A Lark Ascending

Most of her albums have that rather 'big' production Nashville sheen - I find I have to listen past it. She usually picks great songs (has record a few of Richard Thompson's) and has a marvellous voice. The two bluegrass albums and the recent one she did of more honky-tonk type material - 'Sleepless Nights' - probably fit in this thread better than her other albums. I wonder if, with so much competition from younger singers, she's chosen or been steered to appeal to we old foggies and the post-Oh Brother audience. I believe she started in this area. The album cover of 'Sleepless Nights' could hardly be a more blatant pitch at the 'things ain't what they used to be' market: But it's an enjoyable record.

Thanks, Six String. The Dave Alvin and Buddy/Julie Miller albums you mention I know - marvellous records all. I don't know Jim Lauderdale's music and Alejandro Escovedo is a completely unknown name to me. Thanks for the recs. Someone I like very much - even though she is in many ways living in the heart of the Nashville Beast - is Patty Loveless. Was enjoying the second of her two more bluegrassy albums this afternoon: And as the definition of 'contemporary' has become wondefully elastic, a word for Norman Blake. This one was fun earlier today: On the purely instrumental front, I've always loved this one: Jerry Douglas' albums can get a bit overproduced, but this one is joy from start to finish.

Oh, much more than familiar. Much of the 50s/60s folk revival here was based around reclaiming songs from the Appalachians and such and dressing them back up as authentic English/Irish/Scottish folk music. Ballads were probably more likely to be learnt off a Joan Baez record than by rooting around in Cecil Sharpe House. Though the rooting about did take place both in the archives and in the field and lots of native things were found. There's some marvellous interviews with Irish fiddlers and the like who are considered the 'real thing', who, when asked where did they learn a particular tune, reply 'off a record that Uncle Declan brought back from Chicago'. In the Ireland my mother grew up in there was virtually no sign of 'traditional' music apart from the state-approved music (she still recalls my grandmother talking about 'that auld IRA crowd with their come-all-yees'). It seems the revival that kicked off around the 50s began with people hearing records emigrants had made in the early 20thC in the States. Who knows what had changed in the performance techniques by the time they got to record. Scotch-Irish and England are very different. The revival from the 50s through to the 90s was mainly Scots-Irish. Look at the heavily popularised music of the folk-rock bands like Steeleye Span and Fairport and its almost totally Scots-Irish or Scots-Irish-via-Tennessee (even though the players came from London and Birmingham). A very forceful pure English revival started in the 70s (Seeline has already mentioned Gauleiter Stradling) but has only recently burst into full, popular flower. You are still more likely to hear jigs and reels in an English 'trad' pub, but there is now a major English-conscious folk scene with its own stars. Fits in with much broader social changes here - absorbing a large multi-ethnic population, Euro-scepticism, the very strong regional identity of the Welsh and Scottish especially since devolution. When the English ran everything we didn't worry very much about our identity. Everyone from the Prime Minister downwards is now worrying about constructing an English identity. I'm in the front line of this - with a change of government likely in the next month, we're likely to be presented with new diktats on what the authorised version of English/British history is.

I was very late to the party with Laura Cantrell. She won lots of praise over here from people you might not have expected - the late John Peel for one. I heard her on the radio and she didn't jump out but chancing that album it wormed its way in. The bio of Cantrell at AMG is interesting...she clearly wasn't the last of 18 children living in a chicken shack in the Appalachians who learned it all from her grandpappy...BIO The UK has a strange relationship with the country/bluegrass/Old Time thing. I'm not sure when it first began to get an audience here - certainly via the Skiffle boom of the 50s but how much was heard before, I'm not sure. By the mid 60s the sugary Nashville thing had caught on but was always associated with a middle-aged to older audience. Yet it kept seeping through. There were a whole bunch of country rock bands in the 70s who seemed to take their inspiration from the Byrds, Burritos etc. The early 80s saw another burst of left-field interest - Andy Kershaw and John Peel would play it alongside dub and punky stuff. And then the whole Americana/Alt.Country thing got an audience too in the 90s - lots of places in London who have this sort of music regularly. Meanwhile, the rather 'square' country scene carries on with Jim Reeves imitators alongside rather tepid British imitators of the Nashvile pop-country types (just like in rock'n roll days). I think we hear it differently. Like rhythm and blues and blues when it arrived in the 50s (or jazz just before that) it has that 'something from another planet' feel to it. We might be much more sceptical about 'things American' than we were in 50s (well, maybe not, given the success of Starbucks, MacDonalds, the film industry, the pop world....) but this music still has the ability to take you somewhere other than Wolverhampton. And it still has the advantage over most World Music (a competitor now in the 'something from another planet' stakes) that you can understand (some of) what they are singing about. ************** I hated the whole country thing as a teenager but was gradually pulled in via Emmylou, Neil, especially the bluegrassy things on the Manassas album - that one cured me of my aversion to pedal steel! I find the country/blues/bluegrass/Old Time/'whatever you want to cal it' has a different texture to what I mainly listen to - jazz and 20th C classical - with a little overlap with British folk. Always refreshes the aural palate.

