Red Pony Suite and Rodeo in particular as well as Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”?
22 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 24 January 2008:
@20: Popular culture is the basis of higher culture. The “high” elements of North American and much of European society long ago lost their sense of civilization, or have you had any look at most modernist and postmodernist (two faces of the same ugly and coin; only one is symmetrical and the other not) art, architecture, literature and music? It’s all decadent.
And now the “folk” no longer exist, either. Not being a Southerner, I simply lack the ability to appreciate Southern folk music (commonly known as “country music”) but there is no denying that it is real music requiring a real person to create and perform it. Like many other music traditions, real country music is in danger of being confined to the museum. If there is no more real culture, there are no more stories to tell or serious thoughts to share.
As someone said on this forum not long ago, hate contemporary pop culture because it is bad, not because it is popular.
23 Comment by HaroldC on 24 January 2008:
I’ll listen to Merle Haggard before them “pretty-boys” anyday. Didn’t it used to be considered unmanly for a man to get by on his looks?
24 Comment by Clyde Wilson on 24 January 2008:
When I wrote “the end of civilisation” that was an attempt at hyperbolic humour. Genuine country music may not be high culture, but it is authentic and American—created by Americans out of authentic traditions. That for me sure beats European music played by U.S. big city orchestras—often with foreign musicians and conductors. By the way, if you ever have a chance, get hold of the rare tape of Toscanini conducting “Dixie” during his post WW II tour of the U.S.
25 Comment by Nicholas G.P. MOSES on 25 January 2008:
“When I wrote “the end of civilisation” that was an attempt at hyperbolic humour. Genuine country music may not be high culture, but it is authentic and American—created by Americans out of authentic traditions. That for me sure beats European music played by U.S. big city orchestras—often with foreign musicians and conductors.”
Of course if you can identify with the musician and the piece that makes the experience much more real, and I do not judge anyone for preferring country to classical. In general in the evenings I listen to Irish, British or Breton folk rather than classical CDs. On the other hand, the baroque traditions do touch me quite deeply not so much by virture of my ancestry as from their origins in the counter-Reformation (I sing in a classical chorale at my Church). It is natural and commendable to prefer what you grew up with, but there’s no shame in reaching out and finding something–dare I say–better.
By the way, you may have meant it as hyperbolic humor, but I think you were right on: a civilization that cannot produce folk music is not civilized at all.
26 Comment by Ed Roberts on 25 January 2008:
“America is almost totally devoid of musical talent. Country was the last significant holdout from the mid-90’s on, but is rapidly going the way other genres have already gone.”…..
“What the schemers and plotters – in pursuit of yet another money machine – did to country music is a tragedy and an outrage.”
Something to consider about contemporary music in America is that the few corporations controlling the majority of radio stations are issuing very limited playlists.
Five years ago I was spending a lot of time at my workbench and tried listening to local country stations while I worked. A few days of that made me turn the radio off because I realized that the stations here were repeating the same 20 or so vapid, sorry pop songs over and over.
Last winter I bought an XM radio receiver and started listening to music again. What is offered on the commercial free channels is amazing when compared to the trashy little standard playlist that all country FM stations present. A few weeks ago, I was again exposed to the local stations and noticed that the same playlist from the winter of ‘02/’03 was still being played, with about a half dozen newer additions.
American music is still innovative and refreshingly topical, but none of it that qualifies as country music is played on today’s centrally controlled FM stations.
27 Comment by Allen Wilson on 25 January 2008:
@19: I must agree with your statement about classical performers, Mr Moses. Some lesser known ones have released CDs, but I guess you were talking of live performers who are unknown outside certain areas or circles. Of course, I was thinking only in terms of what is commonly on the radio or in music videos. Europe does have America beat in that field right now, though that’s not saying a whole lot.
I think bluegrass could still develop into a higher art form if given the chance. I consider it much like Scottish pibroch, where the arrangements are basic but take great skill.
Anyone have suggestions for good, lesser known or unknown musicians who have released CDs?
I can recommend the South African pop musician Bok van Blerk, especially his song, ‘De La Rey’. Go to you tube and watch the video. It’s in Afrikaans, but still worth seeing, especially because of the history behind it. The song is a tribute to a Boer general, Koos de la Rey. It caused a stir in South Africa because it became a rallying song for the Afrikaners. Much of Blerk’s stuff may be too ‘pop’ for many, but it’s still good. It actually has a country like feel to it.
Also, there is a hillbilly band from the Missouri Ozarks well worth a shot, called ‘Big Smith’. They have real talent and are very good if you like a combination bluegrass-Ozark mountain folk style. Strangely, they seem to be popular with some of the college aged in SW Missouri and NW Arkansas.
You might be amazed at how many amateur musicians upload videos of themselves on you tube, and are actually good. Believe it or not, there are some good folk musicians there, but you’ll have to search and separate wheat from chaff.
