Farewells

I guess today is the day everyone starts in on what songs the documentary Country Music missed and who was slighted. I think they probably covered the scene as well as one in the space allowed and without causing eyes to glaze over. I suppose they regarded Glen Campbell as to "pop" but still I would like to have seen this classic  included.

They did mention Hank Garland as a session player and caught him in one shot of a Patsy Cline session. They made Marty Stuart into some sort of classic prophet and that's no problem. The few, the very few, people I know who are personally acquainted with the Bluegrass/Country scene don't have much good to say about him, but hey, that's inductive reasoning at its worse. Anyone "in the know" please chime in. I'm almost always wrong.

Anyway, it was a classic documentary, perhaps the best I've ever seen. Of course it had lots of actual footage with which to work. There was no way interview Joshua Chamberlain or one of his lieutenants live after Little Round Top, now was there?

At least one mention was of someone that I though I was the only one who had ever heard of. That, of course, would have been Nanci Griffith. She stole my soul years ago with this cover of a favorite Bob Dylan number. As my old friend Gary Toler once said of someone, "had [she] been an old sailor, she could have lured me off to sea." Connoisseur reviewer Jared Lawrence Burden once observed, “As she talks, the young men in the audience are wishing that Nanci Griffith were their girlfriend, the older men are wishing she were their daughter, and the women are wishing that theyou, too, could play guitar and sing.”

Anyway. There's an old story about two travelers crossing the desert who were told by a genie to fill their saddlebags with sand before going to sleep and they would awake in the morning "both glad and sad." They did as told, somewhat sleepily and half-heartedly. They awoke in the morning to find that the sand had turned to diamond overnight. Then they were glad for the presence of the diamonds but sad that they hadn't gathered more sand.

I'm both glad for the Country Music series for what it gave us, and sad that it's over and we must return to these troubled times. Maybe it both taught us a little about how to handle heartbreak, and offered us some hope. It's somewhat like my definition of a perfect visit to a friend. That's when you must leave, but you wish you had one more day to stay. That will always make you want to come back again.