"Not Small Talk."

Sunday, September 2, 2012

On Charley Patton, Field Recordings, Dock Boggs, Et Al.

Those first ones to get it down on wax, what they produced is to popular music what Genesis is to the written word.  They didn't have any antecedents, not any that we would ever be privy to, at least.  Theirs is the original tale, and we can never do what they did.  No pretense to authenticity on our part could ever suffice.  All we can do is to riff on the lines they created, the handful of earthy metaphors.  No one could ever create music now that is free of the influence of the commercial recording industry in the way that they did when they started it all, that influence for them being limited to the immediate phenomenon of the live bodies making the deals and cutting it all down to the wax. 

There is no such thing as folk music now, in the true sense of the term.

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