WEBVTT - That Ain't Country 0:00:15.170 --> 0:00:29.490 Pushkin. This thing is four. My friend Chris King stands 0:00:29.810 --> 0:00:32.930 in the living room of his old house in rural Virginia. 0:00:34.250 --> 0:00:36.250 But this is where it actually gets fragile. This is 0:00:36.250 --> 0:00:39.530 like doing open heart surgery, because this is when you 0:00:39.530 --> 0:00:43.690 could slice that microscopic van. Chris takes a kitchen knife 0:00:43.730 --> 0:00:47.010 to a large package, a two by two foot cube. 0:00:49.730 --> 0:00:53.530 My friend cultivates an old timey look. He has a mustache, 0:00:53.970 --> 0:00:57.850 round towatu, shell glasses, suspenders holding up his core draws. 0:00:58.970 --> 0:01:02.730 He's approaching this job in a methodical way. Think of 0:01:02.730 --> 0:01:06.930 a nineteen thirties country doctor examining a patient. Holy shit. 0:01:08.050 --> 0:01:13.170 Inside the cube, he finds more packaging and still more. 0:01:14.490 --> 0:01:18.610 It's as if someone's playing a trick on him. Inside 0:01:18.610 --> 0:01:24.890 one box, there's another, and another, then a sandwich of 0:01:24.970 --> 0:01:30.810 cardboard and foam, and finally, in the very middle a record, 0:01:32.650 --> 0:01:41.130 just one record, shine mint copy. Holy shit. This record 0:01:41.330 --> 0:01:44.370 is ninety years old, more or less, made to spin 0:01:44.450 --> 0:01:48.770 at seventy eight revolutions per minute. The disc is fragile. 0:01:49.170 --> 0:01:52.810 It's coated with a substance called shellac, a resin secreted 0:01:52.810 --> 0:01:57.250 by an Indian beetle. Shellac was too expensive to use 0:01:57.250 --> 0:01:59.610 for the whole record, so it's only on the surface. 0:02:00.170 --> 0:02:02.810 The inside of a seventy eight is filled with clay 0:02:02.810 --> 0:02:06.450 and limestone dust. It makes them heavy and very brittle. 0:02:07.170 --> 0:02:10.330 Drop one and it will shatter like a china plate 0:02:11.290 --> 0:02:13.930 that's so clean you can shave off. Then I met 0:02:14.010 --> 0:02:16.490 Chris some years ago when I was researching my novel 0:02:16.610 --> 0:02:20.770 White Tears. The book is a ghost story about record 0:02:20.810 --> 0:02:24.890 collecting and the Mississippi Blues. To understand that world, I 0:02:24.930 --> 0:02:27.530 needed to talk to a seventy eight collector, someone who 0:02:27.570 --> 0:02:31.170 is deep in the subculture. Chris agreed to help me out. 0:02:32.570 --> 0:02:35.850 He's the kind of source a novelist can only dream off. 0:02:35.890 --> 0:02:40.250 Everything was stitched into the Fate's Harry. You know nothing, 0:02:40.370 --> 0:02:43.650 there's nothing by chance. Now I'm here to witness him 0:02:43.730 --> 0:02:47.610 in his happiest place somehow or another. The day that 0:02:47.690 --> 0:02:50.730 I was born, it was written into my fabric that 0:02:50.770 --> 0:02:54.010 I was going to play this record for you, and 0:02:54.210 --> 0:03:10.410 carefully lowers the needle into the groove. This is Into 0:03:10.490 --> 0:03:15.730 the Zone, a podcast about opposites and how borders are 0:03:15.770 --> 0:03:22.650 never as clear as we think. I'm hurry Kun's room. 0:03:22.690 --> 0:03:27.810 This episode is about music and authenticity. It's about tradition, 0:03:28.050 --> 0:03:44.130 and modernity. It's about black and white seventy eight. Collectors 0:03:44.250 --> 0:03:49.450 are notoriously secretive. The first one I contacted while writing 0:03:49.490 --> 0:03:53.170 White Tears Well, he told me that revealing information about 0:03:53.170 --> 0:03:57.170 collecting would be against his self interest, because if more 0:03:57.170 --> 0:04:00.210 people realize how amazing these records are, the prices would 0:04:00.250 --> 0:04:02.130 go up and it would be harder for him to collect. 0:04:02.730 --> 0:04:04.730 But Chris is the kind of guy who wants to 0:04:04.770 --> 0:04:08.330 share what he loves. He welcomed me into his lair 0:04:08.410 --> 0:04:11.330 in Virginia, and I've wanted an excuse to go back 0:04:11.370 --> 0:04:15.450 ever since, and we're lucky enough to be in your 0:04:15.490 --> 0:04:16.970 I mean, do you call it a listening room? What 0:04:17.050 --> 0:04:21.330 do you call this place? Yeah? I can do more 0:04:21.370 --> 0:04:24.970 than listen here. Chris isn't lying. He won a Grammy 0:04:25.010 --> 0:04:28.130 in two thousand and two for his work compiling early recordings. 