@26: People have been trying to get me to try XM radio. I may do so now after what you have written.
Perhaps kids and teens should have to take some kind of classical music appreciation class. After I got into classical music, my tastes in all other genres became more discriminating, and I found myself listening to classic rock and country songs that I had heard many times over the years, but noticing things that my ears had not been able to catch before. I began to appreciate bluegrass and big band jazz more because my ears were more in tune with what the musicians were doing. Such a thing might at least be a way to reduce the effect that worthless pop music has on kids today.
28 Comment by G.S. on 25 January 2008:
Re/ Nashville, I’ve heard some view it as the “Hollywood” of the South — that is, as a den of corruption that has overall been detrimental to Southern culture. Anybody else have any thoughts/experiences on this line?
Mr. Newland’s point at #20 is well-taken, although to my mind it’s worth noting that “the high doesn’t stand without the low” or something like that. That is, the high aristocratic culture of Europe was a natural outgrowth from lower culture, following centuries of development. I’m know Shakespeare expert, but I bet a lot of his art owes a debt to the more simple folk-culture of England. Presumably Yeats owes a bit to more primitive Celtic art, right?
Or to use a clearer example, am I correct in thinking that Wagner’s epic Niebelung started out originally as a sort of simple folk-myth of the Germanic peoples? (Perhaps not a great example given that I don’t particularly like Wagner, but hopefully the point is made.)
So perhaps even if the music of the rural South/Appalachia is not in and of itself high art, possibly there is fertile ground there for high art to spring from it, after generations?
Assuming the Bon Jovi effect doesn’t stifle it in the bud, that is.
IMO there is some serious high-power poetry going on in Merle Travis’ “Dark as a Dungeon”, at least at the end where the miner is contemplating from Heaven his own remains being mined, as coal, by some other poor man.
I mean, it’s like in The Odyssey where Odysseus hears the Phaekian bard sing of Troy, and we get a weird surreal image of Odysseus actually being both the victor AND the vanquished in the Trojan War, actually jabbing himself with his own spear.
On another note — I don’t know how it contributes to the discussion, but it’s interesting to note that bluegrass is a distinctly modern musical form. Not only in terms of chronology but also modern in the sense that it is a product of modern processes.
I really don’t think bluegrass could have come into existence ~ 1930’s, sans the commercial forces & technologies — radio & phonographs — that were to later prove so corrupting & detrimental to the American musical scene.
29 Comment by G.S. on 25 January 2008:
Actually, re/ Nashville as a wretched hive of scum & villainy, I guess the term “barbarians” already indicates some of Dr. Wilson’s thoughts on the matter — I was just wondering if he or anybody else has any elaboration on the matter.
30 Comment by Steve Berg on 25 January 2008:
I think that Dr. Wilson’s remark about country hip-hop being the end of civilization is on the mark. My exposure to any rap or hip-hop is limited to enduring thumping bombardment of it at stop lights, but my conclusions on it are that it is only really music if you are an orc.
31 Comment by Lord Karth on 25 January 2008:
Mr. Berg @ # 30:
I think you owe an apology to orcs.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
32 Comment by PcH on 26 January 2008:
Hey, if I keep switching off between Bach, Flatt & Scruggs, Wagner, Sons of the Pioneers, and Rachmaninoff, will the universe over time blow up?
33 Comment by robert m. peters on 26 January 2008:
The words of Dr. Wilson:
“Bon Jovi has recorded a country song, and the barbarians who now control the music industry in Nashville are promoting “country hip-hop.” It is the end of civilisation as we have known it.”
My attraction to country music is absolutely focused on a set of events in my life, a set of events which revolve around my father; thus, I am not entering this discourse to judge between country music and classical music, the latter being my favorite and whereupon I feed my soul within the domain of music.
Until we got a cabinet stereo with a an AM?FM radio in it, we had only one radio in our home: a plastic job which ran on batteries and which was used for only two purposes – to listen to LSU football ten Saturdays a year and to listen to the local talk news show, the Bill and Jay Show, as we got ready to go to school. There was no television in our home until the mid-sixties and it received only one channel, NBC, and was black and white. On it, my father watched the Friday Night Fights and my mother watched, although not regularly, Lawrence Welk. From time to time, I was allowed to watch Have Gun, Will Travel and Gunsmoke. They came on another channel which we could only receive by turning the antenna with a wrench and if the moon and the sunspots were right.
Occasionally, I heard some country music if the car radio was on while someone was trying to find a news station.
