I like a good murder ballad. Why? Well, I'm feeling a little too brain dead to get into it right now (from a retreat with students, which was good)--maybe in a later post. In the meantime, why not enjoy this footage of one of my favorites--Gillian Welch and her partner, David Rawlings--singing "Caleb Meyer."
This next one I've written about before. Just listen to the next to the last verse if you find the song a bit unsettling and let the video play out until the end. Cash wrote this years before he recorded it with Rick Rubin.
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7 comments:
Sheesh. You're scaring me a bit.
Hope this was not the outcome of your retreat.
No, as I said in the post, the retreat was good. It was good to see students and spend time with them prior to the beginning of school and craziness.
Any defense of a murder ballad--especially by a Christian--merits an essay-length response. I'll have to do that some time after school starts.
I thought they were excellent.
There is a great honesty and sincerity to bluegrass and folk music. It is raw, like life. It reminds one that a world exists outside of our sheltered enclaves and it puts a face to our secret pains.
Cash's final video, a cover of Nine Inch Nail's title Hurt, is beautiful and poignant. If you are a Cash fan, it is a must.
Yeah, the Hurt video is great. In the archived post I linked to in this post, I put a link to it and wrote a little about it.
Re: bluegrass and old country...there are many resonances with life. The songs of this genre also tell stories that have universal appeal despite their particularity. Not many songs written today tell stories (exceptions are found in the songs of those who write in the tradition of classic country or blurgrass)--or, at least, they're not that particular.
Oops: bluEgrass, not bluRgrass. That must be a different genre or something...
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