News – The Celestial Monochord

Homestead Pickin Parlor Goes Quiet

The Homestead Pickin’ Parlor is closing for good, and a lot of folks here in Dylan country are having a hard time with it.

Around the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro, the Pickin’ Parlor has long been an essential hub around which acoustic music — especially folk and bluegrass — has revolved.

It’s a center for music lessons, a seller of acoustic instruments, sheet music, instruction books, records, tapes, and CDs. They also handle repairs — they installed a couple railroad spikes on my open-back. They did a great job, cheap and fast.

When I first visited the grave of Sammy Markus — the long-time manager of the Victoria Cafe (see “Moonshiner’s Dance” on the Anthology of American Folk Music) — I was stunned to find he was just a couple blocks south of the Pickin’ Parlor.

I have long used the Pickin Parlor as a key landmark in my mental map of the metro I’ve chosen to be my home and, to an extent, in my map of my own personal universe.

***

I’ve always wanted to tell a story here at the Monochord, and I guess it’s now or never.

Round-about 2002, I guess, I took a lot of banjo lessons through the Homestead Pickin’ Parlor. Before each lesson, you’d check in at the counter, staffed at the time by a goofball named something like Bruce (or Walter?). He’d always have a corny joke, usually about oldtime banjo players vs. bluegrass banjo players — that sort of thing.

My instructor, Rachel Nelson, was a great teacher. I was eventually able to pretty much play a musical instrument for the first and only time in my life. It was a magical and mind-expanding experience.

Still, I was a mediocre student. I didn’t practice enough and when I did, I was frustrated that I didn’t make as much progress as I wanted. I was afraid of sounding bad, which you always do when you don’t practice enough. It’s kind of a vicious circle.

Around this time, I told my oldest brother about my banjo lessons. As with his 1960’s counter-cultural cohorts, music meant a lot to my brother. I knew he’d understand my strangely transformative experience, and what it meant to my relationship with music, my mind, my body, and my potential to … well, to become somebody new.

And he certainly did understand. In fact, he instantly told me a very vivid and important story. I wish I had all of the details right, but at least you’ll get the drift. Here’s how I remember it.

***

My brother said he’d studied at a mountaintop Zen Buddhist monastery in the western United States. Its leader was a roshi who had taught Leonard Cohen.

On their first private meeting, the roshi gave each student their own koan — a simple story, concept, or question upon which to meditate throughout the weeks or months they studied there. At their weekly audience with the roshi, each student would sit in the lotus position, almost knee-to-knee with their Zen master while the student reported any progress they’d made on their assigned koan.

My brother was assigned the question, “How are you born?”

How are you born? For hundreds of hours during long days and nights over many weeks on the mountaintop monastery, he meditated on the question. How are you born? At every weekly audience, he’d report his insights to the roshi.

How are you born? “Oh well, you come into your first light, full of wonder and begin your journey into …” The roshi looked at him in despair. His student was an idiot.

How are you born? “Roshi, it is a frightening world that you cannot comprehend, but by practice alone can you …” The roshi seemed so frustrated my brother wondered if he’d be kicked off the mountain.

After another such attempt, the roshi sighed heavily, looking around at the younger monks living with him. All these kids — these children, heads shaved like boot camp draftees — were just as clueless as the hippies who paid to stay a few weeks and then wander off. He was an old man, near death, and who among them could ever take his place here on the mountaintop?

Finally, at my brother’s last meeting with the roshi, my brother tried again. “Roshi, you are born naked without your monkish robes, but once you …”

Finally, in a savage rage, the elderly roshi sprang out of the lotus position — in one gesture, as if spring-loaded — into a standing wrestler’s stance. Now my brother had an angry old authority figure hovering directly over him, wild eyed and red faced. The roshi barked “HAH!”

He repeated, shouting “HAH! With a NOISE! That is how you are born! Screaming! WITH A NOISE!!!!”

