robert johnson comes after w.c.handy.
"bluegrass" comes after singing cowboys.
this is perhaps the formal truth in dvorak's (sp?) assertion that the future of american music was contained in "negro songs". we are skooled to hear minimalism as 'primitive', less developed. that's a hearing in defiance of the evidence.
a lot of the myth of the west was technologically determined in that it was cheap to make movies about the west. the singing cowboy of b-culture was a contemporary man with his eye to the future. "realism" was a cinematic conspicuous consumption that destroyed much of what was best in the cowboy dream. the "realer", supposedly "more authentic" john wayne cowboy was a monster of manifest destiny whereas gene autry and roy rogers promulgated a benevolent and pragmatic ideology of playing straight, being cheerful and polite, and getting along with your neighbors. the starkly real anti-heros of the 70's westerns (the wild bunch etc.) may have more properly evoked the true nastiness of our actual history, but they did so without offering a methodology of getting better.
if roy rogers ever spanked dale evans you know it was a giggly consensual romp. it wasn't like those horrible drunk john wayne assaults on his chattel maureen o'hara.
woody guthrie started out a singing cowboy and i'm guessing he'd have stayed one if those new york ballerinas hadn't siren vibed him.
6:08:47 PM 
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