No, it's related to a song: "Til they bury me down beneath the ground With the dust and rattlin’ bones." Mark Collins – Floor Tom James Gillard – Upright Bass Bill Chambers – Electric Guitar Shane Nicholson – Resonator Guitar, Banjo, Kick Drum, Trash Can, Vocal Kasey Chambers – Vocal Some odd percussion, nonetheless. No boomerangs.

Spent some of today digging around some CDs I bought five years or so ago. This one really worked for me - good songs, a gentle folky approach: Whereas this didn't (and it wasn't just that picture on the cover of the first was far more fetching than the second!). Everything was right - interesting voices, banjos, acoustic sounds etc...but just as I recall when I first bought it I was left with no memory of any of the songs: I bought it on the back of a stirring version of 'In My Time of Darkness' on a Gram Parsons tribute album; recall being disappointed then. The singer I enjoyed most, however, was as unauthentic as the come - an Australian!: From bluegrassy to country-rock with wonderfully crafted songs. Led me to a more recent album in similar vein: Again, marvellous textures and songs that stick in your head. That's all I need.

Thanks, Aggie. I know Van Zandt. In fact I saw him perform at the Cambridge Festival back in the late-90s, not long before his death. Guy Clark too, who I like a lot.

Thanks for those. I have a few Neko Case from e-music and like them very much. The Jayhawks I need to dig out again. Really enjoyed them a few years back (especially 'Tomorrow the Green Grass'). Strangers Almanac and Heartbreaker I really liked but what I subsequently heard of Adams lost me. Hazeldine's 'Digging You Up' was another favourite. I think I stumbled on bands like Calexico, Golden Smog, Lambchop, Freakwater who seemed to promise more than I actually heard. A bit too rock for me. Will play those again. It can be a bit hard to hear this sort of thing in the UK. Tends to turn up on programmes mixed in with a lot of more conventional guitar rock - Dave Matthews Band and the like - I used to try listening but would normally give up after 20 minutes. Will keep Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt in mind. I know the names, if not the music. Spotify might help.

If styles die once they reach their sell-by date, then surely this is an argument not just for not reviving old style but not reissuing old records. That was then, this is now. The Carter Family are as irrelevant as the Carter Family Revival Band. Except people are fascinated by past musical styles. The fact that Perotin or Hildegard of Bingen are a millenium old doesn't stop people wanting to hear them. I know one of the thrills I get from music is the great diversity of approach and style. Now, where its available, you can listen to that on the original record (no cylinderr discs of Hildegard of Bingen have turned up yet as far as I know); but it can be great fun to listen to it played by a live band now. I might love Boult doing the Moeran G Minor Symphony but that doesn't mean I won't get a thrill hearing the Halle play it live. Based on the original premise of this thread (yes, I knew the 'Great Minds' would take it elsewhere), I've downloaded this disc from e-music recommended above: Enjoyed it thoroughly. Based on the young adults I know, I suspect young listeners hearing this today haven't a clue who The Byrds or the Flying Burrito Brothers were (let alone Clarence Ashley or The Stanley Brothers). But I bet they are having a ball to it. ****************** I go back to something I mentioned earlier - rapid movements forward often burn themselves out; they are frequently followed by some form of neo-classicism, a return to some sort of music from the past, before the next push forward begins. It happened with the 'back to Bach' movement, it happened when the punks went back to the rock'n roll/skiffle model after the complexities of the late 60s and 70s. I'd suggest its happening today in contemporary classical music where there's a general acceptance that somehow the audience got lost in the post 1950 period. Now listening to: Revisionist? Deviastionist? Conservative? Disnified country-rock? No idea, But it sounds great and doesn't stop me listening to any of the sources.

Just finished that myself, Steve. Confirmed all my prejudices, re-enforced all my views on the past! I found it really interesting how all these early explorers started out as modernity-phobes, convinced that authenticity could only be found in players unsullied by exposure to radio and records. She makes a very convincing case for the 'invention' of the Delta Blues. I can see why the feathers flew!

I think that might be a good point to call it a day.

