The Decline of Western Music

Here are a few songs that I've recorded over the past few months.


1. St. Johns Bridge - I was inspired by two weeks spent demo-ing part of a house on the other side of the St. Johns Bridge in North Portland, listening to ships pass through the convergence of the Willamette and the Columbia.


2. Amazing Grace / Swing Low Sweet Chariot - This one sounds best over headphones. It's also the least "Western" of the bunch, but we all stray from the straight and narrow on occasion.


3. The Delta-Mendota Canal - The moodiest of the bunch and really more of an introduction to the next track.


4. Oklahoma Buckboard Springs - I recorded this one the first night I made it up and a cleaner cut will come just as soon as I re-string my 12-string. As is, it's a bit painful.



Oh, and lastly an impromptu video made by my friend Steven (of Band Practice / Party fame) and I out on the San Jose State campus. This is from well over 6 months ago and before I knew how to finger-pick, so that's my caveat emptor. The song's called Earthquake Blues and it's an elaborate exaggeration of my earliest memory, the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake; how Californian, huh?

I'll post more at this facebook page as I get around to writing and recording more.

"that remaining pioneer Western ethic that exists out here"

Following the lead of one of my favorite professors at Berkeley, I've begun collecting newspaper articles that I come across which are connected to my interests. Of course I have to put my Millennial (big M) spin on it, so I collect bookmarked New York Times Online articles, and in particular, their slide shows. Here are two that have particularly enchanted me as of late.


The first is the story of the battle over the future of a town in rural Oregon and it has all of the trappings of a classic western. Water battles, city council meetings over the fate of our little community, the big bad outsider buying up the town, old jailhouses - you know, all the fixin's. The great twist, though, is that the force behind the evil hubris isn't lust, land or liquor, but, ostensibly, the (colonial?) urge for historical preservation. Perhaps the West still breeds big plans and little communities.


The second is about the last rural airmail pilot in the united states and the small mountain community in Idaho that he serves. I can't decide if the postman's plane was the best symbol of "that remaining pioneer Western ethic that exists out here," as one of the people served along the route put it, or if the collection of vehicles they use to reach the pilot are more appropriate: a tractor, a motorcycle and an ATV-inspired hauler, all western transportation icons of certain eras.

The Evolution of Western Music

Here's a little gem from the memory of Alan Lomax that he recounted to an audience asking him about his early days collecting folk music. It came from, in his memory, an old "cow puncher" who'd traded in his pony for a bicycle and was traveling through Austin selling ice cream with this a capella cattle-driving tune-turned jingle:

I've been to the north and I've been to the south,
In times of flood and times of drought.
I've traveled aallll over Europe
And I'a never had the like of the sorghum syrup.
Bye-an-Bye, before I die, marry me a girl with a right blue eye!

I don't know of any field recordings of this uniquely western style of advertising (perhaps the cowboy was presaging green marketing when he took to his bike; he probably moved to Portland), but I think Alan Lomax does a pretty convincing rendition.