Reading Greil Marcus' "Invisible Republic" on the music of the 1920's, one is struck by the repertoire of ballad songs, ghoulish train wreck songs, and other derivatives that have virtually disappeared from the musical horizon. This not only raises questions about the shifting tastes and mores of what is acceptable, but (naturally) about the narrowing of what counts as songs to what one could call "personal relationship wreck songs". To take only the train wreck songs, where are the airplane crash songs? Can Woody Guthrie's Deportees be the last well known one of this genre? The two last great flourishings of this form seem to have been "Teen Angel" and the brief eruption of trucker songs. Where are the narrative ballads of grisly murders, bank robberies (hands up the last bank robbery song you remember), etc.? Where are the plaintive little girls confronting their parent's drinking problems? Garth Brooks seems to have dabbled in this a bit with wife beating. What was the last extended ballad to charm the citizenry -- "Ode To Billy Joe"?

Perhaps all these earlier songs were forms of proto-television, or news, that have all been replaced by the real thing, or the National Enquirer. Perhaps listening to a narrative is not what music is for these days -- rather a form of emotional wallpaper. Maybe it is all secret class warfare. But it does remind me of one of the reasons why folk music interests me: completely eclectic mixes of what music can do. And it does make me pine (a little box of pine) for a really good tasteless plane crash song, complete with heroic pilot, dark foreboding, and mangled bodies. I don't know why: just the sweet romantic purist in me, I guess.