American Music

"Do you like American music?" the Violent Femmes asked on their fifth album, Why Do Birds Sing?. Well, do you? The Femmes answered in the affirmative - "We like all kinds of music but I like American music best, baby" - but the reason they gave seemed a pretty wierd one: "every time I look in that ugly lake it reminds me of me".

The idea of American music as a lake reflecting an ugly self isn't the only strange definition that's been given though. This is the picture of traditional American music conjured up by Bob Dylan in 1966: "Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes from legends, bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables and death. ... All these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to die. .... I mean, you'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact ... In that music is the only true, valid death you can feel today off a record player. ... It has to do with a purity thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy."

Greil Marcus has pointed out that this 'traditional music' - the ancient ballads of mountain music, songs like Buell Kazee's East Virginia, Clarence Ashley's Coo Coo Bird or Dock Boggs' Country Blues - are what Dylan and the Band tapped into when recording The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding and The Band, music which Marcus describes as a "kaleidoscope of American music". "The "acceptance of death" that Dylan found in "traditional music"", says Marcus, "is simply a singer's insistence on mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about; it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back." Or a lake that reflects an ugly self?

But maybe that's only one half of the picture. Anything that comes from bibles and where swans turn into angels can't be all void and ugliness, can't be all bad. In 1985 Dylan expanded on the fundamental impact of the Bible on America and on his work: "... the Bible runs through all U.S. life, whether people know it or not. It's the founding book. The founding fathers' book anyway. People can't get away from it. You can't get away from it wherever you go. Those ideas were true then and they're true now. They're scriptural, spiritual laws. I guess people can read into that what they want. But if they're familiar with those concepts they'll probably find enough of them in my stuff. Because I always get back to that." Maybe what you get in traditional American music is that combination of sin and salvation that Peter Case said characterised his debut album.

Dylan maintained back in 1966 that this kind of American music was not going to die so where can we find it today? There are a loosely affiliated group of bands and songwriters - T.Bone Burnett, Peter Case, Mark Heard, The Innocence Mission, Maria McKee, Julie & Buddy Miller, Sixteen Horsepower, Violent Femmes, Gillian Welch, Jim White, Victoria Williams - for whom fear and threat, mystery and enamour - the twin poles of American music - again and again show up in their music and in relationships. The affiliations between these artists branch out in a way that cries out for a Rock Family Tree mapping production, songwriting and session credits together with personal relationships.

In this way too they take us back to Dylan, The Band, The Basement Tapes and Greil Marcus' surely incomplete statement that they show "the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back". The whole point about The Basement Tapes was that a bunch of mates sat around making the music they loved the way they loved it and when they liked. If Dylan was staring into a void then he wasn't doing it alone. And wasn't this true too of the music that they drew on, that it was more the music of a community than of individuals. We talk more about Appalachian traditions or the bluegrass Bristol area of Tennessee and East Carolina than we do about Dock Boggs or Clarence Ashley. A relational approach to work and life seems important to Williams, Burnett, Heard and the other musicians that share their musical vision and this is so although their relationships feature brokenness, pain and loss. Relationships and a community of music makers seem a vital part then of this tradition of American music.

So there we have it. Fear and threat on the one hand, mystery and enamour on the other - the twin poles of American music. Legends, bibles, plagues, vegetables and death, roses growing out of people's brains, lovers who are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're all in the mix. These are songs of sin and salvation as sung by the wild, unshod, soot-covered orphans of God.

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16 Horsepower - Black Soul Choir.