0:04:28.690 --> 0:04:32.250 He remasters old records for re release. This room is 0:04:32.290 --> 0:04:36.130 a shrine to the early years of recorded sound. Thousands 0:04:36.170 --> 0:04:39.770 of records in identical brown cardboard sleeves sit on shelves. 0:04:40.650 --> 0:04:44.050 The walls are hung with memorabilia, portraits of long dead 0:04:44.090 --> 0:04:48.490 fiddlers and jug bands. There's a mixing desk, a turntable, 0:04:49.090 --> 0:04:53.490 two monitor speakers hung on cables from the ceilings. To 0:04:54.490 --> 0:04:57.130 your collecting of American music, I mean, do you have 0:04:57.130 --> 0:05:00.330 anything after the Second World War? I don't collect anything sucks. 0:05:00.930 --> 0:05:04.210 Don't collect anything that sucks. I think that is a 0:05:04.290 --> 0:05:08.130 valid collecting strategy. Well, there's there's completely a good rule 0:05:08.170 --> 0:05:10.530 of film for anybody. But is there a date at 0:05:10.530 --> 0:05:14.330 which you stop? Yeah, well, I mean I don't. I 0:05:14.370 --> 0:05:18.970 don't have hardly any post ward War two. I have 0:05:19.010 --> 0:05:21.650 no post World War two blues and I have like 0:05:21.730 --> 0:05:25.810 maybe one or two post World War two your belly things. 0:05:26.370 --> 0:05:30.570 The record Chris Just Unpacked is by Mississippi musician Robert Wilkins. 0:05:31.650 --> 0:05:38.930 The song is called rolling Stone Part One. Don't you Go? 0:05:43.210 --> 0:05:45.570 Hearing this on an original seventy eight is like the 0:05:45.610 --> 0:05:49.410 second coming for blues fans. There are very few known copies, 0:05:49.450 --> 0:06:00.930 and this is the one in the best condition rule Someday. 0:06:03.330 --> 0:06:06.450 Robert Wilkins is not the only early blues musician to 0:06:06.570 --> 0:06:09.490 have recorded a song with rolling Stone in the title, 0:06:09.970 --> 0:06:12.370 but he's the one. The English band called the Rolling 0:06:12.410 --> 0:06:16.730 Stones had to pay royalties on the album Beggars Banquet. 0:06:16.730 --> 0:06:20.210 There's a track called Prodigal Son. When it was released 0:06:20.210 --> 0:06:23.210 back in nineteen sixty eight. It was credited to Mick 0:06:23.290 --> 0:06:26.930 Jagger and Keith Richards. It's actually a pretty straight cover 0:06:27.010 --> 0:06:29.490 of a song by Wilkins that he'd been playing since 0:06:29.490 --> 0:06:33.610 the nineteen twenties. After a long court case, the elderly 0:06:33.610 --> 0:06:40.370 bluesman finally got what he was owed. There are many 0:06:40.410 --> 0:06:45.290 stories like this. The British invasion bands of the nineteen sixties, 0:06:45.370 --> 0:06:47.970 like Cream and led Zeppelin did a good job of 0:06:48.050 --> 0:06:51.530 repackaging country blues and selling it back to Americans with 0:06:51.570 --> 0:06:54.970 an English accent. I grew up in England listening to 0:06:55.010 --> 0:06:57.650 a lot of those bands, and like many people, I 0:06:57.690 --> 0:07:00.130 eventually found my way back to the blues tradition that 0:07:00.170 --> 0:07:03.570 they were borrowing from. But it was a long time 0:07:03.610 --> 0:07:06.530 before I really understood how strange it is that rock 0:07:06.570 --> 0:07:10.210 and roll music that comes from the nes came to 0:07:10.250 --> 0:07:13.530 be thought of as a white style. It's one of 0:07:13.530 --> 0:07:15.890 the reasons I went to Virginia to talk to Chris. 0:07:16.530 --> 0:07:21.010 He knows this history better than almost anyone in modern 0:07:21.090 --> 0:07:25.610 popular music. We make this distinction between black and white 0:07:25.610 --> 0:07:30.530 traditions in America, and do you think that distinction has 0:07:30.570 --> 0:07:35.770 any validity? Well, obviously it has validity. Now, but if 0:07:35.810 --> 0:07:41.090 you go back to basically the Civil War, the American 0:07:41.130 --> 0:07:44.530 Civil War up until essentially the dawn of the of 0:07:44.690 --> 0:07:48.770 the recording industry, that was a false dichotomy. There was 0:07:48.810 --> 0:07:53.050 a pre blues tradition that was mixed, It was shared. 