As I write this, the missus and I are flying towards Albuquerque, New Mexico, the starting point for a driving tour around the American Southwest. I'm hesitant, not because I'm scared of ending up as food for the vultures on some desert dirt road, but because I'm afraid that it's quickly growing too late in the cultural timeline for trips like this. The region's fabled mix of cultures and the gorgeous sounds that bubble up from this mix might already be casualties of the cookie-cutter strip malls and chain restaurants that make every place in America look like pretty much every other place in America.
Take my hometown, for example. The woods of my own South — South Carolina — are quickly giving way to cheaply-made housing on lots where a single stinkin' Bradford pear tree on a tiny red-clay patch will replace a half-acre of topsoil, underbrush, oaks, and hickories. This time of year, the small stretch of I-85 along my commute seems to claim a deer every night as they're forced to cross highways in search of ever-smaller patches of wilderness. In my darker moments, I think a human pandemic might be just what the world needs to help thin the herd, so to speak. When such morbid thoughts recede from my mind, I head over to the local strip mall to ogle flat-screen monitors at Circuit City and down some burgers 'n' beer at Chili's.
Consistency has never been my strong suit.
But here we are on a Delta flight heading out to the Southwest, and I've already read the stories about the influx of wealth and the mushroom-like growth of gated communities and the multi-million dollar homes in places like Arizona. Maybe I'll be surprised. Maybe the whole trip will be one long, vibrant adventure, and even moments as insignificant as putting the car in drive will feel worthy of mariachi horns. We'll return to South Carolina older, weathered, and wiser as if we'd walked the crucible of Edward Abbey's Fool's Progress. (OK, forget that. An impossibly beautiful book, but laced with tragedy that, in spite of my earlier ruminations, I'd prefer to avoid. I'd really rather not lose my wife in a Jeep crash out in the middle of the desert.).
I've assembled a batch of homemade compilations to accompany the driving, most of it rootsy and some of it flavored with Southwestern sounds (Calexico, Giant Sand). While he may not qualify as rootsy, per se, Frank Sinatra is a must for the nighttime drive into Vegas as it rises out of the desert (maybe a city as young as Las Vegas, its own little oasis of neon, has "roots" all its own). I've selected my music based on preconceptions about the area, and from a hope that some of the region's character still remains, a hope that we'll still find something among casinos and old Route 66 ghost towns that counts as the "authentic" American Southwest.
As it turns out, New Mexico and Arizona have plenty of everything. If you want to follow parts of old Route 66, you can swing from booming little towns capitalizing on the tourism dollars of people getting their kicks, to boarded-up motels and gas stations in what can only be described as wastelands. In population centers like Albuquerque and Santa Fe, the old historic town centers serve double-duty as shopping areas crowded with enough turquoise to fill the Grand Canyon. The housing boom is obvious, but at least until we start heading further north, the developers seem to be holding to the traditional forms and styles; in Santa Fe, even the parking garages look like mighty adobe structures of old.
The concept of authenticity is a tenuous thing, a subjective wisp of an idea on which roots music (whatever the hell that might be, to crib from the quintessential roots music magazine No Depression's recently retired masthead) depends. I mean, let's look at Calexico: Joey Burns and John Convertino, the group's core, are both transplants to Tucson, yet their sound evokes the borders, dusty roads, and desert sunsets of Arizona so well you'd swear they grew up among the cactuses and scrub. They're also champions of local traditional musicians, having invited Tucson acts like Mariachi Luz de Luna and Salvador Duran to guest on their albums.
Another example: Gillian Welch. Welch emerged from Los Angeles with an uncanny grasp of rustic Americana, as if the spirits of dead Dust Bowl farmers and Appalachian moonshiners had been whispering to her in her sleep. Since releasing Revival in 1996, Welch and her partner David Rawlings have transcended their retro beginnings, creating music that feels timeless: its character is culled from bluegrass and coalminers, but it also draws from the spirit of Elvis Presley, rock 'n' roll, Lincoln's assassination, and getting some action while Steve Miller plays in the background. It's still a sound rooted in the classic interplay of acoustic guitars and high lonesome harmonies, but a song combo like that of "April 14th, Part 1" and "Ruination Day, Part 2" (from 2001's Time, the Revelator) deftly blend the Titanic, Casey Jones, and modern rock bands living out of their vans into something that exists outside of the times evoked by any of their lyrics. "I Dream a Highway" goes even further over 14 hypnotic minutes with lyrics ranging from tricky ("I'll take you as a viper into my head / A knife into my bed, arsenic when I'm fed") to directly romantic ("Now you be Emmylou and I'll be Gram"). It's an experience that's as far removed as one can imagine from a country ballad, but which owes its feel to every influence evident in Welch and Rawlings's work.
