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It Still Moves
Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music
By Amanda Petrusich Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2008 Amanda Petrusich
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5755-7
CHAPTER 1
Ain't It a Pity, I'm in New York City!
Here is a picture of the world: It is a vast globe or ball surrounded on all sides by a sky sparkling with stars. Its surface is divided into land and water. It has upon it two great Continents, five Oceans, many Seas, and Lakes, and Rivers, and Islands, and Mountains. The waters are inhabited by fish and the land is inhabited by man and animals; the land is also covered with trees, and plants of various kinds.
— Picture of the World, lithograph, 1833
I live in Brooklyn, New York, in a gently gentrifying neighborhood called Boerum Hill, eight blocks east of the river and a fifteen-minute subway ride from downtown Manhattan. Last June, I moved to Brooklyn from Charlottesville, Virginia, tugging sagging cardboard boxes through summer swelter, squishing black ants with my flip-flops, balancing potted plants on sloping windowsills, nailing pictures to brick walls. Clawing open a crate of LPs and plugging in an old suitcase record player, I broadcast the hottest songs I could think of: thick, crackling Delta blues.
Brooklyn is removed from mass American culture in complicated ways and consequently feels intensely foreign to the outsider, no matter how askew your trucker hat, how immense your mental Rolodex of dollar-PBR nights, how frequent your trips to the borough's lone Target. Despite growing up only thirty-five miles due north of Times Square, and having squirmed through graduate school at Columbia University, I still feel unprepared for New York City every time I trip out my front door, scrunching my nose to the smell of street-boiled, urine-soaked trash, corking my ears with headphones, curling myself away from sirens, body taut and defensively posed.
A year later, I'm still learning the mechanics of this new place, walking the streets, sniffing, gawking, searching. Today's incessant, soggy rain does little to alleviate the city's inherent muck, and I think, again, about how New York City is maybe the only place in the world that seems dirtier when it pours. Everything thickens: cigarette butts swell into tar-kissed mush, brown puddles crowd the sidewalk. Rain might shine and polish lesser cities, but here, water lands like shellac, leaden and sticky, solidifying our mess. Afterward, the air bloats, becoming too thick to breathe. It's hard not to hear My Morning Jacket's Jim James's high, desperate howl, and shiver: "All your life / Is obscene." But this is the same story everyone tells: living in New York is serious business. It screams, it stinks, it hurts; people push and shoot and kick and grab and yell and dance and holler. The city stings. You are not welcome.
Luckily for me, Brooklyn is not all sludge. I do not miss parking lots or driveways or property lines or cold, suburban isolation. As Ian Frazier writes, "Like many Americans, I fear living in a nowhere, in a place that is no-place; in Brooklyn, that doesn't trouble me at all." Here there are magnificent bookstores, and too many rock clubs, and grain silos where you can watch packs of theremin players congregate, zapping one another with sound waves. In Brooklyn, on the streets, there are fewer secrets, and I judge whole lives from my living room, chewing a pen and listening to Ike Turner records, pressing my palms into dirty window-panes, nose flat to the glass. There are people fighting on the sidewalk; women carrying big, plastic shopping bags; men with newspapers; dogs on leashes of thin white string. Young professionals frown, trudging home from the subway, clutching overstuffed briefcases and sacks of take-out shrimp pad Thai, faces long and prematurely gray, juggling duffel bags stuffed with damp gym clothes, shifting their work from one arm to the next. They are tired. Women with toddlers and sacks of produce smile. The man in the beige trench coat smokes a joint, leans against a street sign, crosses his ankles.
On Friday nights, I fall asleep to Brooklyn Cable Access Television, where Lebroz James, a twentysomething white kid with a beard combed out past his nose, hosts my favorite program: an unpredictable variety show wherein James scrambles eggs, yaps about titties, lifts weights, and superimposes his dancing image over Gwen Stefani videos taped straight from MTV (complete with TRL pop-ups). In the afternoons, I buy chicken empanadas from street vendors, eating them with one hand, smearing excess grease on my thrift store jeans. I read back issues of The New Yorker on steaming subway platforms, my fingers sticking to the pages until I give up and slump over, fanning my damp face, silently commiserating with the woman in nursing scrubs pressing a bottle of Poland Spring to her forehead. I coerce old pals into packing peanut butter sandwiches and thermoses of lemonade and camping out for free concerts in Prospect Park; I huff over the Brooklyn Bridge, kicking at wayward boards with my sneakers, snapping group pictures for giddy tourists. I wander down Bergen Street at night, peeking in the windows of million-dollar brownstones, coveting crystal chandeliers and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. I smile at kids in huge shorts doing pull-ups on crosswalk signals, their white sneakers dangling, thwapping against the yellow pole. At the end of my block, I watch residents of Gowanus Houses, one of New York's largest housing projects, trickle into the street, slicing fruit and pumping hot summer jams, gathering around our local bodega, nodding their heads at passersby. It's trite but awfully true: Brooklyn is bloated with weird, magnificent life.
