Tuesday, October 08, 2013
Great Literature inspires Music
And my Mother, who was embarrassed to say she had been raised in the South, and all of its attitudes, would mention awful earlier hillbilly songs, that betokened the people she came to dislike so much, "I Am My Own Grandpa".
Someone would be singing that tune on one of the C&W music shows on tv (maybe Grand Old Opry) (a show she absolutely detested) as the song had regained a renewed popularity in the mid-60s, and she would sit in an easy chair with her legs crossed sneering at the television screen.
Then she would mention Lorenzo and Oscar's version.
This is a music historian's or pop culturist's dreamworld, you see. A casual throw-away line from Mark Twain becomes a song, launches, a career, is revitalized into a series of C&W hits and people develop diagrams to explain the content. And the content has everything to do with inbred hillbillies.
¶ 10/08/2013 01:33:00 AM
And my Mother, who was embarrassed to say she had been raised in the South, and all of its attitudes, would mention awful earlier hillbilly songs, that betokened the people she came to dislike so much, "I Am My Own Grandpa".
Someone would be singing that tune on one of the C&W music shows on tv (maybe Grand Old Opry) (a show she absolutely detested) as the song had regained a renewed popularity in the mid-60s, and she would sit in an easy chair with her legs crossed sneering at the television screen.
Then she would mention Lorenzo and Oscar's version.
This is a music historian's or pop culturist's dreamworld, you see. A casual throw-away line from Mark Twain becomes a song, launches, a career, is revitalized into a series of C&W hits and people develop diagrams to explain the content. And the content has everything to do with inbred hillbillies.
¶ 10/08/2013 01:33:00 AM