0:07:53.130 --> 0:07:56.530 It was neither neither a white nor black. It was mongrel. 0:07:56.730 --> 0:08:00.090 It was everything. Maybe you should you should play something, 0:08:00.130 --> 0:08:02.690 and we I mean, we could play the guessing game 0:08:02.770 --> 0:08:06.890 and see and imagine who might be playing. Yeah, okay, 0:08:06.930 --> 0:08:09.370 so I mean I'll play two records. One is by 0:08:09.450 --> 0:08:14.370 black musicians, one is by white musicians, but largely the 0:08:14.410 --> 0:08:17.850 instrumentation in the repertoire and the style is the same. 0:08:18.010 --> 0:08:22.810 And this sort of shows that, Um, if anything, it 0:08:22.890 --> 0:08:25.970 was the recording industry that started to parse out and 0:08:26.010 --> 0:08:38.890 say this is black and this is white. I think 0:08:38.890 --> 0:08:42.770 I had sent him knocking on that still now be 0:08:42.890 --> 0:08:55.690 read around him something that as far as I yeah, 0:08:56.450 --> 0:08:58.810 I think that they were very high during that session. 0:08:58.850 --> 0:09:01.170 You can hear the guy kind of like mumbling like whoa, 0:09:02.690 --> 0:09:05.090 and the way he's just experimenting with, like just how 0:09:05.130 --> 0:09:08.930 long he draws that New Orleans. Yeah, I was like 0:09:09.090 --> 0:09:13.370 completely improvised session. It sounded like black musicians to me, 0:09:14.530 --> 0:09:16.410 not so much because of how they were playing, but 0:09:16.490 --> 0:09:20.370 because of their accents. Chris pulls out the other record. 0:09:20.930 --> 0:09:25.370 This record also nineteen twenty nine, and also I didn't 0:09:25.370 --> 0:09:29.290 realize it until I pulled it. This is also Atlanta, Georgia. 0:09:29.610 --> 0:09:32.050 So both recorded in the same place, the same place. 0:09:32.250 --> 0:09:48.090 They probably knew each other. They probably around you. One 0:09:48.090 --> 0:09:51.850 of the speakers says, quit your foolishness around here. He 0:09:51.930 --> 0:09:55.810 says it, Yeah, I hear white people in that straight away. 0:09:56.170 --> 0:09:59.010 May say, who were we listening to? So we were listening. 0:09:59.050 --> 0:10:02.850 The first track was Chittland Supper by peg Leg Howell 0:10:02.970 --> 0:10:06.730 and Jim Hill peg Leg how he had a peg 0:10:06.810 --> 0:10:10.250 leg peg Leg and his band in it. Lanta were black, 0:10:10.850 --> 0:10:13.770 as I guessed correctly. And then the second record is 0:10:13.810 --> 0:10:17.850 the South Georgia Highballers doing bluegrass Twist, and they were 0:10:17.890 --> 0:10:21.130 a white group. The point of Chris's demonstration wasn't that 0:10:21.290 --> 0:10:24.770 back in the day, black and white musicians sounded into changeable, 0:10:25.290 --> 0:10:27.250 though it's true that they did seem to play their 0:10:27.290 --> 0:10:30.970 instruments in almost the same way. No, Chris's point was 0:10:31.010 --> 0:10:34.010 that someone has been training us all these decades to 0:10:34.130 --> 0:10:39.290 hear and recognize slight differences and immediately attribute them to race. 0:10:40.210 --> 0:10:43.850 We've been taught categories, and every day we're taught them 0:10:43.890 --> 0:10:48.810 anew by those who patrol the boundaries. Let's play a 0:10:48.850 --> 0:10:52.690 little game called that ain't country. This game has just 0:10:52.770 --> 0:10:56.610 played by me talking about stuff that ain't country. That's 0:10:56.610 --> 0:11:00.610 the country music YouTuber called Grady Tate who wants us 0:11:00.650 --> 0:11:03.810 to know what ain't country. And the first one and 0:11:03.930 --> 0:11:07.810 main one that really inspired this video is as I'm 0:11:07.850 --> 0:11:12.290 sure you've heard song Old Town Road by Lil Nasax. 0:11:13.330 --> 0:11:16.810 You might remember the internet drama around Old Town Road. 0:11:17.770 --> 0:11:21.890 For a while, TikTok was dominated by teenagers magically transforming 0:11:21.930 --> 0:11:25.330 themselves into cowboys and cowgirls to the sound of this song. 0:11:26.290 --> 0:11:30.570 Sixty seven million views later, Oldtown Road topped the Billboard 0:11:30.610 --> 0:11:34.410 Hot one hundred for nineteen weeks, a record, and it 0:11:34.530 --> 0:11:38.650 made both the country and the R and B charts. 