——

I understood. My brother told me this story to help me understand my banjo lessons. I was overthinking my playing. I needed to forget that I was learning a skill for a while, and remember that my banjo was MY banjo. I was playing —PLAYING like a child — and playing to be heard. Just go at it, kid. Make a noise!

A few days later, I walked into the Homestead Picking Parlor for my lesson with Rachel, thinking about that conversation with my brother.

Lost in deep contemplation, I went to check in at the Pickin Parlor’s counter. There was Bruce. Without saying hello, he looked me right in the eye and asked, “What’s the first thing you know?”

Holy shit — not again! And here, I didn’t have weeks to meditate, seeking the answer in vain. But this was Bruce. He had no power over me. I was paying, so I just demanded the answer.

“I don’t know, Bruce. What’s the first thing you know?”

Bruce answered, “Old Jed’s a millionaire.”

The Return of “Temperance & Temptation”

A great ensemble tackles Moonshiners Dance and other music from Minnesota’s Prohibition history

Celestial Monochord readers will be glad to know that the Rose Ensemble’s upcoming season will include Songs of Temperance and Temptation.

The show will be back in November for an eight-city tour of Minnesota and, in abbreviated form, for a Mississippi riverboat cruise on October 23.

This is great news. The three performances of Temperance and Temptation that closed the Ensemble’s previous season included the first known performances in over 83 years of a peculiar, foot-stomping composition known as “Moonshiner’s Dance Part One.” This piece has been the axis around which my research, writing, and preservation efforts have revolved for more than five years.

Hopefully, the Rose’s upcoming November performances will give Minnesota another chance to catch an incredibly rare performance of “Moonshiner’s Dance,” a neglected and nearly forgotten landmark in the state’s musical legacy.

But even for me, the hope of seeing more of “Moonshiner” isn’t the best reason to look forward to this season’s revival of Songs of Temperance and Temptation.

The research is amazing: Research as Amazing

The show is very amusing — packed with fresh songs (that is, new-to-you and very alive), sung by skillful, versatile, and charismatic vocalists. The show is also informative, immersing you in a kind of cultural history of alcohol that’s likely to transform your understanding.

But the Ensemble’s marketing materials reprint a blurb from a local paper saying, “No one makes scholarly research more entertaining than The Rose Ensemble.” I think this subtly misses the main point, the best thing about the Rose and this show.

What I like most is the show’s unwavering confidence that its surest bet in amusing the audience is to tell them something they didn’t already know. The Rose just assumes from the start, correctly and to great effect, that surprising information — learning something — is among the wildest experiences the stage has to offer.

To me, this approach felt courageous and just a shade radical in its sheer respect for the audience — a belief in the audience’s intelligence, but even more in its willingness to be game for something new. My frenzied notes taken during the single performance I attended in June have grown cryptic with time, but at one point I simply wrote, “The amazing research.”

I’m fairly well versed in the history of pop music during and just before Prohibition. But the Songs of Temperance and Temptation were almost all completely new to me. And the photographs projected behind the performers were mostly new finds. And the collection of sheet music cover art was fantastic.

The show’s stories of Minnesota’s temperance movement will surprise most Minnesotans — the city of Hutchinson’s founding, for example, by a family of protest singers dedicated to women’s rights, the abolition of slavery, and men’s liberation from alcohol.

The Andrew Volstead story may also surprise a lot of people.

The Congressman from Granite Falls was seen across the United States as the primary villain of the Prohibition era — an incompetent, humorless zealot who drove the nation to (furtively) drink. He’s still remembered this way.

But the Rose Ensemble, perhaps following Daniel Okrent’s recent book, invites us to see him in a far more nuanced and sympathetic light.

(My own research has been hinting to me that both Okrent and Rose are going a little far in rehabbing Volstead’s reputation. A proper assessment of Volstead isn’t really available, so I think the guy is ripe material for a thorough biography.)

