No! NO! No! No! No!

You can't let the culture vultures get their hands on this music. POP Culture is voracious; it sniffs around, gulps you down, chews on you a while and spits you out before it moves on. And what it devours is never quite the same again.

I've seen this happen to country music three specific times in my musical career. Each time the cycle was fundamentally the same:
1. Articles are written highlighting the-music-that-you-love. Unfortunately they have focused on all the wrong aspects of it.
2. Suddenly, there are people showing up, asking for all the songs you always hated because they read about them in the Sunday supplement.
3.High-rolling goombahs move in, opening plastic-coated replicas of real performing venues. Everybody cheers - more places to play!! Meanwhile
4. The small, neighborhood people who have been scraping along for years, keeping the flame burning, are surrounded by slick operators who are grabbing the big audience. The big audience likes their drinks RIGHT NOW. In NEW CUPS! And doesn't this place smell a little FUNKY?? At the same time
5. New young, fresh faces learn enought songs from the "MTV Big Book of Real Folk Music" to start gigging. The "new canon" is essentially Grateful Dead versions of traditional songs. This is all you hear and all you're expected to play. Anything else marks you as "quaint" or "self-indulgent" and not competitive. Suddenly
6. The big spotlight moves on to the next big thing. Maybe Rumanian calypso jazz or Def Jam Suburban Comedy. Now the shiny new coffee house-replicas are booking only Rum/ca/jazz and DJS Comix. So the folk fans go back to the "old same place", there for all those years and
7. It's gone. Bought out by some gentrifying Sumbich at the peak and sold to a Peruvian restaurant owner when the bottom fell out.

That's the way it will happen (more or less). There will be a tough transition period during which those caught in the stampede will regroup, dust themselves off, and go back to doing what they were doing before it all started. Maybe the next time it comes back a little stronger; maybe some of the best stuff doesn't survive at all.

It's not as if this hasn't happened to folk music before. And it's survived. But Pop Culture commoditizes things and anything that becomes a commodity loses some of its essence. And I hate to see it happen when there really appears to be a strong grass roots, counter-culture thing happening.

I read a quote from Conway Twitty once, who attributed his longevity to never having a number one hit. He said something to the effect that once you get to number one it's all down hill from there. If your next song is "only" number two, everyone thinks you're slipping. Maybe we can give the pop mavens zydeco - or calypso again! Yeah! That's it - a new calypso revival! Someone call up Harry Belafonte. . .