0:11:39.850 --> 0:11:42.330 I'm not actually even mad at Lil NASA's at all 0:11:42.410 --> 0:11:44.730 for making this song. Who I'm mad at is like 0:11:44.770 --> 0:11:48.170 the gatekeepers over at iTunes and over on Billboard that 0:11:48.170 --> 0:11:51.570 are letting the song chart as a country song, and 0:11:51.650 --> 0:11:53.810 it's not a country song at all. This is a 0:11:53.890 --> 0:11:58.010 hip hop song. That I guess is about horses that 0:11:58.130 --> 0:12:01.450 ain't country was just a tiny part of the backlash 0:12:01.490 --> 0:12:06.090 against Lil Nas, and eventually Billboard pulled Oldtown Road from 0:12:06.130 --> 0:12:10.370 the Country, a category it did not contain quote enough 0:12:10.490 --> 0:12:17.410 elements of today's country music. Lilnar's X was officially not country. 0:12:19.090 --> 0:12:22.370 Like many people, I thought, I detected a racial subtext 0:12:22.410 --> 0:12:26.410 in this argument. Old Town Road has a heavy trap 0:12:26.450 --> 0:12:30.730 beat and big bass, but lots of contemporary country music 0:12:30.850 --> 0:12:35.370 uses elements of other popular styles, including hip hop. Why 0:12:35.490 --> 0:12:40.330 pick on Lilnar's X people said his song didn't sound authentic. 0:12:41.650 --> 0:12:44.410 I'm always on the alert when I hear the word authentic. 0:12:44.690 --> 0:12:48.250 It's a gate keeping word, a word used to exclude. 0:12:48.970 --> 0:12:54.410 It's also racially loaded. My mom's English and my dad's Indian. 0:12:55.170 --> 0:12:57.970 When I was growing up, I was made to feel 0:12:58.010 --> 0:13:01.730 that I wasn't white enough, but also that I wasn't 0:13:01.810 --> 0:13:06.170 brown enough. As a writer, I've always told stories that 0:13:06.370 --> 0:13:10.130 challenge simple ideas about authenticity, that try to show how 0:13:10.210 --> 0:13:12.850 the world is complex and more mixed up than we 0:13:12.890 --> 0:13:15.810 give it credit. For the kind of stories I'm telling 0:13:15.810 --> 0:13:20.450 in this podcast. To get a better handle on authenticity 0:13:20.490 --> 0:13:24.650 in American popular music, I took the A train. It 0:13:24.650 --> 0:13:26.410 goes all the way uptown from where I live in 0:13:26.490 --> 0:13:29.850 Brooklyn to Harlem. I was going to see a writer 0:13:29.930 --> 0:13:34.050 friend called Kevin Young. Kevin is a poet and the 0:13:34.090 --> 0:13:36.930 director of one of the most important libraries in the US, 0:13:37.530 --> 0:13:43.010 the Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture. I wanted 0:13:43.010 --> 0:13:46.650 to ask Kevin. By dressing up as a cowboy, was 0:13:46.770 --> 0:13:51.890 Lil nas X somehow appropriating white culture? Well, I mean 0:13:52.370 --> 0:13:55.090 cowboy face. Is that where you're suggesting, is that there's 0:13:55.130 --> 0:13:56.930 such a thing. Now we'd have to go back and 0:13:56.970 --> 0:14:00.210 talk about cowboys who weren't all white. In fact, there 0:14:00.210 --> 0:14:06.010 are many many black and brown and Asian cowboys. The 0:14:06.050 --> 0:14:09.650 way we think of cowboys as shaped I think entirely 0:14:09.730 --> 0:14:13.450 by cinema. And John Wayne couldn't ride a horse. I 0:14:13.490 --> 0:14:15.770 should leap in here and say that, of course John 0:14:15.810 --> 0:14:19.130 Wayne could ride, he just wasn't that fond of horses, 0:14:19.250 --> 0:14:22.330 and he only rode on set, never for fun. But 0:14:22.490 --> 0:14:25.170 Lil nas X isn't playing a cowboy in the same 0:14:25.210 --> 0:14:29.130 way as John Wayne is playing a cowboy. John Wayne 0:14:29.210 --> 0:14:32.810 fans revere him because they feel he's channeling something authentic. 0:14:33.250 --> 0:14:37.410 He convinces them that he's a cowboy in his dazzling 0:14:37.490 --> 0:14:40.210 stage suits. Lil nas X isn't trying to convince you 0:14:40.290 --> 0:14:45.210 of anything but his fabulousness. He's giving a knowing performance. 