The ballad of geeshie and elvie

stretchl

Haven't read/watched this but at first glance it looks like something some of you may find interesting:


"IN THE WORLD of early-20th-century African-American music and people obsessed by it, who can appear from one angle like a clique of pale and misanthropic scholar-gatherers and from another like a sizable chunk of the human population, there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and ’31 as Elvie Thomas and Geeshie Wiley."

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/04/13/magazine/blues.html?hp

cnh

Interesting find. The kind of stuff that people like Alan Lomax spent a lifetime trying to "save". I'm sure there are more artists we don't know much about, and then there are "all" those poor folks with much greater talent than MOST of our pop stars today, who NEVER get a contract, never make a dime and only entertain their friends who wonder why they're NOT famous. Such a TRAGEDY the music industry is, a mixture of luck, some talent, and a LOT of PUSHY BS. Push, push, push, push till somebody actually starts to believe you're good when you're nowhere near the best!

There's a lot of GREAT talent that dies every day that NO ONE has ever heard of...no musical entrepreneur ever found or cared about. And we wonder why people die of drug overdoses? Why it's because of our "values"!

cnh