• Increase font size
  • Decrease font size
  • Default font size
  • mar08 color
  • dec07 color
  • nov07 color
  • oct07 color
  • sep07 color
  • default color
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010 11:37 am CDT
Options
Home arrow Columns arrow Friday On My Mind: Going Underground
Friday On My Mind: Going Underground Print E-mail
Written by Jim Walsh   
Thursday, August 9, 2007 at 11:53 PM

 

A few things we can agree on about the 35W bridge collapse: 

  1. It shouldn’t happen in America.
  2. It is a historic moment, one that cultural revolutions and real change are made of.
  3. It made neighbors out of strangers.
  4. It made you want to live for the moment, treat each day as a gift, etc., because you never know.

The history books will say as much. What they’ll miss is that at a time when the government (and the muzzled watchdog media) was on the hook for the psychic if not structural implosion of its cities, there was a small but tenacious old-timey music scene happening in old weird America.

Image
Meg Ashling - Photo by Steven Cohen
In Minneapolis, it’s songwriters such as Mike Gunther, Meg Ashling, Eliza Blue, Gabe Barnett, Jennifer Warner, and Jenny Dalton, and groups such as the Get-Up Johns, Black Audience, the Roe Family Singers, and the Floorbirds – all of whom make music that walks the same graveyards as The Handsome Family, The Carter Family, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and so many dear and dearly departeds, armed as they are with acoustic guitars that could be cigar-box guitars, banjos, stand-up basses, fiddles, harmonicas, washboards, and tunes about life, love, cheating, whiskey, death, and taxes.

“Because it’s so different from what’s going on right now,” is how Ashling put it to me at a recent basement hootenanny, when I asked why there was yet another resurgence of this timeless music, and why someone her age (early 20s) would embrace it. She wasn’t glib; she said it with a seriousness that suggested she was born too late and into a world gone stupid, and so knew implicitly what Greil Marcus meant when he said, of his phrase “Old Weird America”:

“The weirdness is that it’s a story that people will always be trying to figure out. It will always be new.”

Image
Get Up Johns - Photo by Tony Nelson
That’s Marcus talking in Rani Singh‘s documentary Old, Weird, America: The Harry Smith Anthology Of American Folk Music, which screens as part of The Sound Unseen Festival next week. Hardly a relic piece, the film is decidedly of this moment, as are the songs, as rendered by the likes of Beck, Steve Earle, Nick Cave, and Elvis Costello, who jokes about some feedback at Smith’s tribute concert, “This is why they kept electricity out of (acoustic music) -- for as long as possible.”

To be sure, America may never have been weirder than it is at the moment, what with most of it going 150 miles an hour, plugged in and tuned out 24-7. Maybe it takes a disaster to get us to slow down. And maybe this moment, as is the case with all unprecedented moments, deserves music that sounds like an old bridge giving, out and the citizenry not giving up.

Or, as Smith himself says in the documentary: “My dreams came true. I saw America change through music.”
Last Updated: Thursday, December 6, 2007 at 08:00 AM
 
[ Back ]
Advertisement
Advertisement

Backstage Blog

Advertisement
Advertisement