Tag Archives: Smithsonian Folkways

From Tejano To Polkas: Americana Lost and Found

Photo by Jacqueline Macou/Creative Commons 2.0

Back in the fifties when I was just a little squirt, most Saturday nights were spent at my grandparents’ house, where we ate boiled chicken, played endless card games, and watched television on a small Dumont black and white. It was always the same routine: Lawrence Welk, Jackie Gleason, Gunsmoke, a bowl of cherry Jell-O and then off to bed. Not sure how my older sister escaped these tortuous nights, but while she was out at sock hops dancing with her friends and cruising the parking lot at Bob’s Big Boy on the boulevard, part of my musical DNA was being formed by the sound of Myron Floren’s accordion playing, an Amercan-ized, white-bread version of polka music.

Fast forward to the mid-’70s, and I was working as a sales rep for an indie music distributor with a territory that took me deep into the small steel and mining towns of Pennsylvania, with an enormous catalog of multigenre titles, including all of Floren’s albums. For almost a half-dozen years I drove through the mountains on the turnpike and country roads with my VW Super Beetle equipped with a Craig eight-track player and an AM radio. Long hours were spent in that car, smoke-filled from Winstons and weed, listening to my own psychedelia mixtapes while alternating through the small local radio stations to get weather updates, check out the farm reports, and listen to polka music. Half-step or waltz, fast or slow, instrumental or with vocals, I loved it. And although this song from Tom Russell sure ain’t a polka, it captures that time period and geography spot on.

One of the people I was listening to back then was Augie Meyers, the childhood friend and longtime collaborator of Doug Sahm. It was his organ playing on the Sir Douglas Quintet albums that added the Norteño style that cut through anything else you were hearing on the radio at the time. Sometime after they released Mendocino, I picked up a copy of Augie’s Western Head Music Co. and played it to death. Pretty sure I still have it somewhere in the vinyl stacks, and I recently found this song posted on YouTube. It was my connect-the-dot to the polkas from the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania to the border music of Southern Texas.

Chris Strachwitz, the founder of Arhoolie Records — now owned and administered by Smithsonian Folkways — has been a longtime fan and collector of Tejano and conjunto music, issuing a great series of albums culled from his 1990 purchase of Ideal Records under the banner of Tejano Roots. He’s also filmed two documentaries and written extensively about this music, which is posted on a page from the University of Texas at Austin site. Below he explains how the music of Mexico was influenced by other countries and cultures.

“The musical traditions of the Tejanos of South Texas and Norteños of Northern Mexico have been influenced not only by the mother country, Mexico, but also by their Anglo-American, African-American and immigrant neighbors like the Czechs, Bohemians, and Moravians as well as the Germans and Italians. Industry, especially brewing, in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, was developed in part by German immigrants; and the distributors of German-made accordions aggressively marketed the loud, sturdy little ‘boom boxes’ as far back as the late 1800s. Norteño/Conjunto accordion pioneer Narciso Martínez learned many tunes from German and Czech brass bands.”

American-born or based performers who’ve since popularized and included the style into rock and folk music include Sam the Sham and The Pharaohs, Ry Cooder, Calexico, Los Lobos, Latin Playboys, The Mavericks, The Mars Volta, and Los Super Seven. In 1971 Doug Sahm was signed to Atlantic Records as a solo act, and Flaco Jimenez, Freddy Fender, and Augie Meyers were often in the studio backing him up. In 1990 the quartet released their debut album under the name Texas Tornados, and it was recorded in both English and Spanish. Sahm died in 1999, and Fender in 2006. Doug’s son Shawn has kept the music alive, working with Meyers and Jiménez as well as Tornado original musicians Louie Ortega, Speedy Sparks, and Ernie Durawa, and releasing Está Bueno! in 2010. Shawn is still out there performing regularly.