Won't change your life but this is quite interesting. http://www.nmcrec.co.uk/musicmap Just click on a name you know.

It depends why one listens to music (or reads etc). To me, the social, cultural, geographical, political and temporal context is a large part of why I listen to music. I feel that societies make music through the agency of musicians. Some of those musicians are geniuses, most aren't. What interests me is what they have in common, rather than what sets a precious few apart. It's much more important to me than what you haven't quite described but nonetheless seems to be "Art". I don't want to ignore that, and try not to, but in the end it isn't what does it for me. So I can't really get too worked up about it. Perhaps if I were a trained musician I'd listen to music in a different way. Well, I suppose that, in a way, it would be my BUSINESS to do so. But that may imply simply a different kind of limitation from mine. So, well... MG I think there's a lot that is interesting there. The idea of the 'star' performer certainly predates recording (all those 19thC virtuoso pianists, opera singers etc); but 20thC recording and the business world that mediates it have used 'the individual' as the primary means of generating interest and sales. A long way from the social origins of music for ritual, church or dancing. In some respects jazz is one of the most individualistic of all, putting a premium on the brilliant soloist able to fly above anything he encounters. I think over the last couple of centuries we've been conditioned to approach music this way. The raising up of your Johnsons and Parkers (whatever their abilities and talents) to almost Christ-like levels of importance just takes this one step further. I think that in the society we live in in the West we're almost inevitably drawn to individual distinctiveness as a mark of interest and admiration. But I wonder if that is actually universal both geographically and historically. Not sure. One of the things that troubles me is the way I see this working in popular history - there's an awareness that a western audience really relates to 'interesting lives' and so quite complex events can get hung on one colourful character from the time. I'm guilty of doing this myself as a history teacher - impersonal forces don't make for riveting lessons; a flamboyant individual does. But that's an issue of presentation rather than a serious attempt to explain what might have been going on. 'The Mystery of Robert Johnson' makes much better copy than 'The socio-economic factors that led to the development of the Blues in 20thC America'.

That there have and are and will be extraordinary individuals, who have been one of the elements in shaping development - of course I accept that. I just see them as part of a much broader range of factors. And I see them as being part of their time (though not necessarily the elements that are immediately apparent on the surface). They have context. Yes, there will be an element of dialectical push and shove against prevailing mores, but I tend to go with the idea that its the socio-economic factors that largely shape things; the individuals nudge things this way or that, sometimes with mega-historic consequences (what if someone with more political acumen than Louis XVI had ascended the French throne in the 1770s?). I think the interpretation you are putting forward here, JSngry - 'The Outsider' who flies against the nature of the times and then cuts through to somewhere new is very attractive but essentially a late-18thC invention. It's also been very much the traditional interpretation since the time of Beethoven when it comes to writing musical history. Hanging it all on colourful individuals with the wider context providing background scenery.

Sound like good old 19thC Romanticism to me. The 'Great Man' theory of history.

Nothing whatsoever, as long as it is presented as such and not as the 'truth'. Claiming music created today is mere imitation of a more real music of the past suggests an attempt to nail down realities. I just think it's all much more slippery - and all the better for it. Not an exact analogy, but I've very little time for the rock music of the last 30 years, yet I still love what I grew up on in the 60s and 70s. Now I could claim this is so because rock music then had 'soul' and today it has lost it. The trouble is that people in the 70s were saying exactly the same thing about the music that was contemporary then, claiming it was a poor inheritor of the excitement of Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Little Richard.

I think that's where you and I are coming from a very different direction - the capitalisation of Shivers and the Broader Unknown remind me of Stanley Crouch's use of the term Swing in his liner notes for Wynton Marsalis. Now I know where all that comes from - but I'm an almost Dawkinesque materialist. Whilst I recognise the ability of music, painting, landscape etc to evoke feelings beyond the conscious mind - and that's why we go there - I don't hold with they idea that they do so because of anything spiritual. So the idea that a Robert Johnson or a Charlie Parker were able to enter a realm of spirituality or grace or 'Swing' that contemporary performers just can't reach just doesn't ring true to me. I think that has been read into this music over the years and almost taken as gospel.

Not at all! There's the past. And then there's history, which amounts to assembling what has survived from the past into something that tries to explain where we are now and how we got there. To my mind history is constructed, not revealed. The trouble is that we all have different ideas of what matters and so we arrange what survives to suit that picture. You can arrange it according to some determinist model that shows how we went from nothing to the inevitable perfection of the future (call it communist utopia or the Kingdom of God); or you can arrange it to demonstrate a fall from grace. The idea that music today is but a shadow of what once was (be it a longing for the Busch Quartet or Bukka White or Walter Pardon or Lester Young) is an interpretation that falls into the latter category. I think those who hold that view are emotionally drawn to the idea of the inherent superiority of things past; they then assemble the evidence to prove it. Nor do I buy into the contrary view of inevitable progress. I'm enough of a woolly-minded liberal to draw my entertainment from the past and the present.

