One of the wickedly cool gifts I received for my birthday was the book and cd set, "The Rose and the Briar". I've been lusting after this for ages and my Mom bought it for me (mere days after I told her about it - my Mom is so cool!). Basically the cd is a collection of American ballads, from Springsteen's Nebraska to Jelly Roll Morton singing Buddy Bolton's Blues (which makes me think of Christopher Paul Curtis's great YA novel, Bud, Not Buddy although In Search of Buddy Bolden makes more sense.). The cd also includes singers like Dolly Parton, Randy Newman, Burl Ives (who my father loved) and even Jan and Dean. The book has a bunch of authors writing about the history of the songs on the Cd as well as other famous ballads. This is where the package really comes together, because the book tells you not only about the songs themselves but also about the particular performances on the cd. For example, Stanley Crouch writes about Duke Ellington and his orchestra inviting Mahalia Jackson to sing their song about the Civil Rights Movement, Come Sunday, in February 1958. It was to be "a prayer in support of the movement that Ellington and Jackson and every member of his band had been a part of since their first day on earth." Cecil Brown weighs in on one of my all time favorite ballads Frankie and Johnny (and yes, I even liked the Al Pacino/Michele Pfeiffer movie - don't hate me because I'm sometimes a romantic.) How much of the story is truth or fiction or fictionalized? And how odd is it that a violent although common enough crime would become a legendary song? You can make anything epic it seems, and every singer who has tried his hand at the song (in this case Mississippi John Hurt) somehow makes this common tragedy beautiful.
I love learning all this stuff!
And then there is Marty Robbins and El Paso. Both of my parents were big country music fans and my father had an 8 Track (I am so old) of Marty Robbins singing cowboy ballads that was played over and over and over again when I was growing up. I know all the words to El Paso (please don't ask me to sing) but never realized that Robbins himself wrote it - or that he "doesn't consider "El Paso" a country and western song. It's a cowboy song, early American folk music from the western United States. " And I never thought of that either. American folk music is not just from the south, but it lives and breathes in all corners of the country. In fact Gwenda recently wrote about ballads of Old New York, and a book that never should have been discarded as far as I'm concerned.
These songs are all American history, pieces of every part of the country and the people who lived there. And great songwriters keep telling the stories, which is how Parton and Springsteen can stand side by side with Ellington or Robbins.
It is all so cool.
Already, this is one of the best birthdays I have had in a long time, and it isn't even here yet. (I also got Sarah Vowell's Assassination Vacation and Vowell has an essay in The Rose & The Briar!) I bought the new Johnny Cash cd hit collection as a gift to myself. Excuse me as I go listen to "Hey Porter" again.
You know what? Sometimes my parents really did know what they were talking about. When it comes to music, they were both flat out awesome.
