The website of Jonathan Bogart, writer and cartoonist.
Epilogue: That Ribbon Of Highway
If you have kept faithful count, you know that we have made our way through only ninety-nine recordings. There is one straggler still on the road, journeying with us to the rising sun.
Scene Seven: Que Le Arde
The inner dialectic of American history is in stark black and white; Kodachrome has not yet reached our deepest instincts.
Scene Six: Hold Back The Dawn
And breaks the dam, and the deluge comes, sweeping all before its path, the world we knew and the world we thought we knew, together drowned in the same all-consuming torrent of noise, noise noise boiling up from the underground, from the shacks (chicken and shotgun and all-night and love) of the backwoods, the brothels of the cities, the lonely trails in the swamps and on the uplands where men don’t congregate or if they do they don’t talk about it later.
Scene Five: A Hand Me Down Broom
The last time we looked at the official, overground version of 1940s pop for any length of time was back in the first half of this list, when we suggested that Frank Sinatra in 1945 was at the tail end of a tradition of songwriting and interpretation which would be swallowed up bodily by the subsequent waves of vernacular pop on the one hand and prissy nostalgia-mongering on the other.
Scene Four: Pettin’ Party Or A Poker Game
Even more so than the blues, we have kept country music off to one side in these misbegotten wanderings, bringing it in only when we’ve exhausted every other topic.