No, I don't have anything better to do in Normal entries

Do ye ken john peel at the break of day?

Do ye ken john peel with his coat so gay?

Do ye ken john peel when he’s far far away,

With his hounds and his horns in the morning? --- Traditional

John browns body lies a moldering in the grave

His soul goes marching on --- I’m calling it traditional no matter what wiki’s, googles and assorted yahoo’s might say

I’m going somewhere, bear with me.

…You are the reason I’ve been waiting all these years … and I’m wasted and I can’t find my way home --- Blind Faith

Wash your whiskey in your water, sugar in your tea

What’s all these crazy questions you asking me?

This is the craziest party I ever seen,

Don’t turn on the lights I don’t wanna see --- Three Dog Night

I guess I could keep going, almost want to out of vanity, like I’ve heard a tune or two written past 1969. Thing is I’d probably have to use Google instead of my own head. Only thing I think of offhand written in the last decade is that Ana Nalik song and I’m a little unclear on my favorite part, something like, The day he turned 21 hmm hmm hmm fort bliss hmmm hmmm hmm flask in his fist, ain’t been sober since maybe October of last year hmmm hmm hmmm when the boy smiles . I just mean my long term works better than my short term.

Anna Nalik would be a good example of what I’m getting at though. There’s a thousand ways from Sunday one could bitch or do a sociology dissertation on how technology has changed the cultural context of, well, everything. I don’t wanna do that. That’s all low spark of high heeled boys (Heh. Just throwing in a Stevie Winwood reference, he actually wrote the blind faith song, half the lyric sites want to say Clapton did, the album was a side project, the album says the songs were all written by blind faith. Nobody suggests Ginger baker wrote anything, ever.)(Oh, shit. Yeah I love low spark of high heeled boys, I haven’t a fucking clue what it means, so I tossed it out in this context to mean mundane, to mean obvious, to mean the low road taken by trendy young men).

I think where I want to go is the whole minstrel vs. the rock star thing. No I’m not going to swing on the nuts of pop culture. A minstrel was bringing the news. Music doesn’t do that anymore. With the whole John Brown thing the music was a part of the message. John Brown was an abolitionist in Kansas right as the issues surrounding the civil war were coming to a head. Correct me if I’m wrong, I’m doing it from memory of sixth grade American studies, but I think Kansas was either all South or, at best one of those split states. All its borders are dangerous for one position or the other and nobody got to be neutral. Anyhow the song is to the tune of the Yankee anthem; The Battle Hymn of the Republic. There just has to be some smart-assholerie going on there somewhere. The band Kansas used that famous picture of john brown looking batshit crazy on their first album cover. I forget the artist.

I digress. That’s a given, it’s my MO; digression. Declension is a cool word, I don’t know how to, um, declent? Heh. I’m just saying prior to mass communication songs carried the news, usually with a strong bias, and, oddly enough given the way the West works, the bias was that of the serf, the peasant, the working class, the proletariat. I don’t mean guys in tights with lutes (I don’t think there really ever was such a thing, I lived in England, you’d freeze your ass off in tights. I think the movies took liberties with leggings because Hollywood is in reclaimed desert and hot as a motherfucker when the sun is up) I mean up until the turn of the twentieth century, even then you had folks who called themselves musicologists trying to record songs that had no sheet music, that were oral traditions. There was a movie a few years back that was sort of a composite of those folks, though they stuck it in a silly romance and adversarial sort of plot and made it vaguely Victorian. Most of those guys were guys and most of the field work was gritty and whole careers came and went without a pinch of romance.

When I think of those guys Alan Lomax is the first to come to mind. Yeah. He did things like go to chain gangs and prisons. Oh, yeah, I don’t know why, but Elvis’s Jailhouse rock was a disturbing song. I’m pretty sure there was no intent to suggest that jails were somehow not segregated by gender; I’m sure there’s a funny story in there somewhere. I mean fiction, don’t I? Still, raging heterosexual that I am I would cruise for the wooden chair before cruising for a partner seeing as the song gives me that option. Oh, digression.

Hmmm, I guess that’s all there is, it ain’t much, sure spread itself out a lot for how not much it was, sort of like how a cat can manage to take up a whole sofa when it gets the urge to.

Oh, if I got those songs wrong, or different than you remember or different than some lyric site, well, I'm doing them from memory. I'd rather cede to your memory, however, than the cock-ups lyric sites manage to put up.