“I’ve Got the Prohibition Blues”

The members of the Rose Ensemble are trained veterans of choral music, and the Rose’s seasons always lean toward a wide variety of “early music.”

The upcoming season, for example, includes one show on “ancient Mediterranean Jews, Christians, and Muslims” and another on “feasts and saints in early Russia, Ukraine, Poland and Bohemia.”

So, of course, there’s the question of how well they handle Songs of Temperance and Temptation — and the answer is pretty good news.

The show’s first half deals primarily with 19th century conflicts leading up to Prohibition, so a bit of reserve and formal training only improves the verisimilitude. Rest assured, the show cuts loose early on and shows a lot of humor throughout. When they approach something like a barbershop quartet style, they’re clearly well prepared.

The real challenge comes during Prohibition, when American pop music fell in love with Jazz and the blues, and searched for something like an authentic “street” credibility. The Rose does very well with it, but it’s not surprising that swing and growl aren’t its most convincing assets.

But even in the slightly strained way the Rose Ensemble comes to grips with the 1920’s, they remain true to the history. One of the great pleasures of listening to, for example, Archeophone’s Phonographic Yearbook series is hearing the pop stars of the era grapple with those very same changes in public taste.

The blues and jazz revolution ended a lot of careers, just as Rock & Roll did decades later. Those who survived often did so by learning, with widely varying artistic success, the African American-inflected stomp and swerve in the era’s new sounds.

The more you hear what was recorded at the time, the more you appreciate the Rose’s mastery of this material today.

Moonshiner’s Dance, Part One

And finally, I know some folks will want to know how they did “Moonshiner’s Dance.” So here goes.

It came late in a show filled with a lot of unfamiliar music, so to suddenly hear a band, right in front of me, strike up that familiar introductory riff followed by that oompah hopped up on goofballs … it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

The only recording of the piece in existence — the one I’ve heard perhaps a thousand times — is trapped in the antique shellac of scratchy, store-bought 78s. It has no other existence. Hearing the piece played anew by a live band immediately in front of me was mind-bogglingly rare, and I felt it in every note.

Their approach was to hew quite closely to the original recording. The band was a little light on the beat and lacked the dance band insistence I’d expect, but otherwise tried to “play the record” as closely as possible.

In the recording, the third segment of the medley consists of a harmonica vamping some chords, possibly noodling a bit with an indecipherable tune. The blog Old Weird America claims the tune is “Turkey in the Straw,” but this is almost certainly wrong. The Rose Ensemble went with this suggestion, enunciating the tune very clearly.

I think it was the right decision. “Turkey in the Straw” is familiar and rousing (as the whole medley would have been to its original audience), and fits the piece nicely. It also dovetails (turkeytails?) with my thesis about the recording being something like a big-city parody of rural culture.

During the “At The Cross” segment of the medley, the fiddler took up a small American flag and waved it haughtily, which I loved. For one thing, it provided a light suggestion of the satirical stagecraft that I think was the real point of the “Moonshiner’s Dance” recording.

What we’re hearing in the recording was the soundtrack to something we’re not seeing. The Rose’s performance, then, also necessarily missed the chaos of the recording’s laughing, indecipherable voices, and generally … thick atmosphere that gives the recording its particular and mysterious register.

Certainly, I think the Rose’s performance worked wonderfully on its own terms, and the piece is plenty sturdy to have a performance life of its own.

But the challenges of performing it anew also highlight what I’ve come to focus on in my years of research — that the original “Moonshiner” recording has the power it has because it is so bursting with its very narrowly specific moment and place. To understand what this peculiar thing really is, then, we need to reconstruct the time and community from which it arose.

The Rose Ensemble has gleefully run directly into the path of that time and place, seeking a new way to make a new kind of performance sense for this piece that so often seems bent on denying the very possibility of sense itself.

In a way, that reinvention of new senses from old contexts is what The Rose Ensemble does for a living. These are brave people, and I want to see more of them.

[See also my thoughts in advance of the show.]

