"...nightfall with no place to sleep."

Last night I watched the Wim Wenders 1984 movie Paris, Texas. It’s about Travis, a man found wandering in the Mojave desert and his attempts to reconnect with his 8 year old son who he left 4 years ago. As they reconnect he decides to take the boy and try to find his estranged wife. I’d recommend it to anyone. One of my favorite aspects of the film was the drawn out shots of desert nothingness and views of LA. These shots are backed by slide guitar tunes that, while I’d never heard them before, were instantly recognizable. They play in our heads at the sight of the dry, dusty parts of the United States. It’s the soundtrack to poverty, lonesomeness, the desert.

The soundtrack was clearly influenced by Blind Willie Johnson’s 1930 song “Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground.” It’s one of the most mournful songs I’ve ever heard, possibly the most mournful. The lyrics, comprised of long, sad moans that you can feel vibrate in your chest are unintelligible. The guitar work is pretty sparse, just a guitar tuned to open D, played with a knife as a slide (as the legend goes). Sources say that the song, while not having any real lyrics, is about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, with the guitar being the preacher and the moans being the congregation’s response. This song is the blues; I’ve never heard it done better or more real.

In 1977 Carl Sagan compiled a collection of records to be included on the Voyager spacecrafts. The records were included in order to give a sample of the diversity of the sounds of Earth should any intelligent life come upon them. Along with greetings in 55 languages, the calls of various animals and sounds common to life on earth, he included 27 selections of popular music. “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground” was included in order to represent a human expression of loneliness. In Sagan’s own words: “Johnson's song concerns a situation he faced many times, nightfall with no place to sleep. Since humans appeared on Earth, the shroud of night has yet to fall without touching a man or woman in the same plight.”

The song is posted below. Download it, sit back with a hot cup of coffee, stare out your window, listen and enjoy. If you don’t feel something from this, well I don’t know what to say.

www.mediafire.com/?3d2242l3e4d

A Bunch of Sticks Cannot be Broken- A Khmer Proverb

In 2007 I spent time sightseeing and visiting family in Cambodia. Thirty years of war have certainly left their mark on the country, particularly in the form of landmines. For years it was one of the most mined countries on the planet and while local and international efforts to clear them have had excellent results, they continue to linger. According to a BBC report from a few years ago, it's estimated that outside of the major cities 40% of the villages have a mine problem. Worse, 85% of the population work as farmers. All of this has lead to a population at least 40,000 (one in 250) chon pika or amputees. To the government's credit all amputees in Phnomh Penh are given prosthetics, but as the statistics show, Phnom Penh's population is not really the issue. Life is tough for much of the country's population and it's especially tough for the chon pika who, often unable to farm or perform manual labor become beggars.

Angkor Wat is the place every visitor to Cambodia sees and I was no exception. It's absolutely astounding but I don't think I can say anything about the temples that hasn't been written a thousand times before. There is a lot of sound to take in as you walk around the sites: tourists and their guides speaking in a multitude of languages, Khmer people hawking t-shirts, postcards and drinks, the ever present put-put-put of motorbikes and tuk-tuks, chirps and screeches from birds and, if you're lucky, the sounds of tros, zithers and hand drums playing traditional Khmer music.

That these musicians even know these songs is a miracle. In an attempt to wipe out any trace of traditional Khmer culture, the Khmer Rouge targeted musicians and artists for extermination. Even more incredible is the fact that many of these musicians are landmine victims. I spent close to an hour watching a group of men perform, all of them either armless, legless, blind or some combination thereof and it stuck with me just as much as the temples and ruins that loomed around us. I was able to purchase a CD of them performing Khmer Wedding Music, easily one of my favorite souvenirs from the entire 6 month trip. I can't find much information on the performers and I doubt the CD is available in the US but the music should be heard. While the songs are songs of joy (I'd imagine, seeing as they are wedding songs), the context creates an air of sorrow, a feeling I gathered from many of my experiences in Cambodia. Regardless of the emotion it conjures in you, it's beautiful music. If you ever find yourself in Cambodia track these men down and buy some of their music, you won't regret it.

This song is called "Bandeotkantoang."

www.mediafire.com/?mzxmqnznazn

Rather be a sailor way out on the sea...

I'm going to start this off with the song that got me hooked on old time music: I've Got No Honey Baby Now by Frank Blevins and His Tarheel Rattlers.

During the fall 2005 I left the US to study on the Semester at Sea program, an experience which unquestionably altered my life. Before leaving my friend Tony gave me a mixtape called "The Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat." I spent a lot of time sitting on the deck and listening to it while staring out at whatever expanse of ocean we cruised across and taking in the immensity of the ever loving world.

Among groups like Minor Threat, Johnny Cash, Rage Against the Machine, Black Flag, Hank Williams Sr. and III and picking up right after a really fuzzed out early Flaming Lips song, this song grabbed me on the first listen. I owned and enjoyed Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music but this old time tune... this was like nothing else. The song was so raw it was like nothing I had ever heard before. I could feel where the singer's voice was coming from in my chest. The fiddling remained in my head between listens and the rhythm laid down by the banjo and guitar was fantastically choppy and primitive. I couldn't make out the lyrics all that well, in fact I thought at the beginning he says something about a dirty old hound when he says "I didn't know how." What I could make out was "Rather be a sailor/way out on the sea/than to be a married man/with a baby on my knee." As a young man with the oceans of the world churning all around me, this line made a lot of sense. I wonder what sort of sense it made to the 17 year old boy who sang it into a beat old microphone one afternoon in the late 1920's in North Carolina.

Here's an mp3 of the tune. This song is what actually made me want to pick up the fiddle, which I did about 2 and a half years ago. I still haven't learned how to play this tune.


http://www.mediafire.com/?zmymntmkzmz

Everything (I think) the Tarheel Rattlers recorded is on available on a compilation called "Music From the Lost Provinces." It's one of my absolute favorite records and I'd suggest to anyone with an interest in real, raw fiddle tunes.

Here we go...

Being unemployed has driven me to start writing about stuff and posting it on the Internet for anyone to read. I was listening to one of the Secret Museums of Mankind compilations this morning and really just admiring how songs can sometimes feel so poignant nearly 100 years after they've been recorded, even if they're recorded in a language of which I have no understanding (in fact, the song that was playing was sung in Georgian.)

Towards the end of college I got very into old time American folk music and while the new stuff is great, it somehow can't compare to the likes of Uncle Dave Macon or Charlie Poole. Work like theirs goes beyond just music. It's an artifact and I mean that in the most positive way. It creates a direct audio connection to the lives our ancestors lived. Someone's great great grandmother in Greece fell in love to Marika Papagika. Someone's great great grandfather in New York City reminisced about the country he left behind while the strains of Poland's Cyganska Orchestra Stefana played.

Since discovering this sort of music I've loved thinking of the people who were touched by the songs of their time and I'm going to use this space to share it as well as my thoughts on it.