Americana

My favorite kind of music is what today is called Americana.  It is an amalgam of folk, country rock and authentic old-time balladry.  The instrumentation is spare, a six or twelve string guitar, an upright bass, a fiddle and some vocal harmonies. The themes of this music are  life’s unfairness, of a love of the land, of living with integrity and of hearts full or hearts broken.  When I was nine or ten I found myself drawn this stuff because the kid’s afternoon shows on NET now PBS would feature people like Pete Seeger, Jean Ritchie, Peter, Paul and Mary and various balladeer and banjo pickers.Hearing these kinds of songs again and again just wired my brain to love this stuff.

When I got to high school I found my way into things like the Grateful Dead and the New Riders of the Purple Sage.  American Beauty and the NRPS’s eponymous first album were the soundtrack of so much of what I did.  When I got to college it was stuff like the Eagles, Firefall, Poco, and even more hard core stuff.  I went and saw Vassar Clements,  Roger McGuinn, John Hartford and Leo Kottke.  As I got to law school I discovered Merle Haggard, Don Williams, George Jones and George Strait.  “Amarillo by Morning” is an all time favorite.

The best of the best, the top of the heap of all that I listened to was Richard Thompson.  “I Want to See the Bright Lights”, as an album was a revelation.  How can you listen to to things like, “Dimming of the Day”, “Vincent Black Lighting”, and “Keep Your Distance” and not know this guy, this Sufi mystic, was the real deal?  He hits it all, love, theft, death, desire and wistful regret with nary a false note. 

For me, and I think for many of my generation, the words of this sub genre were our equivalent of Keats, Yates, and the whole cannon of English speaking poets.  You really can’t talk about this stuff without mentioning Bob Dylan.  If you hear, “Girl from the North County” don’t you just get the longing and loss laid out in those lyrics. Can’t you just sense the permanence of the separation of the girl from the narrator of the song?

From obscure singers singing Child ballads to Tom Rush singing “The Panama Limited” to the Old Crow Medicine Show singing “Wagon Wheel” I think when you listen to this music you can feel something you have felt or have sensed others were feeling. It isn’t the only kind of music I like but it is what I return to again and again.  Yes my favorite concert is a toss up between Bruce Springsteen in a 6,000 set hockey rink and Miles Davis and a symphony hall, but the stuff that I always come back to are ballads played on guitars and sung with a twang.