I’ve just finished ‘It Still Moves’ by Amanda Petrusich the subtitle of which is ‘Lost songs, lost highways and the search for the next American music’. I wanted to read this after being impressed by a short piece she wrote about music from the Mississippi region in the Epiphanies column of July 2009’s Wire magazine. In this she describes herself as an unlikely fan of the Delta Blues, having been born in New York City in 1980 and growing up with “a penchant for Cyndi Lauper cassettes”. In many ways she’s also an unlikely contributor to the Wire which favours experimental and avant-garde above the more mainstream orientated music Petruish has written about for Pitchforkmedia.com or as contributing editor at Paste magazine.
In her book, she attempts to define ‘Americana’ by taking a solitary road trip to some of the key musical locations – past and present. She tries to piece together this complicated story to discover “how and why this music has changed – into Rock’n’Roll, into Nashville Country, into Alternative Country, into Indie-Folk and Free-Folk “. Inevitably, it’s also a story of how America has changed and is changing.
For this bold enterprise, she wisely adopts a highly subjective perspective and makes no claims to it being a definitive overview. Early on she is honest about her limitations: “It is my perpetual and unmistakable failure as a music critic that that I am infinitely more interested in personal details than in studio settings or guitar pedals or synthesizer type or whether or not something has been recorded in 3/4 time. I would rather discuss what the weather was like in Portland the month the band was recording, if the bassist’s sister had her baby, what everyone ate for breakfast, or how hard it was to get off work. These are narratives that can’t be parsed exclusively through song lyrics and chord changes and backbeats and bass lines”
Her writing is certainly weakest when she tries to describe musical forms. Her strength is in making personal and cultural associations. One of the best chapters is in Lebannon, Tennessee where she describes her ‘Old Timer’s Breakfast’ at a Cracker Barrel restaurant with its “shiny lulling fats, mass produced carbohydrates and mild soothing flavors. I don’t care if it’s sort of gross. It’s also sort of delicious”. One of the themes of the book is her unhealthy diet, the eateries she stops at confirms the vision of America presented in Eric Schlosser’s ‘Fast Food Nation’ .
In the Cracker Barrel she describes the “aw-shucks iconography” of signs, photos and other memorabilia which necessitates “buying into artefacts of activities and emotions most of us have never experienced first hand”. This is a form of Americana which, like the music, relies on the creation of an imagined heritage and a reinvention of tradition. I like the fact that Petrusich does not adopt a holier than thou attitude in these descriptions – she admits to buying into the process; she sees the tackiness but doesn’t reject it.
Combining the travelogue aspects of the book with the musical connections is not always successful. The chapter on Woody Guthrie simply gives a highly condensed version of his life without putting his music into a modern perspective. Other times, she includes what seem like direct quotes from her travel journal such as when she returns to her home city: “I buy a strawberry cheesecake at a stand in front of Shoot the Freak, and lean against a railing outside the New York Aquarium’s teaching annex, watching the ocean and pushing the hair out of my face”.
You can forgive these lapses when you come across fine writing like this description of the Mississippi : “the river looks menacing and serpentine, backing reason and straight lines as if it were scribbled into place by an irate child”. She’s also an astute observer of the links to the Alt.Country scene and is rightly suspicious of catch-all genre labels : “when a movement is named (and ,thus, legitimized and given limits) it stops working in the same ways”. She gets a good quote from Kentucky born J.D. Wilkes , the singer of an obscure good time punk meets country band Th’ Legendary Shack Shakers, Wilkes criticises the glumness and introspective of many performers which he calls the “bleak dirges of art-damaged folkies”. She probably has in mind artists like Will Oldham. Richard Bucker and Jason Molina.
In trying to give some kind of definition of alt.country, Petruisich unwisely turns to Brian Hilton’s ‘South By South West’ which is little more than a cut and paste rundown of the links between folk,country and rock. She would have done better to seek out David Goodman’s excellent alternative country music guide and directory – ‘Modern Twang’ – which says more in the introduction alone than in the whole of Hinton’s error laden book. Goodman, for instance, recognises the controversy of the Alt.Country label but says “I feel comfortable with it because I believe that at a time when 90% of the public associates ‘Country’ music with Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, and the rest of the Nashville establishment, there needs to be a way to delineate performers who have provided an important option by drawing on and enhancing traditional country through the addition of contemporary styles and ideas”. As if to confirm this, Petruisich calls Nashville a “central processing plant” of music.
The quest for ‘next American music’ , ends with a sharp summary of the Free Folk explosion which has largely usurped Alt.Country as the real sound of Americana. Petrusich includes quotes from her interviews with Sam Beam (Iron & Wine), Byron Coley, Matt Valentine and refers to David Keenan’s influential 2003 article on ‘New Weird America’ in The Wire. She says that “what most people think of as Americana music – acoustic, folksy, quiet songs – now lives in cities and coffee-houses, admired by upper middle-class, well-educated people and collected and fetishized by academics and/or record store clerks”.
Her conclusion that “Americana is inherently nebulous, destined to change its meaning with each subsequent generation”, is perhaps not something she needed a road trip to discover but the journey does flesh out how the evolution of the American nation feeds into the music. She writes that “all American music reflects the landscape from which it springs”
I broadly share her viewpoint although, as a Brit, I don’t think she quite gives enough weight to the fact that Free-Folk is as heavily influenced by British folksingers as it is by the old folk tunes to be found in Smithsonian and Folkways catalogues.
This is the kind of book I’d like to write and it’s a welcome reminder that traditional music is not just a topic for dry historic study for male academics .