This is a link to Smithsonian Folkways’ catalog of Latin recordings, most of which were acquired by the Arhoolie purchase. You can buy, download, and stream most, if not all. The Tejano Rootsseries is comprised of several collections focusing on specific topics such as women, accordions, orquestas, San Antonio, and artists including Jimenez, Tony De La Rosa, Conjunto Bernal, and Lydia Mendoza.

As in all forms and subgenres of American roots music, this is simply another example of how our country is culturally richer because of our diverse heritage. Whether through the willful immigration from countries spanning the globe or the horrific forced slavery from Africa, people have found ways to connect and share their collective hopes, dreams, and talent, throwing it into the melting pot. And as Woody Guthrie wrote, “In wheat fields waving and dust clouds rolling, the voice come chanting as the fog was lifting … this land was made for you and me.”

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music.

Many of my past columns, articles, and essays can be accessed here at my own site, therealeasyed.com. I also aggregate news and videos on both Flipboardand Facebook as The Real Easy Ed: Americana and Roots Music Daily. My Twitter handle is @therealeasyed and my email address is easyed@therealeasyed.com.

Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music

Several months ago when I transitioned from an owner of music to a renter via streaming, the first selection I imported into my cloud-based digital library was a collection of folk music I first heard when I was just a little sprout. I was introduced to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music by an aunt who also taught me how to make chords and strum her guitar. She allowed me take her well-worn vinyl disc box set home, and for weeks I devoured this music. I couldn’t have been more than 11 or 12 years old, and along with having an older sister who endlessly played Joan Baez’s early albums as often as she’d listen to doo wop, rockabilly, and Elvis records, this early life genre convergence and musical immersion set my plate for life.

In the midst of reading a book about the life of Bill Monroe, I was recently reminded that both the Anthology and I will turn 66 this year. While much has been written about this compilation, it seems a good time to both rekindle the memories of older roots music fans and introduce this work to a younger generation.

Harry Smith was a man with diverse interests. He has been described as an experimental filmmaker, visual artist, mystic, bohemian, self-taught anthropologist, and collector of string figures, paper airplanes, Seminole textiles, Ukrainian Easter eggs, and out-of-print commercially released 78 RPM recordings from 1927 through 1935. After moving to New York in 1950, he found himself in need of money when his Guggenheim grant for an abstract film ran out, and he offered to sell his entire music collection to Moe Asch, the owner of Folkways Records. With the introduction of the long-playing album format, Asch instead encouraged Smith to create a compilation of these songs, and he provided him with office space and equipment. What resulted were three two-disc sets titled Ballads, Social Music, and Songs.

In 2014, author Amanda Petrusich published her book Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records and devoted an entire chapter to the Anthology, which was reprinted and is still viewable online at Pitchfork. It is easily the finest and most interesting account of Smith’s assembly of songs, and I love this particular description:

“Previously, these tracks were islands, isolated platters of shellac that existed independently of anything else: even flipping over a 78 required disruptive action. Shifting the medium from the one-song-per-side 78 to the long-playing vinyl album allowed, finally, for songs to be juxtaposed in deliberate ways. It’s possible now, of course, to dump all eighty-four tracks onto one digital playlist and experience the entire Anthology uninterrupted, but I still prefer to acknowledge the demarcations between its three sections — to play it as Smith did.”

Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the benefactor and guardian of Moe Asch’s wonderful record label, re-released the Anthology on six compact discs in 1997, and all of the songs are available to listen to for free on their website. The box set includes a 96-page book featuring Smith’s original liner notes and various essays by writers, scholars, and musicians. Here are two brief excerpts:

“The Anthology was our bible … . We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated. They say that in the 19th-century British Parliament, when a member would begin to quote a classical author in Latin, the entire House would rise in a body and finish the quote along with him. It was like that.” – Dave Van Ronk

“First hearing the Harry Smith Anthology of American FoIk Music is like discovering the secret script of so many familiar musical dramas. Many of these actually turn out to be cousins two or three times removed, some of whom were probably created in ignorance of these original riches. It also occurred to me that as we are listening at a greater distance in time to a man or woman singing of their fairly recent past of the 1880s, we are fortunate that someone collected these performances of such wildness, straightforward beauty, and humanity.” – Elvis Costello

The collection offers something for everyone – folk, blues, Cajun, gospel, stringbands, Hawaiian and more – and is less historic and more the progenitor of modern day mix-tapes and curated playlists. Inspirational and influential, if you’re looking for the starting gate of both yesterday’s traditional old-time roots music and today’s popular Americana-branded genre, this is it.

