Culture Rover

listening with the collectors.

The great folklorist and music collector Dick Spottswood calls the songs he plays on his fabulous radio program “obsolete music.” It’s a wonderful term to describe what many call “roots music.”

Turning the tables on the idea of “roots,” “obsolete music” trumpets the messy, lost, castoff quality of older forms of American popular music rather than its grounded timelessness. And amazingly, “obsolete music” as a label and approach to country, folk, blues, and r&b from decades past winds up rekindling authentic experience out of the very process of complicating authenticity.

Folk music here is purposefully de-folkified. It isn’t the ahistorical sound of the Volk. It’s not the sonic equivalent of a rustic wooden sculpture made by a visionary tobacco farmer from Kentucky. Instead, it’s folk music as a 1950s Chevy tailfin: showy, flashy, ludicrous, full of glint and style and utopian longings to live in the moment, even if this turns out to be a moment from the past.

On Spottswood’s show, then, we are not in the realm of folk music understood as the pulsating heartbeat of a vibrant, rooted community. Instead, when we tune in Spottswood’s show, we journey to the dispersed, dusty alcoves, attics, and basements of a former community’s sonic coherence. We get lost, disoriented, outmoded on the margins and edges of the collective musical soundscape of American popular song.

Listening to the Dick Spottswood Show, we find ourselves in a new community on those margins and edges: a secret society of shamanic listeners. In short, we are no longer among the originators, but we are instead among the collectors. We’re listening to ghosts.

But we only hear those sonic ghosts through figures such as Spottswood, who, like spiritualist mediums at a seance, tune in those ghosts, touch and perceive their shapes, and link them together.

As Spottswood re-collects and recollects older songs, how weird that roots music would emerge on his radio show from such seemingly rootless and now-lost sounds.