In these days of economic trouble, recession and the like, I bump up my post promoting this song from the roots music band, Dread Clampitt, and offer a tribute to the song “Granny Brown.”
Balder Saunders is in this band. He’s the son of Jack, a hero writer of mine (one of his novels for sale in my Products > Literature section). Granny Brown was his gramma. She raised a bunch of wild commercial fishermen with their own boat in a bay in Panama City. For the band’s first CD Balder wrote a tune for his gramma. It’s a great one.
Of course the main thing is the lyrics. Altho, the tune is great as well. But we all know that the meaning of lyrics is hugely important in music. (We’re not just killing time with this stuff, right?)
This song includes lines that go vaguely like this:
I asked her What about the depression? /
She said There weren’t no such thing, we always lived that way /
We got our pride and our music /
We weren’t supposed to have nothing /
So much fun to be had, quit your cryin and your fussin
Here’s a link to it on the YT:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0fr-PcEK2Q
Maybe there are other songs that express this sentiment better. If you know of any, please post them!
Some folks wonder that if gas goes higher and times get harder if more people will start doing more free culture things like singing and dancing or biking and walking and visiting with neighbors rather than going on chartered bus trips to casinos. Given where we live, Martha is pessimistic—she says there will just be a lot more discounted casino trips and coupons for bargain charter buses going to casinos. I was kinda thinking that, what with OYB being a leader in sustainable affordable folkway culture for almost 20 years that it might start finally standing out a bit more and become more popular as the consumer culture collapses. Martha says it’s not likely—and in truth I’ve seen a steady readership of this website at about 15,000/month for the past few years. Quite good, but not growing in any surprising way even as the media tries to make hay off of its latest hysteria. Maybe my scene just doesn’t connect to the mass scene in any way, for better or worse.