Postscript: Producer Hal Willner paid tribute to the Anthology with a revisionist version called The Harry Smith Project, which included a two-CD set and DVD that were culled from a series of concerts in London, New York, and Los Angeles in 1999 and 2001. Featuring a wide variety of musicians from Steve Earle to Lou Reed, Sonic Youth to The McGarrigle Sisters, it is a loving interpretation that you may have missed. Here’s a taste with Richard Thompson, Eliza Carthy, and Garth Hudson covering Clarence Ashby’s “The Coo Coo Bird.”

This article was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside column over at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website.

Easy Ed’s Broadside Outtakes #8

Richard (R.L.) and Tammy

Easy Ed’s Broadside column has been a fixture for over ten years at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music’s website. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

New Music Rising: Ana Egge & The Sentimentals Collaborate-A-Go-Go

AnaEgge_SayThatNow_albumcover copy Last year when I wrote a story about Ana Egge, I pulled this quote from Steve Earle, who had produced her Bad Blood album several years earlier: ‘Ana Egge’s songs are low and lonesome, big square-state noir ballads which she plays on a guitar she built with her own two hands and sings like she’s telling us her deepest, darkest secrets’. I also called my friend Mark Miller, frontman of New York roots music band Spuyten Duyvil and a concert promoter, who offered this thought: ‘An artist’s ability to connect with an audience is frequently and disingenuously misrepresented in their marketing copy. Ana is a rare exception. She captivates a room and draws all eyes and ears with a combination of thoughtful and heartfelt lyrics, a heartbroken voice, and serious instrumental chops.”

While her last album Bright Shadow was a sweet collaboration with The Stray Birds…one of the finest string bands on the road today…on June 10th she’ll be releasing her ninth album Say That Now, which finds her playing with The Sentimentals, a Danish band who rock a little harder.

The Sentimentals are MC Hansen (vocals, harmonica,guitars), Nikolaj Wolf (bass), and Jacob Chano (drums), and they’re old friends of Ana. In addition to previously going out on the road together, the band has also played behind other touring musicians from the US such as Gurf Morlix, Jonathan Byrd, and Sam Baker. This album was recorded over two days in Denmark, and I reached out to Ana to share about the experience.

It is a different road from my last record Bright Shadow, for sure.. In a strange way though, I was drawn to working with The Sentimentals on Say That Now for the same reasons that I was drawn to working with The Stray Birds on ‘Bright Shadow’. Because each band had developed a psychic groove together as a group from playing so much together. The remarkable thing about both bands is that they’re all fantastic players and all amazing harmony singers. That’s the magic dust.

I realized the depth of feel that The Sentimentals had to offer by touring with them in Europe as my back up band over the years. They can be so supportive and quiet on some songs and then they can totally rock. Which gives me, as a vocalist, more ways to push my voice. It was so fun to work with them in the studio in Copenhagen and do so much focused, down to the wire co-writing as well. That’s what makes this album unique to the rest of my catalogue. We wrote most of the songs together and all of them were written in Denmark.

Go over to Ana’s website to check out her entire catalog and get this summer’s dates with the Sentimentals. They’ll be touring Denmark from June 23 through July 2, and then heading to the USA for at least another month. Ana lives in Brooklyn, so I’m particularly looking forward to the homecoming on July 19th at the Rockwood Music Hall.

I’d like to leave you with a little encouragement to take a listen to the video I’m posting below, which was put up on You Tube back in May 2015, just in time for Mother’s Day. The song takes my breath away, and inspired me to title my previous column Why I Cry at 2:35, which you can and should read here. Ana wrote this with Gary Nicholson and it features the Stray Birds. While it’s not very often that a song will come along that can repeatedly turn me into an emotional bowl of jelly at every listen, this is the one. 2:35.

