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Utopian Turtletop. Monsieur Croche's BĂȘte Noire. Contact: turtletop [at] hotmail [dot] com

Monday, March 06, 2006

He's your candy man.


Got a 3-CD edition of Mississippi John Hurt's complete '60s recordings out of the library today. Glancing at the liner notes filled me with dismay. The producer of the sessions brags about how he persuaded Hurt not to record the country and gospel songs in his repertoire and to restrict himself to blues.

Without the whacked-out puritanical '50s-'60s so-called folk revival, we wouldn't have these wonderful recordings. But the ideology is so messed up. Keep the genres separate! The blues must not be diluted with gospel or country!

Rockist ideology descends directly from folk-revival ideology (as Robert Christgau has written about). The ideology has badly distorted the general image of how music and musicians work.

What a loss! What other songs did Hurt want to record? What did his versions of gospel and country sound like?
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