0:14:45.570 --> 0:14:50.130 It's cowboys style. It's camp, a kind of camp with 0:14:50.250 --> 0:14:54.450 deep roots in African American culture. And here's where things 0:14:54.490 --> 0:14:59.250 get really interesting. Kevin connects that form of camp to 0:14:59.330 --> 0:15:03.050 the cake walk, a parade like competitive dance that started 0:15:03.090 --> 0:15:06.410 in the days of slavery. It was performed for a prize, 0:15:06.770 --> 0:15:11.850 sometimes a cake. It was a dance from the plantation 0:15:12.050 --> 0:15:18.050 of blacks, the enslaved, mocking there would be masters. They're 0:15:18.130 --> 0:15:23.610 putative slave owners, the holders of them. Supposedly they are 0:15:24.250 --> 0:15:28.930 imitating them, you know, being quote fancy. And of course 0:15:29.090 --> 0:15:31.250 it depends on where you stand how you took that. 0:15:31.530 --> 0:15:35.130 If you were the white slaveholder, you thought, wow, look 0:15:35.130 --> 0:15:37.890 at them, not quite able to do what I do 0:15:38.010 --> 0:15:41.770 in my elegant dance. And if you were the black performer, 0:15:41.810 --> 0:15:44.210 you were like, boy, they don't understand how much fun 0:15:44.210 --> 0:15:46.850 we're making of them, you know, and how much fun 0:15:46.890 --> 0:15:50.490 we're having in this limited system which within which we 0:15:50.490 --> 0:15:53.890 can only operate this way. The k Kolk was the 0:15:53.930 --> 0:15:57.210 ancestor of everything from the line dance on soul Train 0:15:57.610 --> 0:16:01.850 to bull room voguing. It's the ancestor of Lil Nazek, 0:16:01.970 --> 0:16:07.010 sacheting along in his hot pink mesh cowboy shit. At 0:16:07.010 --> 0:16:12.370 the same time, you know, there's this parodic satiric quality 0:16:12.410 --> 0:16:14.770 of the music that you know, I'm tracing back to 0:16:14.810 --> 0:16:17.170 the cake Walk, but we can trace back any number 0:16:17.170 --> 0:16:19.810 of ways, which is, give me a form, and I'm 0:16:19.850 --> 0:16:22.530 gonna make fun of it, and I'm gonna make it 0:16:22.610 --> 0:16:26.210 better than you made it. Of course, when Lil nas 0:16:26.370 --> 0:16:30.330 X was having a showdown with a country music authenticity sheriffs, 0:16:30.690 --> 0:16:36.170 an outlaw rode to his rescue. Billy ray Cyrus, famous 0:16:36.250 --> 0:16:40.170 mullet haver and father of Miley, teamed up with Nas. 0:16:41.650 --> 0:16:44.410 It should be fast. We'll settle in here for the night. 0:16:46.770 --> 0:16:50.130 I don't know, man, last time I was here. They 0:16:50.170 --> 0:16:52.570 want to welcome and the outsiders. In the video they 0:16:52.610 --> 0:16:55.970 made together, Nas rides a horse down a street in 0:16:56.010 --> 0:16:59.930 East la He and Billy also face down an all 0:16:59.930 --> 0:17:07.050 white crowd of seniors in a community hall. The segregated 0:17:07.090 --> 0:17:10.570 bingo game turns into a line dance, and it all 0:17:10.690 --> 0:17:14.930 ends in a sweet interracial prom photo. Nas fixes a 0:17:14.970 --> 0:17:18.930 smile and his old white lady dance partner gazes admiringly 0:17:19.010 --> 0:17:25.730 up in him. But let's be honest, this kind of 0:17:25.730 --> 0:17:28.570 thing is exactly what makes a lot of country music 0:17:28.610 --> 0:17:32.890 fans uneasy in a world of style and flimflam. Country 0:17:32.930 --> 0:17:38.050 sells itself on authenticity, on realness, though it sometimes wears 0:17:38.130 --> 0:17:42.410 Ryan stones and hairspray. Country means songs about growing up poor, 0:17:43.370 --> 0:17:49.330 about enduring hard times, and it has musical traditions. Country 0:17:49.330 --> 0:17:53.490 fans feel there's a way it ought to sound. Everyone 0:17:53.570 --> 0:17:58.130 knows that country has that thing that twang. No, you 0:17:58.170 --> 0:18:02.770 can't take my door, I don't want to love you anymore. 