It's Easy To See The Problem There

Debussy is cranking from out of the speakers I found by the side of the road about 2 years ago; which sat around collecting dust until the turntable arrived, and then the Panasonic entertainment center was found in the Sacred Dumpster, missing its 2 speakers, and with at least one of the dual cassette bays damaged.

I holds 5 CD's which is cool, because I can pretend I'm putting in the 5 CD's that I would take with me on a 30 year space journey if I was only allowed the extra weight of 5 CD's to be playable on the solar powered Discman...

Or, if stranded on a deserted island with my own wind-powered CD deck, and a suitcase washes up on shore, and in it were 5 CD's (and the rest stuffed with marijuana). Which 5 would you wish they were, type of thing.

Ma Mabel's Family

I might have to make room for a "The Carter Family" one...

I have been binge listening to they, who were big in the 1930's and pretty much into the 1940's and beyond.

Recently, I stuffed the Panasonic with a 4 disc "American Roots" boxed set that I somehow have, in an attempt to force feed myself stuff that was the cat's meow when it came out; back when monaural speakers might have filled people's living rooms with it. 

Ostensibly this is music that the whole nation was grooving to, through the earliest syndicates of radio music.

The World Catalog

I suppose one could think more critically that it was music that people who could afford radios, along with the electricity to plug them in to, that nurtured this form of music, more specifically, a bunch of white girls singing, type music. 

And thus the group that validated this music and actually gave it its status, wasn't really really representative of America in the 30's and 40's. 

There were disproportionate numbers of people of color who didn't own radios back then, so I had better listen to as much as I can, in case Google disappears it from The Catalog. 

I derailed myself from the American Roots 4 disc set, to check out closer, The Carter Family and their music, having made it to only the 3rd song in that collection, before deciding to go off on the tangent. That song was "Wildwood Flower."

Somehow, as a kid, growing up in Massachusetts in the 1970's, I was aware that we lived in rock and roll country. The rock station was the hub of all things youthful, and the country station was for people who hadn't been born in town, but often had moved there from "someplace out in the country."

In the case of Mr. LaBelle, he was a truck driver, and so would have been exposed to a variety of stations that play music, and might have gotten to like it that way. I remember when driving from Massachusetts to Florida in 1993, I hit a stretch of highway in North Carolina where every station that I could get to come in on my FM radio was a twangy vocal piece with steel guitars and the snare drum being played by some "hick," who would be laying his stick down horizontally on the drum head and tapping the rim with the end of it -the sound that first grabbed my ear when I heard country music, coming out of the LaBelle's garage one morning as I was walking up their street for some reason.

Supposedly, it was Jeffrey LaBelle's father (who drove a delivery truck for Black Label beer) who was working in the garage and had his radio tuned to WFGL, and that was where the "tuck, tuck, tuck" of a horizontally situated drumstick was coming from.

But, Jeffrey had admitted to the other kids in the neighborhood that he would "listen to it" sometimes. It didn't take long for word to spread that Jeff Labelle liked country music, and he was looked at slightly askance by us all, after that.

I wanna hear some accordion!

So, for now, it is The Carter Family, and there is synchronicity in the fact that I had just order a Chet Atkins guitar method book from Mel Bay, which is on its way, while I listen to Chet picking his guitar on accompaniment...kind of funny to hear perhaps the number one guitar legend in the world, totally in the background...

My hope is that I will at least be able to do spoofs of that kind of music, and make a mockery of it. Before Youtube decides to take it all down; because there is no way to describe it without "white" coming up in the description; and it's easy to see the problem there...?