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This will be my last post for a day or two, since I've been overactive. But I wanted to contribute from another direction--as a blues musician who learned his trade in an East Village (NYC) juke joint among down-home musicians from Brooklyn and Staten Island and (The Holmes Brothers) Virginia. I've been amazed by how active southern music-making is in New York City. In particular, the last 5-7 years have seen an explosion of bluegrass and old-timey musicking. My harmonica-playing friend Trip Henderson (whose day gig is planning special events for Channel 13, public television) sends me an email every week or so about one southern-flavored band or another. I've been to several gigs in little bars on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn. I'm talking guitar, banjo, dobro, harp, and maybe a guy on a trapset, with all the vocalists congregating around one central mike, as though at a recording session in Bristol, Tenn.--each stepping forward and leaning in to solo, then stepping back. Here's one website: http://www.bigapplebluegrass.com/babsrap.htm Here's another: http://www.sheriffunclebob.com/session.asp Also check out the movie-clip with "Cherokee" in the title for some live southern music, NYC style: http://www.sheriffunclebob.com/movies.asp Sheriff Bob is a local legend. I'm not sure if he's northern or southern, by birth. From what I've been told, he's a New Jersey pothead who inherited money and decided to actually have fun with his life. In performance among this crowd, there's occasionally a very faint undercurrent of O Brother surrealism or mockery--a postmodern tinge, I'd say, and quite possibly a function of the fact that it's hard to be a suburban Jersey guy or Brooklynite singing mountain music with an entirely straight face, no matter how hard you try. So they try just a shade too hard, and know they're doing this. In any case, my point was that there is an active and passionately invested southern music scene in New York City. Can this music be called "southern music"? If I'm right about the subtle tongue-in-cheek or over-the-top dynamic, would that somehow undercut whatever residual southerness the music possessed? In other words, are authentic musical southernness--however one defines it--and self-consciousness about oneself AS a purveyor of southern music mutually exclusive? (I tend to think not, and would invoke "Hee Haw" as evidence.) --Adam Adam Gussow Assistant Professor Department of English and Program in Southern Studies The University of Mississippi P.O. Box 1848 University, MS 38677 (ofc) 662-915-7333 (h) 662-281-8596
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