Posts Tagged ‘Virginia’
Seeking Joe Pug: A Discursive Interview
I’ve come to be untroubled in my seeking
And I’ve come to say that nothing is for naught
I’ve come to reach out blind, to reach forward and behind
For the more I seek, the more I’m sought
These lyrics, from Joe Pug’s “Hymn 101,” might as well be the tagline for Pug’s current year-long tour, which has taken him from tooling around the local circuit in his hometown, Chicago, to tailing alt.-country legend Steve Earle’s tour bus on a swing down through Texas and back up toward the Great Lakes. From there, he’ll take a brief sojourn to Norway then take up with Josh Ritter for an upper-Midwest tour before heading west for festival season. “I rent a room in Chicago,” he tells me Tuesday after a set in Richmond, “but I’ve probably slept in it about 20 times this year.”
Folk Wisdom: Steve Earle @ The National
The National, in Richmond, is a decorous little theater with a semiformal air. But on Tuesday night, when Steve Earle played a set of mostly Townes Van Zandt covers from his new tribute album, peppered with anecdotes from his 25-year friendship with its eponymous hero, the venue assumed the close familiarity of a living room.
Earle’s speaking voice—deliberate, avuncular, devoid of pretense—sounds as though it was engineered for the specific purpose of perpetuating folk legends. When he says he got the idea for the tribute album when one night from his tour bus he saw Van Zandt’s ghost riding his old horse Amigo through the Colorado fog, you take him at his word. At Tuesday night’s show in Richmond, Earle deployed folk’s discursive oral tradition in the service of contextualizing Townes.
Ralph Stanley Cuts Radio Ad For Obama
Via TPM: “A Virginia Democrat sends over a new radio spot that Obama is airing in the southern part of the state — it stars homegrown bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley vouching for Obama’s values and character to the tune of some banjo pickin’ in the background.”
