What Americans do best is discard everything that makes their country and culture great and hang on fiercely with what is utterly loathsome and worthless.

American roots music is the greatest music ever, in my opinion. Evidently, other countries agree because there are few places that haven't incorporated blues, jazz, bluegrass, ragtime, swing, gospel, rockabilly, etc. And while these other countries show a great reverence for this music, Americans forget about it. A while I posted a thread about whether Brits remembered George Formby and the answer was basically, "Of course not." If Formby had been American, WE would have forgotten him and, because he wasn't American, most of us have never heard of him.

Americans basically booted Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley out of the country. And where did they go? Britain. There is still an Eddie Cochran Society over there last I heard. There has never been one in America and, indeed, most Americans couldn't tell you who he was or name anything he had written or recorded. Yet, we Yanks loved the English bands doing "Summertime Blues" and Come On Everybody" and "Cut Across Shorty".

Blues profoundly changed Britain--profoundly. A couple of years ago, I was playing Muddy Waters in my office and a guy poked his head in and said, "You know, that sounds a lot like Led Zeppelin!" Ya think?

We're great at spawning new, wonderful forms of music and then forgetting about it while the rest of the world raves over it. We're incredibly creative and incredibly clueless simultaneously.

But we hang on like pitbulls to a genre that regards a line like:

"Hit da clubs wi' mah homies lookin' fo' sum ask-shun!
Dancin' on da flo' 'til I look like Michael Jack-son!"

They call this "street poetry." I call it shit but then what else would a grumppy old man do?