
Some of Us Are Haunted by Washington Phillips - tintinnabula
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/some-of-us-are-haunted-by-washington-phillips
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_petronius
I'm reminded of John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay on the blues, "Unknown Bards",
where he talks about the album "Pre-War Revenants":

"We're talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something
like Ishman Bracey's 'Woman Woman Blues,' his tattered yet somehow impeccable
falsetto when he sings, 'She got coal-black curly hair.' Songs like that were
not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for
listening. For grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind
Willie Johnson's 'Dark was the night, cold was the ground.' It has no words.
It's hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the
guitar. We have to go against our training here and suspend anthropological
thinking; it doesn't serve at thee strata. The noble ambition not to be the
kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticise black or poor-white
folk poverty has allowed us to rmain the kind of people who don't stop to
wonder whether the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially
high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves."

His discussion of writing about blues, and the writing about writing about the
blues, is pretty interesting.

([https://ourblues.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/unknown_bards.p...](https://ourblues.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/unknown_bards.pdf)
but all of his essays are great, I especially recommend the collection
'Pulphead')

------
btown
The article doesn't make it very clear, but many of the links are to YouTube
uploads of the actual songs. Here's one - the instrument he uses to accompany
his voice is indeed unique and rather haunting:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoOX9-kcv7g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoOX9-kcv7g)

(N.B. to journalists: in a world where embedded multimedia is easier than
ever, make sure that if you're writing an article about audio, you make it
easy for someone to listen to said audio without leaving your page and giving
someone else your advertising eyeballs!)

~~~
matt4077
THere's a audio player embedded at the bottom. And I'm quite fond of the idea
that should serve the reader by making the best use the structure of the web,
i. e. ny linking to primary sources and other related material, instead of
ignoring it or trying to recreate everything on their own site.

~~~
btown
While hypertext is theoretically the "best use of the structure of the web,"
it does not immediately follow that this is the best UX for the consumer. Some
middle ground exists between _copying_ all multimedia to one's site, and
simply making the most crucial pieces of information (namely the audio that is
essential to the "why" of the article) an <a> tag that looks like all other
<a> tags (and adding the cognitive overload of leaving your site to a foreign
one with entirely different design and controls!). IMO embeds (inline, not
just appended to an article) strike that middle ground quite effectively.