Not doubting that, Jsngry. But we're talking about two different things. Historical significance and pleasure derived from music. You can amass the historical evidence to demonstrate that Parker was more musically and historically significant than Adderley (or Charlie Patton than Corey Harris) with ease. But that does not mean that if you listen 'properly' that you will inevitably prefer the former over the latter. When I refer to the invention of the past I'm referring to the larger-than-life, mythical attributes projected onto astounding musicians (as if they needed it) - the sort of thing that buries the likes of Robert Johnson or Parker. And I think it encourages dishonesty - I always chuckle when a new listener to jazz proclaims a total conversion experience to Parker or Coltrane. There's often an element of learnt response there - the books tell me these were giants, wow I am filled with divine grace! Comes across as being just a bit too eager to join the club. Can I stress that I am not accusing you or Allen (or anyone else on this thread) of that sort of fabrication. I might disagree profoundly with many of your views, but the honesty of your love of the music you care for shines right through. And that is far more powerful than any dismissal of music you don't care for - to me at least.

Marvellous little story told on a BBC programme about the UK blues boom a couple of weeks back. When Muddy Waters first played in Britain he arrived with electric guitar, plugged in and did what he was doing back home. Lots of grumbling from the blues/folk purists who expected him on acoustic. When he next appeared a few years later he played acoustic. By that time the UK had caught up with his electric records. Lots of grumbling about not hearing him play electric. Ever anxious to please his audience Muddy Waters asked, totally bemused, 'What do they want?'

There used to be folk clubs in Britain - one in Nottingham called the Nottingham Traditional Music Club - that had rules about authenticity that were almost Stalinist in their rigour. Only source songs/tunes, no Dylan songs or self-composed things, no guitars or new-fangled instruments. No revisionism! No deviationism! They were inventing the past.

Interesting choice of metaphors - the implication is that you have been 'saved' and if I would just follow your path I could be too! Sorry! Prefer to follow my own path! I do have a couple of Hemphill records - they haven't clicked yet, but in time they might, probably if I come at them from a different direction. But if that happens it will be because I somehow connect with their inherent qualities, not because they lie on the righteous path. **************** Around the time I got interested in jazz (mid-70s) I also got interested in English/Irish/Scottish folk music. Now this was already 15 years on from the 50s folk revival (and several decades on from Vaughan Williams and Grainger out there collecting source singers). What I heard was a vibrant, exciting, very different music from what was commercially available. But I recall hardcore traditionalists turning their nose up and insisting we should listen to the surviving source singers - there were still a fair few who had grown up learning music in the isolation of Sussex or Suffolk, supposedly unsullied by comnmerce (though it's interesting to read Bob Copper talking about his love of popular music on the radio and going up to London to hear Louis Armstrong in the 20s). Today we're at least a generation on from the musicians I enjoyed (and who were already considered derivative by the hardliners). And there's a whole new generation of young people singing those songs, playing those tunes. And still the hardliners grumble about how they are but a pale reflection of what went before. I hold to the view that the hardliners have invented much of the past (not the quiality of the music, just its near mythical unapproachability) and are now using that invention to besmirch the musicians of the present. There are plenty I don't care for; but also many who sing songs or play tunes that I've heard played many times before by older musicians, yet they still send a shiver down my back. There's a place for academic study. But when the chips are down I trust that shiver over grand theories. Of course, not everyone will hear or feel it. But it doesn't mean it's not there.

Some sort of medicine? Outside my cultural reference points!

Thus the rambles. They're the rambles I've chosen to take, often off on completely (for me) unbeaten paths, suggested by others or as a result of a chance hearing. Suggest to me an interesting ramble and I might well take it. Tell me I ought to be taking the ramble you favour over the one my instincts are leading me to and I stop paying attention. I recall my teachers telling me that I shouldn't waste my time listening to Led Zeppelin, I should listen to Beethoven. Eventually I learnt they were completely right about the second part, completely wrong about the first.

Love these records - at a time when Ellington records were not easy to come by I bought a couple of these. The sound isn't brilliant but much more than acceptable if you are used to hearing music from this era. I love the way they are paced - well known things, suites, fresh off the block short pieces. I don't need to replace what I've got, but anyone unfamiliar should buy without hesitation.