Roots Music, "Make Me a Pallet"

olive branch

If you don’t care for lowland blues, acoustic blues, bluegrass, or roots music (the inclusive term, I guess), you might excuse yourself from today’s post. And while you're away, get a life. Or you could sample each piece for a few seconds or more, just to broaden your horizons.

YouTube - Mississippi John Hurt Make Me a Pallet on the Floor

YouTube - Gillian Welch - Make Me A Pallet On Your Floor

YouTube - Doc Watson - Make Me a Pallet On Your Floor

YouTube - Mississippi John Hurt — Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor

The blog titled Robert Frost’s Banjo got me wandering around on YouTube, starting with Taj Mahal and Dave von Ronk, which led to Mississippi John Hurt, which led to young Christine Pizzuti at I Play Banjo Now, and that connected to Gillian Welch’s YouTube version of “Make Me a Pallet.”  She in turn credited Doc Watson as her link to the song.  I’ve liked “Make Me a Pallet” since I first heard Hurt’s rendition in the sixties, but the fact that I enthusiastically like all four of these versions makes me wonder if I should . . . worship it. 

I wonder too if Sarah Palin’s bus tour will . . . LISTEN . . . to all available versions of whatever. Taj Mahal (Harlem), Dave von Ronk (Brooklyn), and Christine Pizzuti (New Palz) are New Yorkers, but variety is the theme here, if I have one. Taj Mahal majored in animal husbandry at U. Mass.  There is a John Hurt museum in Mississippi (which I learned at Robert Frost’s Banjo, located in Idaho). Doc Watson’s place sits somewhere in the mountains of western North Carolina, and Gillian Welch is a Californian whose beginnings included membership in a goth band.  She performs with her partner, David Rawlings of Rhode Island, who does things on the guitar that strike me as original and terrific. 

Sometimes I forget to be grateful to the U.S. and the world of music for such happy accidents.  Yes, variety can be work; yes, it’s worth it.

(Biographical info is from Wikipedia).

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Movie Review: Winter's Bone

Winter's Bone: A+


Is there anything lofty or even fundamentally human about a primitive mountain code? A clan’s code? Where are the boundaries between the individual and any group, from family to neighbor to law enforcement? Where do loyalty, love, and submission intersect? Where does the changing role of women fit into all of that? In the mountains? Well, mebbe.

Set in the Missouri Ozarks, Winter’s Bone is a must see. Ree Dolly, a 17-year-old girl, is the heroine (not merely a protagonist, but a bona fide heroine). She’s the caretaker for her 11- and 6-year-old siblings and lives in a rundown mountain home with her demented mother.

Despite her courage, Ree asks for nothing more, but the law will not leave her alone with the little she has. Her father, Jesup, busted again for creating “crank,” something like crystal meth, has put up the property as security against his court appearance a few days hence. Will he show, or will he leave his family to fend for themselves while he lights out for the territory? Yes, this might be the darker flip side of a Huck Finn journey.

The adult males in these hills have names like Teardrop, Jesup, and Thump. The country-fi-cation could be too much, but I fell for it big time, and I predict most viewers will. If the characters don’t get you, the landscape will—or the music. Listen for very nice renderings of “Farther Along” and “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens,” by Meredith Sisco. There’s other music, but I really heard those two.

Rewriting Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor (especially "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" or “Good Country People”?) is risky business. We owe so much to those giants of the past, and it’s so easy to cross one line into cynicism about country folk as mere critters, or that other line, into romanticizing them, that one wonders why any artist takes the chance.

There must be something big, maybe some fundamentally human thing, in the rural American South to make it worth revisiting so often. Winter’s Bone is one more reason to hope superb writers and film makers keep trying.

Apparently it’s hard to find Winter’s Bone in theaters, and I have no idea whether phone calls to your local Roxy will help. But it’s worth a try. There will be talk about this as best movie of the year or the decade.

On another note, beyond Altadenahiker and Ken Mac's recent interest in rodents, is there a reason for today’s second photo? Oh, I ‘xpect. See the movie.

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