My encounter with country music, happened twice a year, on a Monday and a Friday, usually the week before Christmas, over a period of about ten years. My father was a member of a deer camp, not a hunting club, over in the Big Swamp in a place called Bougé just out of Ferriday, Louisiana, Ferriday being the home of the cousins Jerry Lee Lewis, Mickey Gilly and Jimmy Swaggart. The camp was located right in the middle of nowhere somewhere between the Mississippi River and Bayou Concodrie. There were always at or about forty men at the camp, including a black cook named Black, who later worked for my father elsewhere; about twenty Blue Tick, Walker, Black and Tan and Catahoula hounds, and one horse. The building was a two story, two-by-four and tin structure heated by a stove made of oil field piping – one big piece for the oven and a smaller piece that vented through the roof.
These are my some few of my memories of being at Bougé for five days and four nights once a year for ten years, about:
1. seeing a 500 pound man bathing in a bayou covered with ice and laughing at something which I had said, his laughter making his body and the bayou undulate;
2. seeing, a year of so later, the same 500 pound man mount a horse, break its back, with the dead horse falling on him and breaking his leg, with our having to extricate the man from under the horse and put him, in a freezing rain, in the back end of a pickup so he could be taken to the hospital in Natchez;
3. seeing an Ivory Billed Woodpecker in a stand of bald cypress and reporting the sighting through my agriculture teacher to LSU, whose scientists dismissed my claim as a teenager’s story or a false sighting;
4. hearing my father as he and I waded waist deep in freezing rain Cooper’s Slough say, “Son, we wouldn’t rake leaves in this weather, would we?”;
5. killing my first deer, an eight-point, with a 410 bore using a number six shell from which my father had taken the shot and replaced with 00 buck;
6. watching in awe as the men of the camp left in an armed convoy to get a deer which some locals had shot ahead of our dogs, with my remaining behind with the cook;
7. listening to the stories of these men, men who had served in WWI, WWII and Korea; men who were doctors, lawyers, cement masons, rough necks, loggers and outlaws;
8. leaning from my father at the end of that unanticipated last year, that someone had blown the building up with dynamite; we never went back.
What does that have to do with country music? Well, on the way to Bougé, about 4 a.m. each Monday morning, we went though Jonesville on the Black River and stopped at a café to get a big breakfast. There, blasting from the jukebox, was country music of the type common to the late fifties and early sixties. The place was fully of rough necks, river men, hunters, loggers, town’s folk and cops of all varieties – state police, sheriff deputies and game wardens, all telling stories, eating breakfast and listening to country music. On the way back home, on those Fridays, we would again find ourselves at the same café in Jonesville eating a big T-bone steak. Some of the same folk were of course there; but their would also be families in the evening, mom, dad and the kid’s night out, listening to country music.
So, when I hear country music, particularly that “good” kind from the late fifties and early sixties, my mind goes back to all of this, this that more than anything else which has made me what I am. As much as I appreciate classical music, it did not play this role in my life.
As to “hip hop and country,” can any of you really imagine “hip hop” in a café on the Black River, a café filled with rough necks, loggers, river men, hunters and cops. I don’t think so. I cannot imagine it either!
34 Comment by Chet Eastwood on 28 January 2008:
“Personally, I would get immunised before getting into close proximity of anyone who works in a high level government job in D.C. – which is indeed a foreign country, at least to me.” -above
‘yo, i hear that dog’ (i.e. dog means one is in appropriate touch with one’s creature – rather than having it mindlessly sublimated), ‘wizard,’ (i.e. wizard means it’s almost hopless or it is but i’ll call on the wizard within – or above -), and so now let’s go on from there.
since d.c. as we all KNOW is another country… who hit the twin towers… even if 3 or 4 mindless camel herders?(really?) … who helped? like with the recent public television report on ‘who hit jfk’ … some nere’do well – all by his sthilly lonesome?’
the advantage is to the observer. so ALL govts. are INEVITABLY conspiracies – it always only a question as to how bad.
35 Comment by PcH on 29 January 2008:
Something – ahem – tells me that this just might be useful here: Google search
36 Comment by FRSALAZAR on 5 February 2008:
When I wrote “the end of civilisation” that was an attempt at hyperbolic humour. Genuine country music may not be high culture, but it is authentic and American—created by Americans out of authentic traditions. That for me sure beats European music played by U.S. big city orchestras—often with foreign musicians and conductors.
What is said of “genuine country music” can likewise be said of rap, hip hop, death metal, and the like. They likewise are developed out of, and reflect their American cultures.
Further, concerning the high versus the low: to argue complexity or arrangement, skill level and the like in music is to mistake the artisan for his art. Picasso may have had great talent, and his art may have been difficult to produce, but that does not change the fact that his art is a corruption even while reflecting his culture and even more so the culture which followed.
It is one thing for art to recognize fallen nature as Waterhouse’s Hylas and the Nymphs does, it is quite another to mistake fallen nature for virtue as authentic ameircan society often does.
Does the country music raise man up as Waterhouse does while while recognizing fallen nature for what it is? Or does it degrade man by pulling him down as Picasso does? That is the mark of high versus low.
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