Regardless, possibly the biggest upside to living in New York is that nearly everywhere else in the country feels easier when (and if) you leave. Now I understand why New Yorkers make the very best travelers. Here outsider status becomes a perpetual part of the daily web of living. Suddenly, feeling a little bit misplaced seems comparably tame. The armor is already built-in; we hold our bags to our hips and keep our heads down.
In 1942, the Texas-born scholar Alan Lomax went "song hunting" in the Mississippi River basin, armed with a missive from the Smithsonian and the same five-hundred-pound portable recording machine that he first used with his father, the folklorist John Lomax, in 1933. Before his death in 2002, Alan Lomax recorded stacks and stacks of quasi-obscure regional folk songs, beginning with the American South and, eventually, stretching his net most of the way around the world. To some, Alan Lomax was an unapologetic imperialist, selfishly scouring foreign cultures for folk songs, making a career out of capturing and lionizing and publishing and picking apart indigenous anthems that did not belong to him — but Lomax also saved hundreds of folk songs from grim, untimely deaths, offering subsequent generations tiny, mysterious bits of art.
For many modern folklorists, a wariness of the Lomaxes' methods still lingers. (There is much mostly unsubstantiated fuss about the family's self-serving agenda, a controversy that began after John refused to sign over his part of the copyright to Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter's "Goodnight, Irene" — which John recorded at a Louisiana state prison in 1933, and with which the Weavers scored a colossal hit in 1950 — despite the Ledbetter family's continued impoverishment.) But both John and Alan Lomax understood folk songs; they felt them in their teeth. I admire their bone-deep fervor — the way they craved these songs — as much as I admire their bravery, and, to an extent, their nerve. The Lomaxes understood that America has always been a frontier country. One quick glance at an elementary school social studies syllabus makes the point — Daniel Boone, Sacagawea, Thomas Freeman, Peter Custis, Zebulon Montgomery Pike, Stephen Long, Jedediah Smith, Nathaniel Wyeth, John Audubon. Pillage, claim, steal. Advance, acknowledge, apologize.
There is a famous black-and-white portrait of Alan Lomax, taken in 1941: The room is dim, and Lomax is perched in front of his typewriter, legs splayed. A box of typing paper, an ashtray, and a coffee press crowd a tiny writing table. He is wearing a shirt and tie; a cigarette droops out of the far left corner of his mouth. Blank-faced, Lomax gapes at his paper, hair mussed. I like to stare at his hands: each index finger is pointing straight out, poised to peck, taking careful aim at his keyboard. Along with his father, Alan Lomax is often considered responsible for the preservation and distribution of much of southern American music, and, subsequently, could arguably claim ownership for the past fifty years of rock 'n' roll. Still: here he is, typing with two fingers, like a little kid. Somehow, it makes his work seem less monumental, less intimidating, less dirty.
John and Alan Lomax might be America's most renowned song-catchers, but the notion of trekking into mountains and valleys, poaching and doting over and preserving ancient songs, was hardly a novel endeavor, even in the 1930s. Nor is it extinct. Scholars and academics still toil in libraries and archives and cornfields, rolling up their trousers and wiggling out of their corduroy blazers, tying cardigans around their waists, trying their best to help these songs endure. Part of that impulse comes from the preservationist instinct of people who read too many books; part is imperialist; part is love.
There is something about indigenous, rural music that invites myth-telling, that demands movement and discovery. Like so many other things, this is as much about the quest as it is about the prize. Where music comes from — the landscapes and faces and churches and industries and seasons that create and preserve certain systems of sound — is the real story. It is my perpetual and unmistakable failure as a music critic that I am infinitely more interested in personal details than in studio settings or guitar pedals or synthesizer type or whether or not something has been recorded in 3/4 time. I would rather discuss what the weather was like in Portland the month a band was recording, if the bassist's sister had her baby, what everyone ate for breakfast, or how hard it was to get off work. These are narratives that can't be parsed exclusively through song lyrics and chord changes and backbeats and bass lines.
So in order to get closer to the songs I love — Americana music, craggy, tottering, uncontrollable country, blues, and folk — to see where they started and what they've since inspired, to fully understand the ways in which these songs have been perverted and rearranged and revisited and reimagined in the decades since their creation, there was only ever one place for me to go.
Periodically, in interviews or conversations about American music, my counterparts will shift their eyes, lean close to my face, and whisper — voices deep, conspiratorial, hushed — a curt proclamation: "All great music comes from the South." If they are feeling particularly plucky, they will fold their hands and add: "And literature, too." A pause. "I mean, you know."