0:18:07.210 --> 0:18:18.090 Whiskey good straightened on you get If that sounded off 0:18:18.170 --> 0:18:22.810 to you, Congratulations, your bullshit detectors are still functioning. That 0:18:23.530 --> 0:18:28.610 was country music generated by artificial intelligence. Researchers trained a 0:18:28.690 --> 0:18:32.690 neural network on country music's greatest hits. This was what 0:18:32.730 --> 0:18:37.050 it came up with, Well, get yourself at a sham Away. 0:18:38.930 --> 0:18:41.450 The melody and the lyrics were the work of the AI. 0:18:42.130 --> 0:18:47.170 The arrangement and singing humans Elsewhere on the Internet, there's 0:18:47.170 --> 0:18:50.250 a twenty four to seven live stream of AI generated 0:18:50.290 --> 0:18:53.410 death metal created on the fly with no human intervention 0:18:53.450 --> 0:18:55.970 at all. I don't want to make you listen to that. 0:18:57.050 --> 0:19:14.170 I really don't, all right, I do sorry. At some point, 0:19:14.410 --> 0:19:18.010 possibly very late at night, I realized that in twenty twenty, 0:19:18.250 --> 0:19:22.530 any conversation about country music and authenticity is best conducted 0:19:22.530 --> 0:19:25.210 by two men of South Asian descent in a living 0:19:25.290 --> 0:19:32.130 room in Brooklyn, drinking old fashions. I am from Pennsylvania 0:19:32.210 --> 0:19:34.770 and I grew up in a college town. I've always 0:19:34.810 --> 0:19:38.130 loved music, but I think that I came across country 0:19:38.170 --> 0:19:41.930 music just artificially, just you know, collecting records as a teenager, 0:19:42.930 --> 0:19:47.370 discovering that unexpectedly I really liked this stuff. This is 0:19:47.410 --> 0:19:51.490 Shuja Hider. Shujia is a smart cultural critic who's always 0:19:51.490 --> 0:19:54.890 happy to share his opinions on political philosophy or the 0:19:54.930 --> 0:20:00.170 best Michael Mann movie Collateral. Shujia also loves country music, 0:20:01.290 --> 0:20:02.890 and I think it may actually have something to do 0:20:02.930 --> 0:20:05.570 with with my South Asian background. That you know, I 0:20:05.610 --> 0:20:10.090 grew up on hearing the sort of Hollywood music of 0:20:10.130 --> 0:20:12.410 the forties and fifties and sixties that my dad used 0:20:12.410 --> 0:20:15.690 to play. And those songs are all full of stories, 0:20:17.290 --> 0:20:19.210 you know, they were associated with the movies of the time. 0:20:20.090 --> 0:20:26.130 They describe rural life or urban life in India and 0:20:26.330 --> 0:20:29.890 they're written by you know, some great poets. The lyrics 0:20:30.570 --> 0:20:33.970 we would some favorites of USB Well, my dad loved 0:20:34.050 --> 0:20:41.850 Muhammad Raffi and taddethmod N, Johnny Tunkab. Yeah, these are 0:20:41.890 --> 0:20:44.850 songs that are very intricately written. They draw on the 0:20:44.890 --> 0:20:49.490 folk traditions of the landscape, and I think country music 0:20:49.810 --> 0:20:53.170 kind of does the same thing. Jiujia has written about 0:20:53.210 --> 0:20:55.930 his own attempt to pin down the essence of country 0:20:56.050 --> 0:21:01.250 music that's set in something that feel that twang. Twang 0:21:01.690 --> 0:21:04.810 is a word that initially is used to describe language 0:21:04.850 --> 0:21:08.690 people who speak with various kinds of accents, the way 0:21:08.810 --> 0:21:11.330 you are aticulate a vowel or so on. We're often 0:21:11.330 --> 0:21:13.170 described as twang all the way back to Europe in 0:21:13.530 --> 0:21:17.930 the seventeenth century, and it often is used to denote 0:21:18.170 --> 0:21:21.890 a Southern accent, dropping the geese and you know, kind 0:21:21.930 --> 0:21:25.410 of twirling your vowels and so on. I would ride 0:21:26.370 --> 0:21:32.930 number nine heads, Carol Ride, and that's a sound that 0:21:32.970 --> 0:21:36.490 I think at the time that people in the South 0:21:36.570 --> 0:21:39.930 started to migrate to California towards the north towards city centers. 0:21:40.370 --> 0:21:42.570 They brought their accents with them, and they brought their 0:21:42.650 --> 0:21:45.450 musical traditions with them, and once they came into contact 0:21:45.490 --> 0:21:47.570 with the new technologies that we're being used to produce 0:21:47.690 --> 0:21:50.690 music and to record music, they started to emerge in 0:21:50.730 --> 0:21:54.370 new ways. So you have the sound of an electrified string, 0:21:54.570 --> 0:21:58.130 you know, being picked up by a magnet that's being 0:21:58.130 --> 0:22:01.890 fed into an amplifier, and people are giving it the 0:22:01.930 --> 0:22:04.290 same kind of articulation that they would give their speech. 