Featured image: Hutchinson Family Singers, 1845, www.metmuseum.org (founders of Hutchinson, MN, and abolitionist and temperance folksingers)

Journal of American Folklore Features the Monochord

The Journal of American Folklore says we’re “an obscure but interesting midwestern vernacular music blog.”

Some weeks ago, we here at Monochord headquarters were pleased to find ourselves featured in the latest issue of The Journal of American Folklore.

The article, by Nicole Saylor (head of Digital Services at University of Iowa), surveys several blogs that are “interested in vernacular culture,” and are of interest to folklorists.

Among other things she says about the Monochord, Saylor describes us as “an obscure but interesting midwestern vernacular music blog.”

The article focuses on three sites — Community, and Celestial Monochord, and The Art of the Rural — and the sites they include in their virtual communities, such as friend-of-the-Monochord, Old, Weird America, and the excellent Excavated Shellac.

Getting ahold of the full text of recent academic articles is often a headache for those not in academia. If you need help with this one, you might contact me personally or consult your friendly public librarian.

Of course, honors like this one — or the occasional fan letter — always make me feel guilty about not writing both more and better. I’ve developed a blogger identity crisis the last year or so, and nothing’s duller to read (or write) about than a blogger’s identity crisis.

I suspect I’ll feel more free to express myself once the Saint Paul City Council is done with its deliberations about the Victoria Theater.

As the most prominent defender (possibly) of a whole neighborhood’s most valuable architectural resource (conceivably), it’s suddenly a little intimidating to just logon and go joshing blithely around about kitten astronauts and garbanzo beans named Dylan.

Harry Smith Anthology Site Before Saint Paul Council

The city of Saint Paul officially takes up the question of its Folkways Anthology landmark

In May 2006, I was astonished to find the Victoria Cafe, still standing, right there in the Frogtown neighborhood of Saint Paul, Minnesota. Apparently, nobody had figured this out before.

Although music fans around the world knew the 1927 recording made by the Victoria Cafe’s orchestra, the Cafe’s location was unknown. Meanwhile, the old building was familiar around the neighborhood, which seemed completely unaware of any recording associated with it — much less what that recording represented, what place it held in American culture.

The Victoria — in which I see unparalleled significance for American music, and especially for the cultural history of the Upper Midwest — was just sitting there unnoticed, uncelebrated, and vacant, watching the traffic pass back and forth on University Avenue.

Now, about 5 years later, the City Council of Saint Paul will decide whether to finally recognize this building as an official Heritage Preservation Site. The city has an opportunity to protect this cultural resource and keep the demolition crews away from this landmark.

To my eyes, passing up this opportunity would reaffirm the Victoria’s decades of anonymity and neglect, instead of finally acknowledging an important cultural contribution made by Minnesota, Saint Paul, and Frogtown.

RESIDENTS of Saint Paul, please contact your City Council member and urge them to strongly support the Victoria Theater’s bid to become a Heritage Preservation Site.

NON-RESIDENTS of Saint Paul, please contact them anyway! You should email the entire council, or just the Victoria’s councilmember, Melvin Carter III.

And please, spread the word!

Links:

Now that the Victoria has reached the City Council, I’m tempted to tell the whole story all over again — explain it all, get it right, pin it down. But, well … the heart of the matter is out there in one form or another. Here’s a sampling.

History of the Victoria Theater — a short sketch at the Frogtown Neighborhood Association website.

Moonshiner’s Parking Lot? — when the wrecking ball was coming for the Victoria, I spilled (some of) my guts about why I think the building matters.

A Geography of the Anthology — a map of the influential Anthology, and a reminder of the default Southern emphasis of the idea of American “roots music”.

North Country Blues — thinking about the American musical canon, and what it means that the Upper Midwest has been neglected too often.

Louis Armstrong at the Coliseum, 1939 — Frank Cloutier, the Victoria’s bandleader, moved to the Coliseum at Lexington & University, where he was Musical Director for 13 years.