Every Picture Tells A Story.

Sandy 2 The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books (buy them…really) and blog. And more of her images can be found on this site….like this one.

On Smithsonian Folkways and Arhoolie Records…The Grand Acquisition.

sifolkwaysbwlogo

Those of us who’ve been pleased with the great job that the Smithsonian Folkways people have done with the preservation of Moe Asch’s record label, are over the top with news that they’ve now acquired Arhoolie Records as well. I’ve posted one of my Broadside columns about the news over at No Depression…and click here to read it. Back in April 2015 I profiled Chris Strachwitz and the great Arhoolie label he built, and you can read that here on this site.

Ben Sisario of the New York Times wrote a detailed story of how this deal came down, and I’m going to cut and paste the first paragraphs, but encourage you to follow the link to read the whole enchilada.

For more than 50 years, Chris Strachwitz has been one of the music world’s great pack rats and champions of American folk styles, as a record collector and the founder of Arhoolie Records. Since 1960, Arhoolie has released hundreds of albums of blues, gospel, Cajun and Mexican folk music that have caught the ear of musicians like Bob Dylan and Ry Cooder.

Now 84, Mr. Strachwitz has found a new home for the label: Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, which has acquired the Arhoolie catalog and will be adding more than 350 Arhoolie albums to its collection, the labels announced on Tuesday. In keeping with the longstanding policy at Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit label associated with the Smithsonian Institution, the catalog is to be kept accessible in a variety of formats. Click here to continue.

The Other Jack Johnson

Another Broadside column I published on the No Depression site recently, and it began like this:

jack_johnson If I was a baseball player you might say I’m in a slump. I feel as though, when I’m up to bat, I swing at air. If a ball speeds toward me, I reach up to catch but it just sails through my glove. I could grow a beard, shave it off, lower my right shoulder, raise my left, shuffle my feet, or tug at my ears. No change. And that’s probably the best analogy I can come up with, as to my current relationship with new music.

This affliction is hardly new, and I’ve been struck by it several times in the past few years. One cure that seems to work has been for me to take a break from the new stuff and get back to the tried and true — simply immerse myself in old favorites. I might spend a month listening to only the Carter Family Border Radio set, or something completely off the wall. Last year, it was 60 days of the complete Elvis Costello discography. To continue, click here.

https://youtu.be/lswBX3cBKAQ

Father John Misty Mocks Corporate Americana.

I picked this story up over at the NME site:

Josh Tillman – aka the indomitable Father John Misty – has just sneaked out a typically dry lampooning of new folk commercialism via his SoundCloud. Happy Wednesday. The just-over-two-minutes-long track brims with the heavy weight of capitalist ennui before you’ve ever heard it. The title, ‘Prius Commercial Demo 1’, gives you a pretty solid measure of the thing – this is FJM’s take on the shameless corporatisation of a seemingly salt of the earth sound, and effortlessly manages to make a mockery of the earnest linen-clad likes of the Lumineers and their big bucks pastiches of the work of Bruce Springsteen and The Band.

With it’s talk of riding traincars where the mountains reach the sky, drinking whiskey, never learning how to say goodbye and growing soya beans on a tinning farm, Father John Misty mercilessly lampoons the current vogue for Americana by numbers – even throwing in a meaningless “hey! ho!” over jaunty, jangly acoustic guitar. Give it a spin below, brothers.

Without Jazz and Blues, There’s No Americana.

And coming right behind Misty’s parody, is an interesting article published by The Atlantic by David A. Graham. A story about a new album titled Americana by sax player J.D. Allen ‘makes the case that any genre that pretends to represent the full scope of U.S. culture can’t ignore black music’.

