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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Left and center, courtesy Amanda Petrusich; right, photo by Bret Stetka
Left to right, Sun Studio in Memphis, Tenn.; the crossroads of the blues, Routes 61 and 49 in Mississippi; Amanda Petrusich.
The author of "It Still Moves" discusses her road trip through America's musical past and future -- and why we still yearn for the music of yore.
By Judy Berman
Read more: Books, Music, Indie Rock, Interviews, Blues, Elvis Presley, Folk Music, Country Music, Authors, Books Interviews, Judy Berman
Sept. 2, 2008 | One morning last week, the sound of raucous, twangy fiddle music greeted me as I groggily descended the stairs to the subway platform. A small crowd had gathered around a young man attacking his instrument with intensity and skill. Toddlers did clumsy dances as their parents dropped change into his open case.
Sitting on the train, I pulled out my copy of Amanda Petrusich's "It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music," considering the parallels between the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based music critic's book and the juxtaposition of ancient sounds and contemporary landscape I had just witnessed. Every decade or so, Americana resurfaces, from Creedence Clearwater Revival in the late '60s to the Mekons 10 years later, to Uncle Tupelo, who ushered in the early-'90s alt-country movement. But as music increasingly becomes digitized, it's getting more difficult to feel a personal connection to the songs we listen to. The longing for old-fashioned forms, pastoral themes and nostalgic visions of the American dream seems more urgent than ever. "Living on a farm, the only thing to do at night was gather on the porch and have everyone play a song together," says Petrusich. "There's something appealing about the simplicity of it. Things have gotten so complicated."
This impulse to simplify may be at the heart of Americana music's most recent, and increasingly popular, revival. The country-flavored band My Morning Jacket has risen from the underground to release one of 2008's most commercially successful and critically acclaimed albums, "Evil Urges." Last year, formerly obscure, antifolk weirdo Kimya Dawson earned overnight fame with her soundtrack to the film "Juno." And, as Petrusich describes in "It Still Moves," the world of independent music teems with new "free-folk" (or "freak-folk" or "new, weird America") artists like Devendra Banhart and Iron and Wine who shape old forms into albums that sound ancient and contemporary at the same time.
Structured around a three-and-a-half-week solo road trip that took the author (a 28-year-old staff writer at Pitchfork and contributing editor for Paste) across the American South, from Memphis and Nashville, Tenn., to the Mississippi Delta and the mountains of Appalachia, "It Still Moves" is a contemplative journey through the history of folk, country, blues and rock 'n' roll. Petrusich's tale unfolds in the first person, complete with uncomfortable moments, delicious home-cooked meals, and long, dreamy stretches of highway. She tells stories about legends like Elvis and obscure figures like W.C. Handy, another Memphis musician whose 1909 song, "Boss Crump Blues," may have launched the genre. Petrusich traces the divergent strands of Americana through the 20th century and into the 21st, finding the tradition alive and well in free folk's unofficial headquarters of Brattleboro, Vt., where the first free-folk festival was held in 2003.
Salon spoke with Petrusich at Salon's New York office about her road trip through America, how Lead Belly was the 50 Cent of his time and why we still yearn for the music of yore.
I grew up listening to grunge and pop radio, and I found it the way a lot of people find it. You listen to enough Led Zeppelin and you eventually hear the name "Robert Johnson," and from there it's a treasure hunt through the record store. When I first started hearing that stuff, especially Delta blues, I fell in love with it. And when Harry Smith's "Anthology of American Folk Music" was reissued on CD in 1997, I was 17 years old. Through that, I hunted things down. Around 2003, I started hearing a lot of bands in the indie-rock area that were drawing from Americana in really interesting ways.
Why do you think Americana has had such a resurgence lately?We live in a digital culture now. Things feel less regional, and music feels less regional. Americana appeals in the way that it feels more "authentic," or a little bit richer, a little bit tied to a place. We don't see as much of that anymore.
Maybe it's the same thing that draws people to record collecting -- it's tangible.I'm no record collector, but I'm kind of a nerd about that stuff. You hold an LP in your hand, and it's all those clichéd things. It's big and it's awkward, it's dusty, it's beautiful, and it smells funny. It has the liner notes, and it's kind of mysterious. All those things apply to this music, too. It feels rooted.
So many of the characters in "It Still Moves" -- like Moses Asch, who founded Folkways Records, and John and Alan Lomax -- are obsessive collectors. Does the impulse to collect and preserve strike you as a particularly American trait?Yeah. It's endemic of American culture, whether it's collecting money or square footage or going to Costco and collecting 65 cans of green beans. It's funny, because I've just started writing about record collectors. I'm following around these 78 collectors. It's amazing how much preservationist work they do. [In the 1940s] lots of masters [master recordings] were melted for the war effort. Paramount's were supposedly thrown in the Milwaukee River. All that are left of those songs are those 78s.
Record collectors are a big part of American music history. People think of it as being this niche and a male pastime -- Robert Crumb, "Ghost World," basement dwellers, mouth breathers. But John and Alan Lomax were song collectors. I think they were driven by a love of that music and a desire to preserve it.
You mention in the book that the protagonist of most American road trip stories is male. Most rock critics are also male, as are most of the characters in "It Still Moves." How did being a woman impact your experience, both on the road and in writing the book?The story of Americana music is very much a male story, or that's the way in which it's been preserved. There were certainly a lot of amazing female blues musicians, but unfortunately they didn't get to record, and their stories haven't been passed on in the same way. There were times when I felt almost self-conscious about it. I wanted to write about more women artists, but it was difficult to have access to that information and to those recordings.
About the road-story structure of it, I love "Blue Highways"; I even love "On the Road." I felt like, why can't a woman write this book? Why are these stories so overwhelmingly male? So many women I know love driving around listening to records, but I guess that's not something people think about.
Male road trip stories tend to focus on finding oneself through a journey. Did you experience that?The trip was cathartic for me. It's an interesting time to be writing a book about America because we're at war, and there's a very contentious presidency. "Patriot" has become a loaded word with uncomfortable connotations. It was interesting to get back in touch with the country at a time when I felt out of touch with it politically. Especially the South, which gets maligned as being backward or conservative by default, which is not necessarily true. I fell deeply, deeply in love with this country.
Next page: How big a role did racial tension play in the history of American music?
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