Email Me — if you have questions, or answers, about the Victoria or Moonshiner’s Dance, or anything else.

Saint Paul City Council — please contact them!

Save the Victoria Theater — the Facebook group with over 600 members.

See also “Anthology of American Folk Music” links at the upper left of this blog.

an original copy of the 78 rpm record of the 1927 “Moonshiner’s Dance,”
which Harry Smith included on the 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music

Moonshiner’s Parking Lot?

A piece of St. Paul's cultural history may be torn down for a parking lot.

The Victoria Cafe produced a recording of absolutely unique importance

—

In May 2006, I realized that an internationally notorious recording from 1927 — "Moonshiner's Dance, Part One" — was the work of the house band of a nightclub at 825 University Avenue in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Nobody had understood this before, so I was astonished and overjoyed to find the building still standing 79 years later. Since then — since early 2006 — I drive by it often, and each time my heart skips a beat until I see that the Victoria Theater is still there.

But now, not even 4 years into my research for a book on "Moonshiner's Dance," the Victoria building is being eyed for demolition to make way for a parking lot.

What disturbs me most is that, while my findings are enormously suggestive, the building's historical importance is not yet well understood. Like a species allowed to go extinct before biologists are even able to describe it, the Victoria Theater may be destroyed in the near-total absence of knowledge.

Other community members have great reasons to want the building saved.

I have my own reasons.

[ NOTE: Most of the information previously presented in this space has been superseded by my subsequent writing and research efforts. For this reason, I've deleted the text. Please visit this more recent post for better information on my mission to express the many stories I've encountered while trying to understand the meanings of this place. ]

Moonshiners Dance – On the Air

This blogger makes an appearance on Twin Cities community radio

(a relief in the Hibbing High School Library)

Tomorrow morning, May 21, I’ll be on the radio to talk about my research on “Moonshiners Dance, Part One,” from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music.

There’ll be more music than talk. We’ll be playing records that put Moonshiner into some sort of context — notably, the very rare and much speculated-about “Moonshiners Dance, Part TWO.”

The program is The Dakota Dave Hull Show, on KFAI from 9 to 11 central time. You can listen live, and the show will also be archived online for two weeks ONLY:

http://www.kfai.org/thedakotadavehullshow

Enjoy!

Update: The show went beautifully — it really couldn’t have gone better. Here’s the direct link. Remember that the show will become unavailable on the morning of June 4.

Barack Obama: Secret Banjoist?

Obama interrupts "Hopalong Peter" at a New Lost City Ramblers concert

In another clear sign that his campaign is in financial trouble, presidential hopeful Barack Obama is now fundraising among devotees of the southern Appalachian stringband music known as "oldtime."

Apparently conceding bluegrass donors to his Republican rival, Obama's campaign is appealing directly to less affluent and less numerous oldtime contributors.

Senator Joe Biden, asked for comment while attending a joint New Lost City Ramblers concert / Obama rally, said "This makes perfect sense. I mean, you got the first mainstream oldtime stringband who is articulate and bright and clean and nice-looking guys. I mean, that's a storybook, man!"

According to John Edwards, also in attendance, "This is a great idea! You know, Kelly Harrell was a textile worker, just like my fath — Ow! Hey! Ow! Not the face! Watch the hair! Security!"

The oldtime demographic has been ignored by major candidates ever since its support doomed the otherwise front-running candidacy of Henry A. Wallace in 1948.

Understandably, Obama's sudden embrace of the clawhammer banjo-playing set has left even some campaign staff puzzled.

"You know how you tell the difference between a bluegrass band and an oldtime band?" asked a high-level adviser to the Obama campaign on the condition of anonymity.

"The oldtime band is skinnier than the bluegrass band," he said, citing the previous testimony of Garrison Keillor.

To appeal to oldtime jammers, the campaign has even changed its official theme song more than forty-two times.

