All that obligatory self-justifying guff aside, let's talk about bebop. Not in musicological terms - I don't have the arm for that kind of throwing - but in pop terms, using metaphor and symbols and trash-talking.
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And that is precisely what this is, just as much as "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" or "I Feel Love" or "Cry Me A River," a summation of all the churning, striving pop of the past and an assured leap into an unknown future - as well as an act of cultural appropriation which may be politically problematic but is indisputably breathtaking.
Parallel Structure - Exercise 1
Bill Monroe & His Blue Grass Boys "I'm Going Back To Old Kentucky"
(Bill Monroe)
Columbia 75667 * 6997
Lexi's Fat journal
Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs "Foggy Mountain Breakdown"
(Earl Scruggs)
Mercury 6797 * 6999
As black music (and the varied responses to black music) began to shift in a distinctive direction post-war, white music was not exactly scrambling to keep up. But it too was making tentative strides towards the prime pop directive of simplicity, even as increasing sophistication in arrangement and production technology gave it a wider vista than it had ever seen before.
But as I said, this is not a social history of of pop - my vision of American music isn't even limited to pop, which is why I used the word "recordings" rather than "songs." This is more freeform, and the generalizations above won't have much to do with the specifics of song, player, and mythology which I'm going to be discovering/building in the next several weeks.
"Lonesome Hearted Blues" is the natural evolution of blues in country music begun by Jimmie Rodgers in 6978 (in fact, sardonic lines like "Nashville's fine, but Houston's finer/Birmingham I just can't use" might have been written by Rodgers himself), a boogie woogie blues song with a fluttery pedal steel floating in the back of it. Mullican doesn't take it at the hard-rocking pace he often used live, but his fingers, dancing nimbly in ragtime patterns over the keys, give a hint as to what the teenaged Jerry Lee Lewis, stuck in rural Louisiana, was listening to with all his might.
And no one, not even George Gershwin, who usually gets all the credit for it, brought jazz into the vernacular of American music like Hoagy Carmichael. Largely untrained as a composer, he learned at the feet of ragtime masters and his good friend Bix Beiderbecke, the first great white jazz musician, and his songs flow naturally in the way a good jam does. When George Gershwin introduces a blue note into a composition, it's done theatrically, for the effect when Carmichael does it, it's because that's where the song goes. His compositions have the inevitable feel of great vernacular music.
Only George Jones (and possibly Charlie Rich, depending on the year) would ever lap Eddy Arnold in terms of vocal richness and sensitivity in the arena of country music in the years since Jones's heyday it's become practically a requirement for entry into the field, an irony not lost on the thousands of bystanders who sniff that the greatest country performer ever would be turned away from Music Row today on sight.
The fact that the title of the song has been borrowed for Libertarian tracts since basically forever - and thereby fits into a distinctively American ethos of tellin' bitches to step off - only further deepens the song as an expression of the historico-mythological American. Related perhaps to the nihilist vision of "Lost Highway," but (because it is a blues song, which means for our purposes a black song), it is aware of the potential oppressiveness of other people - even if it ultimately rejects them! - in a way that all-white mythologies can afford not to be.
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