The High Ground, Honesty and Authenticity
from David N. Meyer’s
Twenty Thousand Roads – The Ballad of Gram Parsons and His Cosmic American Music
“For those who controlled the conversation in the Village, the moral high ground continued to be held by what was deemed the honest expression of (presumably) unsophisticated rural folks, black and white. The unknowing inauthenticity embedded in this urban yen for rural simplicity was summarized best by Rodney Dillard. Rodney played with his brother Doug, a banjo virtuoso who later toured Europe with Gram and the Byrds. Dillard told author Richie Unterberger (for Unterberger’s excellent history of folk rock, Turn! Turn! Turn!):
‘I came from a rural area, grew up on a farm with no electricity and no bathroom until I was fourteen. We were coming out of that music which had been around like dogs in the yard. These intellectuals who discovered bluegrass were coming from an intellectual/educational/social approach. At that time, everyone was wanting to put bluegrass in a museum, keep it the way it was, look at it once in a while, and protect it so it didn’t change.
‘Our first album, Back Porch Bluegrass, had echo on the record. And one of the critics from on of the little back-East rags said, ‘Since when did they have echo chambers on back porches?’ Well, the guy had probably never been off of his block. Because you sit here on my back porch right now and you get nothing but echo, because I live up the side of a mountain.’
“Primitives were supposed to remain primitive and thus support widely held preconceptions about an anticommercial vox populi. The seminal text for those notions was collector and rural music historian Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, released in 1952. Smith’s six-LP set included murder ballads, country blues, Hawaiian slack-string guitar, jug bands, mountain folk songs, and Southern gospel. It seemed a paragon of rural authenticity, but there were deceptions galore even in this fantastic collection of American weirdness.
“Many of the twenties, thirties, and forties down-from-the-hills / up-from-the-hollers musicians the folkies so admired were not consciously preserving a back-porch tradition. They wanted radio play and popular success. It did not seem to register on their future listeners that these hillbillies might have deliberately altered their seemingly primitive style in search of more airplay and bigger sales. Similarly, for the staunch folkies, Dylan’s decision to go electric was a betrayal because it meant he was superficializing his music, willfully reaching out to the rock mainstream. Dylan had only done what most of the musicians in Smith’s Anthology had. Or would’ve, given the chance.”
Saturday – 04/12/2008
The Book and Bean
50 Front Street – Berea, Ohio – 44017
8:30 PM to 10:30 PM – See you there!!