"First it was Sally Ann, and then we changed it to Sally Goodin, and then Sally in the Garden," said the exasperated campaign insider. "But the oldtimers didn't even notice! Apparently, they can't even tell their own songs apart!"

"Barack has got to put an end to this! He has to lift his foot up!"

Editor's Note: There is a (real-life, no joke) update to this article!

Milwaukee Soldiers Home

Maybe the Milwaukee Soldiers Home astounded me so because I was unprepared for it. I had no impression of the place, beyond a few lines on a map, until I found myself suddenly in the middle of it. Then I wanted to call everyone I knew and tell them to go there immediately.

My only thought originally was to visit the grave of Frank E. Cloutier's son — Alden, a sergeant during World War Two. The soldiers home, where Alden died, is surrounded by the Wood National Veterans Cemetery, where he's buried.

I realized long ago I can learn a lot by visiting the graves of the various characters I encounter in my research. Often, the headstone's inscription teaches me about the person's military service, or relatives I hadn't heard of are buried nearby. Sometimes, I discover a musician was a dedicated Freemason. Occasionally, the adjacent plot for the widow never quite got filled.

Once, explaining all this to a coworker, he said, "Just imagine how much you'd learn if you dug them up." I thought seriously about this for a few more seconds then you might imagine before coming to my senses. I think it's possible he could have been making fun of me.

Anyway, the grounds of the Milwaukee Soldier's Home are mind-boggling. Approved by Abraham Lincoln, they have the most impressive Victorian (I guess) architecture I've ever seen — overly massive and extremely dramatic. After more than forty years of visiting Milwaukee, I somehow had no idea such a place even COULD exist there, much less that it actually did, and very deep in the heart of the metro area.

And the buildings are all dilapidated. I later learned that a concerted effort is underway to preserve and renovate the place, but it is currently in a surreal state of disrepair. Peeling paint, broken boards, shattered windows, yellow police tape everywhere. Any movie studio would gladly pay a small fortune to make pristine grounds look this neglected. Sadly, paying to make neglected grounds look pristine is a harder sell.

Strange and disorienting as the visitor's experience is, it's intensified by the overwhelming, looming presence of a cynical and majestically trite metaphor — Miller's Stadium. The unimaginable scale of the stadium, just across the street, gives the impression that you could almost touch it from every point on the grounds. The rows of headstones feel like the stadium's parking lot.

It's impossible to walk there, at this stage in the renovation project and at this stage in American history, and not see the irony. A crumbling veterans hospital shadowed by a violently expensive baseball stadium. (According to my research, Miller's Stadium was built at a cost of 87 godzillion dollars. For the mathematically disinclined, that's an 87 followed by six ass-loads of zeros.)

The casual visitor will definitely be reminded of the scandal that put Walter Reed in the headlines a while back. Of course, it should be said — emphatically — that I have no clue about the medical care and other services currently offered veterans in Milwaukee. A knowledgeable veteran, for example, recently told me the veterans hospital in Madison is truly world-class. I was surprised to hear this because I know nothing about it.

Since visiting this veterans home, I learned that my father's mother volunteered there for many years, helping care for World War Two veterans around the time of the Vietnam War. Maybe my grandmother knew Alden Cloutier.

But I wouldn't have known any of this had I not made the effort. I've visited a lot of locations across the Upper Midwest for no reason other than some musician happened to pass through there 80 years ago. The effect is a little as if a Star Trek transporter beam had gone haywire and dropped me off at a random place and time. I highly recommend it.

Here is a Flickr set I took there (it begins with rather too many shots of Alden's headstone) and here are some shots by other Flickr subscribers.

When My Willie Come Home

Recently, Hillary Clinton made a cutesy Lockhorns-ish joke about her husband Bill being a bad and evil man, presumably thinking of the Monica Lewinsky incident, among others. And, you know, all the pundits got busy on it.

