It occurred to me the other day that "culture" comes in so many sizes that it can all get very weird. My main culture is that of a white, suburban, middle-class, American. I suppose that culturally, I should be into soft rock and New Christian music.

I don't know about the rest of the world, but in the United States, at least, "foreign" cultures have a tendency to sort of break loose and be adopted by people who don't share the same ancestry but may share the same geographical region an life experiences. It's hardly a new phenomenon and after awhile, the "borrowed" traditions end up being part of a new tradition, which may be based on a lot of things in addition to (though not necessarily exclusive of) ethnic origins. The most obvious example I can think of would be the adoption of African-American musical forms by white musicians, which has been going on for generations now. In the country music traditions, at least, I imagine there was enough of a shared experience of a difficult agricultural lifestyle to easily explain why country blues appealed to white musicians and was blended into their own forms.

I don't have a continuous family tradition of Anglo or Irish folk music (which I could have had since my mother is English/Irish/Welsh, except that her family weren't into that sort of thing), and I'm much too white to justify my German/Swiss/English/French father's lifelong love of blues, gospel, and ragtime. I grew up with contradance music and the standard pop-style folk revival stuff and then slid into things that were nearer the "roots"

My parents learned most of what they knew from recordings, which would probably be smiled-at by a lot of traditionalists but which I think is better than them not learning anything at all, and they taught me their own versions of a lot of songs that meant special things to them. Bingo--family micro-culture. These songs were chosen because they went along with everything else about our lives---they reflected values my parents held, stories or images they loved, or places we had been. Who says that's not my tradition?

We've lived a number of places in the U.S. and theoretically ought to belong to that "regionless" overeducated, liberal, upper-middle class. My brother recently moved to Northern Virginia for graduate school and suddenly realized he's not an Eastern academic type. He calls home every once in awhile pining for open spaces, real Mexican food, and backyard barbecues. Oops. We grew up in Colorado and Texas. We're not the Western/Southern stereotypes but it has definitely had an effect. I've spent enough time in the Midwest and East to sort of know the ropes but I'm not at home there.

I don't sing or play music to be patronizing. I try to learn about origins and to stick with things that mean something to me besides some romanticized ideal. Everybody here knows there aren't any coal miners or sharecroppers in my family (doesn't mean there aren't mining songs I love, but I'm not fooling anyone, nor would I want to). I mostly do old-time and very-early-country (i.e. lots of Carter Family) music, and there are musicians I think are absolutely brilliant but I don't bend over backwards to imitate anyone.