0:22:04.970 --> 0:22:13.810 And I think that's what we call twang. Choose it 0:22:13.890 --> 0:22:16.970 points out that the twang, the sound I think of 0:22:17.010 --> 0:22:20.450 when I think of country music, is an electrified sound. 0:22:21.290 --> 0:22:24.890 The sound of an instrument called the pedal steel. Pedal 0:22:24.930 --> 0:22:27.330 steel is a wooden board that has strings across it, 0:22:27.490 --> 0:22:31.570 and rather than actually being touched with fingers, it's played 0:22:31.610 --> 0:22:37.090 with a steel bar and usually sort of false like 0:22:37.250 --> 0:22:41.330 metal claws, and it's got not just not just the 0:22:41.690 --> 0:22:44.290 steel bar to change the notes, but also a system 0:22:44.290 --> 0:22:47.570 of pedals that change the notes after they've already been articulated. 0:22:51.570 --> 0:22:54.730 The quintessential sound of a genre that prides itself on 0:22:54.850 --> 0:23:00.090 tradition is the sound of a modern instrument pedal steel. 0:23:00.090 --> 0:23:02.210 Sums it up. It was invented in the twentieth century. 0:23:02.210 --> 0:23:05.570 It was constantly revised and tinkered with. You know. It 0:23:05.570 --> 0:23:09.010 originally has its roots in Hawaiian music with the lap steel. 0:23:10.130 --> 0:23:13.370 So you can't play the pedal steel on a farm. 0:23:13.410 --> 0:23:17.050 The pedal steel is an electric instrument. It needs to 0:23:17.090 --> 0:23:19.970 be amplified otherwise you can't really hear it. And it's 0:23:19.970 --> 0:23:21.730 really kind of a space age sound, you know, it 0:23:21.770 --> 0:23:23.730 sounds something like the phamin or it even sounds like 0:23:23.730 --> 0:23:37.650 a synthesizer. You know, give everyone, this is what commercial 0:23:37.730 --> 0:23:41.010 country and Western music sounded like. In nineteen thirty seven, 0:23:42.210 --> 0:23:45.890 Blue Yodel Number two, recorded in Los Angeles by a 0:23:45.930 --> 0:24:09.890 band called The Rhythm Records. This song is a cosmic 0:24:09.930 --> 0:24:14.850 collision of styles and influences. It's a blues about a 0:24:14.890 --> 0:24:19.330 loving gal called Lucille. The growling vocal is copied from 0:24:19.370 --> 0:24:22.930 black singers like Bessie Smith, but the singer is a 0:24:23.010 --> 0:24:27.050 fourteen year old white boy from Oklahoma who goes by 0:24:27.370 --> 0:24:45.770 Whitie McPherson. And what about that yodel? It sounds so good, 0:24:45.930 --> 0:24:50.290 yet it's so weird. Yodeling was actually a solid part 0:24:50.290 --> 0:24:53.890 of American life for at least a hundred years. Yodling 0:24:53.930 --> 0:24:56.890 started in the Swiss Alps, of course, but American yodeling 0:24:57.050 --> 0:25:01.330 had a long history in blackface minstrel shows. The writer 0:25:01.450 --> 0:25:04.890 of this song was the huge star Jimmy Rogers. He 0:25:05.010 --> 0:25:11.130 started out performing as a black face minstrel. What you're 0:25:11.210 --> 0:25:17.210 hearing is, in fact a space age Hawaiian Alpine black 0:25:17.250 --> 0:25:53.050 face minstrel song. May carry me back to old Virginny. 0:25:53.650 --> 0:25:56.290 That's where the cotton and the corn and the tatoes grow. 0:25:57.210 --> 0:26:00.850 That's where the birds warble sweet in the springtime. There's 0:26:00.930 --> 0:26:05.890 where the darky's heart am long to go. That's an 0:26:05.930 --> 0:26:10.170 old minstrel song. Until nineteen ninety seven, it was also 0:26:10.330 --> 0:26:13.690 the state song of Virginia. This version was sung by 0:26:13.730 --> 0:26:16.730 Marion Anderson, the first black singer to appear at the 0:26:16.730 --> 0:26:21.330 Metropolitan Opera House. Carrying Me Back was written in eighteen 0:26:21.370 --> 0:26:25.370 seventy eight by a black singer and composer called James A. Bland. 0:26:26.730 --> 0:26:33.690 But would you say the song was black music? Marion 0:26:33.770 --> 0:26:38.730 Anderson sings in a European style with European orchestration and 0:26:38.850 --> 0:26:42.330 Bland's lyrics repeat one of the primary racist fantasies of 0:26:42.370 --> 0:26:46.250 the South that free black people long for the certainties 0:26:46.290 --> 0:26:50.290 of the plantation that they actually want to be enslaved again. 