Back in 2013 Giovanni Russonello wrote another Atlantic essay tracing the roots of the Americana genre and the ‘weather-beaten, rural-sounding music that bands like Whiskeytown and Uncle Tupelo were making. It was warm, twangy stuff, full of finger-plucked guitars and gnarled voices like tires on a dirt road.’ Graham writes:

Russonello pointed out that the artists grouped under the banner tended to be overwhelmingly white, male, and older—or at least obsessed with music from the 1950s to 1970. “Can a genre that offers itself up as a kind of fantasy soundtrack for this country afford to be so homogeneous and so staunchly archaic?” he asked.

The blame for this impoverished definition of Americana falls on the tastemakers of the genre. Since the Grammys established an Americana award in 2009, only three black artists have been nominated (one of them, Mavis Staples, twice). But musicians working in jazz and blues don’t necessarily see themselves as part of Americana, either, as Allen’s own story demonstrates.

Most of this article focuses on Allen and the new album, and it’s a great read that seemed to really piss off the ‘twang nation’ Americana-ists when I posted it on my Twitter feed. Read it here.

Americana

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

On Smithsonian Folkways and Arhoolie Records

920x920 Last week I was thrilled to hear that Smithsonian Folkways — the nonprofit record label associated with America’s national museum — has acquired Arhoolie Recordsfrom Chris Strachwitz and his business partner, Tom Diamant. In keeping with Folkways’ policy, the catalog will be kept accessible to the public in the same way that they’ve been managing Moe Asch’s Folkways catalog.

The Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage purchased Folkways back in 1987, and one of the conditions of the sale was that all 2,168 titles would remain in print forever. Using a combination of modern digital distribution and their custom order service, every single title remains available for purchase. Over the years, the Smithsonian has added content from other labels and collections, and the addition of Arhoolie’s 350 titles of blues, gospel, Cajun, and Mexican folk music is a perfect fit.

The New York Times covered the story on May 10th with an article by Ben Sisario, who wrote:

Chris Strachwitz, born in Germany to an aristocratic family, came to the United States after World War II. In the 1950s, he joined the loose network of collectors and sleuths who tracked down and recorded folk and blues musicians who had made their first recordings decades before. Arhoolie’s first release was by Mance Lipscomb, a blues singer and guitarist, whom Mr. Strachwitz and his fellow researcher Mack McCormick located in Texas.

Partly inspired by Folkways, the label run by Moses Asch that released records by Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie and the landmark 1952 “Anthology of American Folk Music,” Mr. Strachwitz took a scholarly approach to releasing records. The Smithsonian acquired Folkways in 1987, a year after Asch’s death, and in an interview this week Mr. Strachwitz said that it was Mr. Asch who once gave him advice about setting up his legacy.

“It was the late Moe Asch of Folkways Records who told me, ‘Chris, when you kick the bucket you’ve got to think about what you’re going to with all your stuff,’” Mr. Strachwitz recalled.

I’ve always been curious about how the Smithsonian operates, as I assumed it was a branch of some government entity. So I did a little research.

The Smithsonian was established in 1846 from the estate of a British scientist named James Smithson, and although two thirds of its employees are federal workers, funding comes from the Institution’s endowment, private and corporate contributions, membership dues, government support ($800 million in 2011), and retail, concession, and licensing revenues.

In the case of Arhoolie, the Times article states that the acquisition was made as a result of a donation from Laura and Ed Littlefield of the Sage Foundation. Strachwitz said that the Littlefields essentially bought the label and donated it to Smithsonian Folkways.

Imagining there must be a lot more music-related collections throughout the 138 million items that the 19 museums in Washington, DC, make available to the public, I came across a new building opening this year on the last available space on the National Mall, next to the Washington monument.

According to its website, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture “will be a place where all Americans can learn about the richness and diversity of the African American experience, what it means to their lives, and how it helped us shape this nation.”

When that museum opens its doors in September, there will be an exhibition called Musical Crossroads that will showcase contemporary items along with those of the past. There will be rare recordings from Mahalia Jackson alongside George Clinton’s wigs, outfits worn on Soul Train, a pair of Curtis Mayfield’s glasses, and Cab Calloway’s suits. An Amtrak field trip seems like a pretty good plan.