Personally … maybe it’s me … what I thought of was a cut on Mike Seeger’s “Southern Banjo Sounds” — the one called “Last Night When My Willie Come Home.” It’s one of my favorite cuts on a CD full of brilliant recordings.

It’s a lively performance, sweet and funny, punctuated by quills — bamboo pan pipes, basically, which Mike wears the way Bob Dylan wears his harmonicas. At the same time, Mike accompanies himself on banjo, sounding absolutely effortless, natural. But the liner notes inform us that he’s alternating between SIX different styles of banjo picking based on the playing of Sam McGee, Virgil Anderson, Maybelle Carter, and Charlie Poole.

The lyrics begin:

Well, it was late last night when my Willie come home
Heard a mighty rappin’ at the door
Slippin and a-sliding with his new shoes on
Oh Willie, don’t you ramble no more

Of course, Bill Clinton was called “Slick Willie” back in 1992, and the Willie in Seeger’s song is “slipping and sliding”. Maybe that’s more than enough of an association.

But when Seeger refers to “my Willie” in the first line, it always carries an unfortunate penile image for me, and I have to remind myself that the speaker is Willie’s long-suffering woman. Then again, the Starr Report conjured a lot of similarly unfortunate images, and the experience of trying to shake them from my head only reiterates the association, in my twisted mind, between these Willies.

More to the point, this is a rounder song — a song about a wastrel, “one who,” according to my desk dictionary, “dissipates resources foolishly and self-indulgently.” Willie’s slippery new shoes are the central theme of all rounder songs — he lives high, spends a lot of capital on all the wrong things, and is ultimately a tragic figure. His shoes are new, but he’s dangerously rootless.

Like a lot of these old songs, the point of view careens from one character to another recklessly and without warning. In the chorus, Willie speaks:

And it’s “Oh me” and it’s “Oh my”
What’s gunna become of me?
For I’m down in town just a-fooling around
No one’s gunna stand my bond.

The song is sympathetic to Willie’s wife, but also to Willie — it understands his fear and regret:

Well the last time I seen my own true love
She was a-standing in the door
She threw her arms all around my neck
Saying “Honey, don’t you go”

I don’t have a “message” here, at least not about politics. Seeger’s “Last Night When My Willie Come Home” is ill-suited to the politics you typically find today on TV and, come to think of it, in blogs. The point of view shifts (and is shared) among the characters, and the song doesn’t bother much to identify the guilty and innocent. The song’s affectation is light and comic, but the emotional lives of the characters are intense, sincerely felt (the inverse of what you might find on FOX chat shows).

Presidential candidates always promise to change the tenor of political debate and Hillary frames her campaign as a “conversation” — just the form in which this song comes at you. I wonder if she’s looking for a campaign song …

I’ll love you, dear girl, till the sea runs dry
Rocks all dissolved by the sun
I’ll love you dear girl till the day I die
And then, Oh Lord, I’m done

Editor’s Note: This is the first installment of a grand experiment! The Celestial Monochord will attempt to post one entry EVERY DAY during the month of February 2007. Pray for Mojo!

One Post Every Day in February!

Attention ladies and gentlemen! Hear ye, hear ye!

Next month, The Celestial Monochord will conduct an unprecedented experiment in the history of the internets!

We hereby announce and commit, against our better judgement as well as the laws of physics, that there will be ONE ENTRY posted to the Monochord EVERY DAY during the ENTIRE DURATION of the month of February in the year of 2000 and 7!

Neither your ears nor your eyes deceive you!

Never before has any proprietor of an electronic journal-keeping service attempted a feat of such dizzying blogospheric daring-do! Do not try this at home! Individuals of weak constitution such as ladies and nervous persons are forewarned!

Tell your friends and neighbors! It’s absolutely free! An event you will never forget!

[ Quality entries are not guaranteed. The publishers of The Celestial Monochord are not responsible for lapses in good taste, civility, research rigor, insight, nor any other editorial standard ordinarily aspired to by this blog. ]