0:26:51.730 --> 0:26:54.410 The black man who wrote the words had never been 0:26:54.450 --> 0:26:57.610 a slave on a Virginia plantation. He was a Howard 0:26:57.690 --> 0:27:01.810 University graduate from Flushing, Queens who made his living writing 0:27:01.850 --> 0:27:05.850 minstrel songs. Carrying Me Back to Old Virginia has a 0:27:05.970 --> 0:27:11.410 quality I find in Oldtown Road, in Blue Yodel Number two, 0:27:12.130 --> 0:27:19.890 and so many other American popular songs. It's like a 0:27:19.970 --> 0:27:23.570 Merbius strip with a white side and a black side 0:27:23.610 --> 0:27:28.570 that run together, impossible to separate. My Virginia friend, Chris, 0:27:28.610 --> 0:27:34.410 the collector, lives inside that strip. He loves it. It's 0:27:34.410 --> 0:27:37.370 a wonder that you can find anything, because these are 0:27:37.410 --> 0:27:42.450 all identically sleeved records. They're all in these uniform brown 0:27:42.890 --> 0:27:45.170 paper sleeves. And I mean, I don't know how many 0:27:45.290 --> 0:27:47.010 you have. He had enough. You know how many you 0:27:47.090 --> 0:27:53.930 have here? He has five thousand, five hundred records. Could you, 0:27:54.130 --> 0:27:57.490 I mean, talk about your cataloging. How do you oddly enough? 0:27:57.930 --> 0:28:02.370 Oddly enough talking about segregation? So this is all black, 0:28:03.130 --> 0:28:06.210 so shelf it's about here, huh. And the one from 0:28:06.210 --> 0:28:10.450 there yonder is all Cajun and from here over to 0:28:10.530 --> 0:28:23.890 there is all white Hillbilly, and then Ukrainian, Polish, Indian, Albanian, Greek, Turkish, African, Mongolian. 0:28:25.210 --> 0:28:31.290 I didn't know you didn't know you did? Mongolian is 0:28:31.290 --> 0:28:35.810 our evening together gets later and later. Chris ranges across topics, 0:28:36.330 --> 0:28:39.890 occasionally pausing to roll a cigarette to will refill out glasses. 0:28:40.170 --> 0:28:41.850 All right, I'm gonna get another glass of wine and 0:28:41.850 --> 0:28:44.450 then I'll play you something that will go good with that. 0:28:44.810 --> 0:28:46.770 But but black, But you won't be able to tell 0:28:46.770 --> 0:29:04.010 it's black. I swear to God. At that time, in 0:29:04.170 --> 0:29:06.610 nineteen twenty nine, you would have been able to encounter 0:29:07.330 --> 0:29:10.530 William Moore playing that piece, and then somebody like my 0:29:10.610 --> 0:29:14.290 grandfather playing the exact same piece with probably the same 0:29:14.370 --> 0:29:19.050 vocal inflection, the same style. In Britain, folk singers revived 0:29:19.090 --> 0:29:23.610 ballads and traditional regional songs, always striving to sound as 0:29:23.650 --> 0:29:27.930 authentic as possible, searching back in time for some pure 0:29:28.130 --> 0:29:33.730 original version. American music was from the earliest days a hybrid. 0:29:34.730 --> 0:29:38.530 I asked Chris to play me English ballads, Irish jigs 0:29:38.730 --> 0:29:42.010 and African banjo playing to show how elements from many 0:29:42.050 --> 0:29:46.010 different places went into the sounds of American music and 0:29:46.090 --> 0:29:49.450 how they began to blend together into something that couldn't 0:29:49.450 --> 0:30:04.170 have been from anywhere else. This is old country stomp 0:30:04.850 --> 0:30:08.290 by a Texan musician called Henry Thomas. Very little is 0:30:08.330 --> 0:30:12.290 known about him. He was a wondering songster and sometimes 0:30:12.290 --> 0:30:15.050 a hobo who rode the rails across America in the 0:30:15.050 --> 0:30:18.370 early years of the twentieth century. We never would have 0:30:18.370 --> 0:30:20.650 heard him a tool had he not been brought into 0:30:20.690 --> 0:30:24.250 a studio in Chicago where he recorded this in nineteen 0:30:24.290 --> 0:30:30.050 twenty eight. Henry Thomas isn't somebody who was born early, wasn't. 0:30:30.050 --> 0:30:32.730 He was quite old by the time he was recorded 0:30:32.770 --> 0:30:35.490 in the twenties, and he's he's like one of the 0:30:35.690 --> 0:30:39.130