This post was originally published as an Easy Ed’s Broadside on the No Depression website.

Easy Ed’s Outtakes #1

Photo by Sandy Dyas

Easy Ed’s Broadside weekly column has been a fixture at No Depression: The Journal of Roots Music for over ten years. These are odds and ends, random thoughts and fragments never published.

Killer Duets: Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones

Almost two months ago RS Country reported on a new project from Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones. They wrote: ‘Little Windows, the first collaborative album from singer-songwriters Teddy Thompson and Kelly Jones, packs a whole career’s worth of sparkling pop gems and sobering country ballads into a collection that runs just short of 26 minutes. What’s more remarkable, however, is that the LP represents a relatively new partnership, and every one of the songs is original to the project, although any of the album’s 10 tracks could be mistaken for some long-lost sonic nugget from the Fifties or Sixties’. Read more here.

Bars of Allman Joy

The first time I laid eyes on the Allman Brothers was inside a beer and clams bar on the boardwalk of Atlantic City on July 4th 1971. It was a way too early too early Sunday morning and residue from the previous nights activities could still be felt and smelled. I was there with a blonde haired girl named Karen who was pregnant and running away from her boyfriend Bobby. He later married my cousin, and then they broke up. I recognized Duane among the seven or eight guys who sat across the stick from us, and I recall we traded some laughs about weed and the condensation dripping down the outside of the pitchers of beer that sat before us. They were finishing up a week long run at The Steel Pier. I may have seen then that week, or not. Hard to remember, but I know I went to one of their shows sometime that year. Duane was gone by October.

Garden and Gun has published a slideshow of photos that appear in a new book by Kirk West. This is one of my favorites, and here’s the link to it and the overview: Back in the 1970s, photographer Kirk West was just a self-described “hippie with a camera” and a diehard Allman Brothers Band fan who traveled to see his favorite Southern rock group whenever he could. He became such a fixture that the band invited him backstage and to studio sessions, and in 1989, West joined the crew as an assistant tour manager. “I was only supposed to work for three weeks,” he says, “and it ended up being twenty-one years.”

Over at Oxford American, my favorite music journalist and author Amanda Petrusich…whose books you should add to your reading list asap if you somehow missed them…has published The Road Goes on Forever, a beautifully crafted article on the band. You can read it here, but if you’re super-smart you’ll also buy the OA Georgia Music Issue before it sells out. It includes their annual sampler CD that is indeed exceptional. (Read more about Amanda and her books at My Back Pages.)

Radio is a sound salvation. Radio is cleaning up the nation. Radio, Radio

Somewhere along the way, despite my early adaption of digital music files over shiny discs of plastic, I missed the podcast thing. In a recent article over at No Depression from Sloane Spencer, her recap of the past year caught my eyes.

Top-notch programs from media powerhouses and coalitions of their expatriates have brought the medium to general recognition in America. Many of the early, grassroots, or DIY programs, though, went on permanent hiatus or completely ended their runs. A lot of this churn is normal attrition, but a lot of it is due to the success of podcasting itself. Superstars exploded from the top echelons while those bubbling up from below saw downloads stay flat or vastly decrease while streaming took over. For indie podcasts, streaming is not even monetized by the content maker, as most of it is via apps that pick up the RSS feed and redistribute thousands of programs.

As we all muddle along trying to figure out what is happening and will happen with “new media,” change is gonna come. Change is opportunity.

While I still figure out for myself if I have the time and inclination, my friend Carter recently shared with me how he finds so much (free) old-time music on the web using a couple of podcast apps. So as I was on the Smithsonian Folkways site today looking for something other than this, when I happened to discover that they have a series of 24 one-hour shows called The Folkways Collection. You could spend an entire day listening to this.

On Roy Zimmerman, Donald Drumpf, Kylie Jenner and the kitchen sink.

