I think I am too stuck in the mud middle class to carry it off with the real style that it needs. But who knows??
What interests me about the old songs is the obvious thrill people had in the details -- the scalded engineer, the numbers and names of the trains, the tornados and hurricanes and floods destroying the schoolhouse -- mixed with the most abject sentimentality. Pure National Enquirer, midday TV shows, total trash. And yet turning this into music seems to have disappeared. It seems somewhat odd that millions of people should be watching this stuff, and yet the whole collection of genres seems to have gone completely. Is this not, for example, a gold mine awaiting tapping? ("At the bottom of this mine, lies a big, big man....")

yours, Peter T.