So does authenticity even matter when we evaluate this so-called "roots music"? Heck, the definition of roots is vague enough as it is without applying litmus tests. My own idea of roots music is fluid, to say the least, and embraces everything from the Louvin Brothers to Ray Charles. To me, it's music derived from particularly American experiences, in particularly American voices. But are there any distinctly American voices left, any regional voices left, where the pains of the American Experience ring through? And what of bands from outside America like the Kruger Brothers? They're from Switzerland, for Pete's sake, but they totally tear it up with their brand of traditional bluegrass. If you want old styles in their respective birthplaces, you can still go to Chicago or the Mississippi Delta to hear blues, or to Louisiana to hear zydeco, or to New Orleans to hear Dixieland jazz. But how much of the music that's being made in those places today is the genuine article, and how much of it is a construct that's been created for the collection of free-flowing tourism dollars?
So what if Welch and Rawlings have never worked in a coal mine or a saw mill? Our manufacturing jobs have been leaving for so long that the sound of doors and options closing, once alarming, is now nothing more than familiar white noise. The seats of tractors were replaced by swivel chairs in cubicles long ago. The peculiar sayings and rituals of my grandparents — the wave of a hand over a steering wheel while passing someone in the other lane, the invitation of "Y'all come with us" when leaving a friend's house — are the stuff of our quaint nostalgia, roots seemingly on the verge of withering. I'm 36 (old enough to know better) and miss my grandparents terribly, but I'm as guilty as anyone else in my family of letting the traditional gatherings and grapevines die out year by year. I doubt I'm in the minority, unfortunately.
Before too long, how many songs will be born of genuine personal experience, as opposed to someone's abstract idea of what certain experiences must feel like, or from vague memories of experiences that don't exist anymore? In short, is it possible for there to be genuine roots music — at least in the traditionally accepted sense — anymore, without it being little more than proof that someone listened to their Alan Lomax, Carter Family, and Muddy Waters discs with a really attentive ear?
I've often wondered if this is the central paradox at work within a band like Wilco. Wilco is hailed as the leading light of roots music, even though it arguably severed ties with its roots legacy years ago. Does Wilco get props because it's creating a new kind of American music, culled from the wreckage where artistic sensitivity crashes against the rocks of modern-day chaos, or because it stemmed from Uncle Tupelo (one of the benchmark bands of the 1990s' "alt-country" movement) and did a nice job on a bunch of Woody Guthrie songs?
Personally, I don't think Wilco is the musical equivalent of Moses leading the hipsters through the desert, but its music is important nevertheless. Wilco is important because it points to a way to create honest music that's a product of its time, and not a pastiche of learned Americana. Even in the early days, Uncle Tupelo struggled to coax Depression-era truths through a punk rock filter, and that made people take notice.
Since then, there have been loads of roots-inspired artists with unique artistic visions. Otis Taylor, possibly the best modern bluesman few have heard of, attacks weighty topics like racial injustice and drug use head-on, sometimes with his teenage daughter Cassie singing in a clarion voice, as if she'd been there, of segregation and its inequalities. Tom Waits lives out in the boonies somewhere, walking the woods and junkyards with the ghosts of Leadbelly, Sinatra, and Kurt Weill crashing and banging around in his head, and he somehow reconciles that mess into his unique brand of industrial blues.
Modern-day, "real" roots music is out there, and maybe the first thing we need to do as listeners in the 21st century is admit that the experiences of moonshiners, bootleggers, and sharecroppers have long since faded into the past. Unfortunately, the stills are being replaced, at least in my neck of the woods, by meth labs. Needless to say, it just doesn't seem as romantic, although I'm sure the haze of history muffles the violence of shotgun blasts and car crashes back in the "good ol' days".
Maybe the new American voices will come as a form of resistance. Maybe the rap songs that came in the wake of Hurricane Katrina will redirect attention to rap's power as folk protest. Rap's always been a form of social commentary; acts like NWA and Public Enemy chronicled their environment with just as much unflinching precision as the forgotten authors of "Moonshiner" or "Stagger Lee".
Occasionally on the road, out taking an anthropological pulse of the nation's music, "Field Work" will explore roots music — both old and new — out there, and show that it's changing into a new beast even as it tries to hold on to yellowed scraps of its heritage. Authenticity's a bitch, especially when it gets to us by way of sepia-tinted nostalgia. Despite mainstream culture's daily erosion of regionalism, there are still artists who foster their ties with the past, and with those who came before to carve a country from different parts of the wilderness. More power to 'em, and we'll do our best to keep up.
Y'all come with us.
