digital emunction

1/ Donald Barthelme, “For I’m the Boy” (1964):

The bottle was old and dirty but the brandy when Huber returned with it was tasty in the extreme.

2/ Grateful Dead, “Brown-Eyed Women” (1971):

The bottle was dusty but the liquor was clean.

The complete absence of country music on the whiplashing summer-music chart New York put together last week is even less surprising than the New York Times’s similar sin of omission a few weeks ago. And yet if New York is really, as I suggested to a friend the other day, the People magazine for people like us, you’d think they might try to imagine an “us” with a little less constricted sense of what counts as summer sonic fun.

There’s something to Jane Dark’s suggestion that these blind spots are all about class, but I don’t know if that fully explains it. I mean, hell, in every respect save disposable income and zip code, I’m at the demographic heart of the class their ads are gunning for, right down to Dr. Hakimi’s Art of Oral Harmony. But there I go again, listening to—and, shh, even liking!–country music.

Not that I’m too worried; we all, somehow, find our own ways to survive the diktats of glossy-magazine taste. But still you have to wonder what it’s going to take to make country music safe for the architects of mediated cool, when even the high-profile defections of Jack White, Robert Plant, Jewel, Jessica Simpson, and Jon Bon Jovi couldn’t do it.

You have to wonder, that is, until it hits you: Hootie!

Darius Rucker will save us all.

Photos from the Randy Rogers Band show at Joe’s last week are up here.

Maybe you knew about this, but I didn’t:

The recordings, which range from the late 1930s to recent times, are especially strong in the areas of fiddle, banjo, harmonica, and dulcimer tunes; secular ballads and songs; gospel songs, and the unaccompanied lined-out and shape note singing styles. Included as well are such relative unknowns as the mouth bow with origins in Africa, Cherokee singing and dance music, Swiss-American singing and yodeling, Hungarian-American cymbalum playing, and the jug band sound from the early 1900s comprised of a loose rural-urban mix of blues, hillbilly, and jazz.

In many instances the repertoire and playing styles documented in these recordings date well back into the 1800s. Among the music’s readily detectable influences are musical expressions arising from slavery, minstrel stage music, Civil War military music, and the dance music of Britain, Ireland and, in some instances, France and Germany.

(via Silas House)