lunch&library ramble w. john,who always suprises me w. how wise he is:

j:cities are boring
a:well, i would say the country is, but i never spent any time there, small towns are.
J:esp. ones made by oil money.
A:or the ones w. plants

also

cbc 3 liked my phots enough to invite me to submit them, its no money, and its a flickr thing, so kind of hit or miss if they will actually use them, but to be noticed (and invited to submit) is always nice.

roy k is working for folkways about a boscum box set, who did i wish i was a mole in the ground, which i wrote about for sukrat, here is where we talk:

I love your reading, Anthony. You made me think about the song in new ways.

I'm co-producing a big box set of Bascom Lamar Lunsford's Library of Congress recordings (should be out at the end of the year, or beginning of the next). I'm not an expert, not hardly; however, I can say that Bascom learned the song from Fred Moody, a Haywood County, North Carolina banjo picker, in 1901. He says in the introduction to the LOC recording (some 20 years after the version on the Smith anthology) that "the bend referred to is the bend of the Pigeon River in Haywood, North Carolina." He also says that the song was the last his mother ever asked him to play for her before she died.

Now that doesn't mean you're not right; it's entirely possible the song, or some version of the song, alludes to a prison, and perhaps there are imprisoned overtones to the lyric and to Bascom's delivery. But Bascom didn't understand the song that way, or at the very least he understood "the Bend" as a river, not a prison.

Also, I'm pretty sure the name of the woman is "Tempy"—at the very least, there is a folk tune ordinarily called "Tempy," which probably pre-dates "Mole" and shares the lines about "Tempy wants a nine dollar shawl."

(Reply to this)(Thread)

Re: "the bend"
anthonyeaston
2007-03-20 02:58 am UTC (link) Select
i got the prison stuff from marcus, taking him at face value, and there was a prison near that place in tennessee, no? (marcus, and smith were both smart mythologisers who used the text to their ideological advantage, and are as such deeply unreliable.)

in my gut, bend always goes w. river, and that river though, is b4 hiways a v. real, natural way to escape, like eliza jumping the ice in uncle toms cabin or huck finn? (are those earlier or later then boscom)



(i wonder if w/ frank and maybe edd i could swing a mutual essay in the linear notes of said boxed set?)