Music City
At the heart of county music is the performance of sincerity
Nashville is a neon-lit diorama of that other big idea, America
That said, Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’ is a pretty good movie
The first time I saw Nashville, Robert Altman’s 1975 film about my hometown, I was in my early thirties. After a decade spent living in midwestern college towns and East Coast cities, I had returned to Middle Tennessee for the summer, and I was struck, dumbfounded really, by what I found. Nashville, in flux for as long as I could remember, was now under full-on construction. Orange cranes stalked the city skyline. Everywhere, hard hats and heavy pounding. The dust in the air, deviled by pile-drivers and dump trucks, described upheavals, big change.
Shortly after I arrived, my sister-in-law gave birth to a baby girl in the same hospital where I had been born, but the facility had recently come under new management. Just days before, the banners for Baptist Hospital had been replaced with signs for Ascension Saint Thomas Hospital Midtown, a birthing place for the new city of high-rises, …
Gamboling With Gamble Rogers
Itinerant south-central Florida troubadour ain’t no Rodgers and Hammerstein
Yet the New York Public Library lovingly preserves his songs and yarns, from ‘Habersham County Mephistopheles’ to ‘Bovine Midwifery’
Spoilers: His father swam at Dartmouth; His grand-uncle designed Yale’s library; He became a kind of folk-song Faulkner after drinking with the man himself at U. Va., just as Stephen Malkmus might have done.
The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives of Recorded Sound contains over half a million physical recordings stored in individually labeled slipcases so as to be easily retrieved by the hard-working archivists at the New York Public Library. The archive contains recordings of Billy Sunday preaching sermons, Irving Berlin singing his own songs, and Toscanini performing at the Metropolitan Opera. It is named after Richard Charles Rodgers and Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II, a New York-born songwriting duo who made a gazillion dollars creating Broadway hits set in places where neither man had ever traveled, such as Oklahoma!, a musical about a farm town in which the biggest word used by any of the hick characters is “Oklahoma” (unless you include compound words, such as “smart-alecky”).
The Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives is also home to a rare 12-inch LP titled Sorry Is As Sorry …
Richard Thompson and Friends
Being a folk singer means being a home to all the people who sing through you
The universe wants us to jubilate
Folk genius fills a ballroom in seedy, smelly New Jersey
Some of the oldest written music was melismatic. Melisma — that’s an oozy, radiant musicological word for the technique of singing multiple notes to articulate a single syllable. Think of Joni Mitchell’s sudden soaring on Blue’s penultimate track: I could drink a case of youuu-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oO-OO-Oo, darling — shooting the one-syllable you to the sky with eight extra tones. Think of the vocal acrobatics of a circa-2007 American Idol contestant, or of Bach’s Mass in G Major: Gloria. One word. Three syllables. 21 notes. That’s melisma.
Early Christian mystics felt melisma to be the ultimate externalization of spiritual feeling, an irrepressible gushing of holiness. Medieval monks called it “jubilated singing.” Sometimes jubilated singing meant one word was sung with 300 notes. St. Augustine called it “the expression of a mind poured forth in …
