Cosmic Music of Burritos, Byrds and Scruggs

Rummaging around the internet I stumbled on Christine's Tune by the Flying Burrito Brothers, and a performance of You Ain't Goin Nowhere by the Byrds and Earl Scruggs.

These two performances are just stunning to me. Talk about your 'roots' music or your 'alt country', it don't get more rootsy or more alt. Sneaky Pete's solos with the fuzzbox remind us that putting a guitarist like Nels Cline together with Wilco should appear completely natural.

Let me quote extensively from Joel Cohen's liner notes to "An American Christmas":

Where, we may ask, are the songs the mass media forgot to promote? Where are the true and good works of the American spirit? Why are they so hard to come by? The answer, at least in part, has to do with the way we tend in this country to become estranged from our own roots. For in fact, our music history has been written wrong, and our past denied. No wonder it takes some effort to locate our best music. Our past denied? That is a heavy accusation, and a hard one to prove all up and down the line: but let us test it with one work that was highly respected in its (fairly recent) day: Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, American Supplement (New York, 1941). ... We began with religious music; but American sacred song is not the only area in which almost everything real and vital in our music history is ignored or written off by the official Grove's chronicle. Stephen Collins Foster does get an entry, but there is nothing on Joplin (Grove's does allow, paternalistically, that "in the future the various colleges for Negroes will become able to magnify training so as to produce decided results.") Charles Ives (b. 1874) does not exist for the 1941 Grove's, not even in the rapid survey of post-1900 activity, but Deems Taylor (b. 1885) has an entry, and there are elogious articles on Edward MacDowell and Mrs. H.H.A. Beach (the latter with a full-page photo). And don't even think of looking for Jelly Roll Morton's (b. 1885) name in these paler-than-thou pages. Conclusion: Our official music history has misled us. The finest of the wheat has too often been thrown aside, and much energy is spent cataloguing and canonising the chaff. Americans, awake! We have one of the most rich, diverse, and challenging musical civilisations on this planet! We also, unfortunately, have a collective inferiority complex abour popular culture, and a dreary, stifling tendency to make "official" thoughts and "correct" attitudes replace the spontaneous movements of the soul. As a result, the media and the official circuits of distribution often ignore what is best in our musical heritage, and the public has been miseducated to prefer counterfeit culture to the real thing. Much of American music defies classification -- that is in large part why academic historians have such trouble dealing with it.

Defies classification indeed!

Christine's Tune



You Ain't Goin' Nowhere