Art & Bart

Can't directly disagree with a thing you guys say here, but there is a caveat that has to take a little of the definition out of your argument. Americans have always been a mobile lot — always going where the grass is greener. And they took their music with them and picked up influences wherever they went. Bill Monroe took old-timey mountain music down along the Mississippi and picked up some of the blues/jazz chords he heard there to make up bluegrass. Whites and blacks swapped songs and styles between blues and country. Sylvester Weaver, a black Louisville, Ky. blues man, for instance, wrote the original song that became Guitar Boogie (drawing a blank on the Grand Ol' Opry performer who used it as his signature tune). The list goes on and on of works swapped or shared, taken someplace else and made into something entirely different.

There are a goodly number of area-specific songs — identifiable by subjects such as logging or whaling or hauling canal boats — but I think it would take a lot more guts than I've got to draw a map and say where things came from. Truth is, I just don't know where they CAME FROM; I could pin down where a lot were COLLECTED and specific places/events referred to in the lyrics, but I think trying to be too specific is a mugs game.

cheers,

david