Precisely how and why the American South has shaped and nurtured so much successful art is something sociologists and anthropologists will still be bickering about a half century from now. All I know is that it is mostly true. That particular chunk of rock and water and dirt and kudzu, where people speak in warbles — voices stuck in perpetual song, all slow consonants and giggly cadences, singing, always — and eat too much pie and drink Mountain Dew with spoonfuls of sugar stirred in, bears wild and ridiculous fruit. This is why I decide to climb into my scratched-up Honda Civic and start driving, leaving New York City to learn more about where the songs I love come from and, when I am very lucky, why. My mission is relatively simple: How are our collective ideas about Americana changing? Where did they start? How are those notions preserved, celebrated, milked for profit? How do the places we come from — our hometowns, our regions, our city blocks — influence the sounds we make? And, most important, how is Americana music transforming to accommodate the massive cultural and geographical shifts in the American landscape?
I will chug eagerly (and haphazardly) through Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Georgia, zooming up and down big highways and country lanes, shooting left and right, going in circles, pushing down, down, down, following little lines on maps, reading signs, squinting at blacktop — looking for music, and looking for more roads. Because every good story about America is also a story about the road.
I sometimes think that there is nothing more emblematic of America's base ideology — liberty and justice for all — than its indiscriminate, empowering, hopelessly communal roads. Every day, America's populace segregates and defines, marking neighborhoods and claiming territory, but our highways remain inherently shared experiences, both in memory and in present tense, all tax dollars and shit-spitting potholes. These highways — thin red and blue lines etched into maps, scrawled onto napkins, shouted across gas station parking lots, tucked into wedding invitations — unite us in perpetual motion. For the contemporary American, the language of the road is satisfyingly concrete, unambiguous, and hard: north, south, east, west. Interstate 81 to 64 to 29 to 10. Left at the dairy stand, right at the split oak, straight past the McDonald's parking lot, circle around the baseball field.
The notion of the American road as an unregulated gateway to freedom has been codified and repeated so many times throughout modern American literature and history that road stories have practically become their own genre. The stereotypical narrator is the lonely male (the man on the road is the stuff of American legend; the woman on the road is the stuff of teenage fantasy), preoccupied with achieving catharsis or reinvention, desperately fulfilling an awkward, unnamed quest for authenticity. I understand: Here, moving, shooting fast through the countryside, pressing my foot to the gas pedal, waving to the tractor driver, I am real, and my world is navigable. Driving is both freeing and clarifying; you are steering your own journey, controlling, in very physical and intellectual ways, your trajectory. The road contains the potential for change, for discovery, for adventure. It is the ultimate antidote to plain old life.
There is something deliberate about that kind of idolization — everyone knows that good road stories make the finest fodder for barstool rants, best barked with a cigarette sliding out of the side of your mouth, boots striped with dirt, voice thick and grumbly from sleep deprivation and too many cups of whiskey. It is shameful escapism, romanticized. See Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Alexis de Tocqueville. See Jack Kerouac write, in 1957's seminal On the Road: "What did it matter? I was a young writer and I wanted to take off ... Somewhere along the line I knew there'd be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me." Or, as William Least Heat-Moon explains, in 1983's Blue Highways: "A man who couldn't make things go right could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life. Chuck routine. Live the real jeopardy of circumstance. It was a question of dignity." Or, as the novelist Larry McMurtry admits, in 2000's Roads: "My destination is also my route, my motive only an interest in having the nomad in me survive a little longer."
These are lonely choices, which is also why they yield such rich stories. Driving a U.S. interstate is not a particularly social endeavor. It's possible to drive eight hundred miles without ever speaking to anyone, charging gas and wadding up the receipts, nodding to the convenience store clerk as he stuffs your Snickers bars and pretzels into a plastic sack, sleeping in the backseat, barely looking up from your book when the waitress refills your coffee cup. Driving this way, alone, it's easy to develop faux relationships with the cars around you, dreaming up adventures for their captains, squinting into rearview mirrors, trying your best to snag a glimpse of face. Who are they yelling at on their cell phones? What brand of cigarette did she inch out of the pack with her lips? The graduation tassel wagging back and forth, the STEAL YOUR FACE sticker half-peeling off the bumper, the tire rims, the radar detector stuck to the windshield — where did it all come from?
Eventually, I find myself asking the same questions of our roads, and here is what I find out: In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, high on the post–World War II economic boom, scribbled his name on the Federal Aid Highway Act, guaranteeing federal funding for the majestic interstates (the government covered 90 percent of the net costs, with individual states ponying up the rest). The project's official name was the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways, and it was intended, at least in part, to facilitate the movement of troops and supplies during wartime (General Eisenhower had been impressed by the efficiency of the German autobahn). Rather than charging through, interstates are built to circle major metropolitan areas — the system's original designers understood that American cities could someday be bombed, which would inhibit the flow of essential interstate traffic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from It Still Moves by Amanda Petrusich. Copyright © 2008 Amanda Petrusich. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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