Bryant, you should run out and get a copy of Greil Marcus' book, Invisible Republic, on Bob Dylan's use of Harry Smith in his "Basement Tapes". It is a profound meditation on what that 20's-30's music meant -- not perhaps to the originators, but to the latter day. Voices from "another America" he calls them -- the shocking, National Enquirer world of train crashes, drowned babies, the dirt poor, the wierd, and the marginal.

In a recent interview he said (I copied this at the time when I read it):

"My wife would sometimes say, "Well Invisible Republic is your '60s book." And I'd say, "This is not my '60s book. This book isn't about Dylan and the '60s. This book's about the '20s. This book is about when Doc Boggs and Clarence Ashley and Frank Hutchison and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Richard "Rabbit" Brown, when they were recording, when the original body of traditional American music was first put onto records. And that was something really the opposite of rock 'n' roll, but it also had this similar galvanizing quality. We were talking earlier about how rock 'n' roll, when it began, it sounded to so many people as if it came out of nowhere. And that experience of music seeming to come out of nowhere, when it really has deep roots, what does that mean? This was music that in the 1920s, when it was first recorded and city people began to listen to it, to some people was the strangest music they'd ever heard, the old American folk music and so it sounded as if it came out of nowhere. But it was also music that was already very, very old. The real country was in this old, old music. And that's the sense that I began to get out of it when I went back listening to it. That's a lot of what this book is about. Where is the real country?
yours, Peter T.