Every other week my Easy Ed’s Broadside column is published on the No Depression website, and my most recent one is a meandering walk through the current state of how hashtags have usurped the sixties protest music movement that used to ‘spread the word’ back in the day. Actually, I contradicted that thought when I noted the last song ever written that galvanized a generation to actually do something was Ray Steven’s “The Streak”. Anyway…you can read the article here and I’m putting up one of Roy’s videos for your amusement and joy.

https://youtu.be/Ege_RBhh37A

Every Picture Tells a Story

Sandy The image at the top of this page was shot by my long-time-we’ve-only-met-online friend Sandy Dyas, who is a visual artist based in Iowa City that I’ve written about often. You can visit her website here and check out her work, books and blog. And more of her images can be seen on this site too.

Videos You Wouldn’t Know Existed, Unless You Found Them By Mistake.

A List of Performers at SXSW 2016 That I Found.

Happened to notice this on Untitled Magazine‘s site, and it just seemed such a strong image of randomness, not that I didn’t immediately recognize that it was simply arranged alphabetical. I choose to think that simply staring at the letters is particularly intellectually satisfying if you’re not planning to take the trip to Austin. And I’m not.

3ballMty, Abjects, Barry Adamson, Adée, Alex G, Alice on the roof, Aloa Input, Altimet & the Kawan Band, Anamanaguchi, And The Kids, Autobahn, Avec Sans,The Ballroom Thieves, The Band of Heathens, Bee’s Knees, Better Person, Beverly, Big Phony,Bird Dog, Bombino,Boulevards,Brass Bed, Bye Bye Badman, Laura Carbone,Rosie Carney, Caveman, Ceasetone, Chirkutt, Cirkus Funk, Cóndor Jet, The Crookes, Crystal Castles, Dash Rip Rock, David Wax Museum, Demob Happy, Dolce,Downtown Boys, Dubioza Kolektiv, Eau Rouge, EMUFUCKA, Expert Alterations, Lena Fayre, Fear of Men, Few Bits, Ian Fisher, The Foreign Resort, Andy Frasco & the U.N., A Giant Dog, Matt Gilmour’s Patient Wolf, Gold Class, Jon Dee Graham, William Harries Graham & the Painted Redstarts, Guerilla Toss, HÆLOS, Haihm, Har Mar Superstar, Hinds, Howardian,S ilvana Imam, Imran Aziz Mian Qawwal, Into It. Over it., Jahkoy, Jambinai, John GRVY, Judah & the Lion, KAO=S, Marina Kaye, The Kickback, La Banda Morisca, Lazyeyes, Lois, Demi Louise, Love X Stereo, Lushes, Mai Nimani, Mamamoo, MC Lars, Methyl Ethel, Mise en Scene, Missi & Mister Baker, Moving Panoramas, Mumiy Troll, The National Parks, Oil Boom, OKRAA, Paul Oscher, Overload, The Parrots, PHASES, Platonick Dive, The Pocket Rockets, Ron Pope, Prince Rama, Pure Bathing Culture, Quebe Sisters, Self Defense Family,S kyline, Sleepers’ Reign, Southern Hospitality, The Spook School, Suboi, Summer Heart, Sunflower Bean, Sur du monde, Tarmac, The Nightowls, Throwing Shade, Vaadat Charigim, Victim Mentality, Victoria+Jean, Waco Brothers, Wahid Allan Faqir, The Wet Secrets, Wildhoney, Marlon Williams & The Yarra Benders, Womps, Wordburglar, XYLØ, Yuck

I should note the passing of the SXSW music festival co-counder Louis Meyers who was part of the original team that started this back in 1987. He left it in 1994 citing the stress of the conference. Meyers was also a musician, playing banjo and recording, touring, producing or performing with Bill & Bonnie Hearne, Bob Schneider, Killbilly, The Killer Bees, Mojo Nixon, Fastball, Willis Alan Ramsey, Tommy Ramone, and Jello Biafra, among many others.

And In The End…A Song I Love That Sir George Martin Produced. RIP.