Blank and Blues: Hesitation Blues

Holy Modal Rounders: Hesitation Blues

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Growing up in midwestern America, I listened to a lot of music that everyone else was listening to as well. There was AM radio where I absorbed my share of the rock and roll culture. There was the tiny cache of my parents' vinyl albums (Mom's taste ran to Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, and Mr. Acker Bilk; my dad liked Boots Randolph). There were my sister's Beatles albums.

It took leaving home and going to college before I heard anything like this kind of music.

I first heard the Holy Modal Rounders through a boyfriend who loved blues of all sorts. Their songs were nothing like the music I knew. The lead singers both have voices that undoubtedly caused their tearful mothers to beg them not to aim for clearly hopeless musical careers. The guitar and fiddle sound straight from a West Virginia holler, not New York City where it actually originates. And the lyrics? What is this "psychedelic" of which they sing (remember, this was way back in 1964)?

Luckily, my love affair with distinctive music like this has lasted much longer than the one with that boyfriend.

Street Names: Down The Old Plank Road

Holy Modal Ramblers: Down The Old Plank Road

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The Chieftains w/ John Hiatt: Down The Old Plank Road*
*Link removed due to hotlinking. Please don't steal our bandwidth!

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The Highwoods String Band: Way Down The Old Plank Road

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The Mammals: Way Down The Old Plank Road

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The Old Plank Road was exactly what it sounds like: a 6.5 mile road built of wooden planks, without which it would never have been possible to traverse the sandy Algodones dunes between San Diego and Yuma, nor indeed the gap between Southern California and Arizona. Difficult to maintain, hard to drive, and too narrow for cars to pass in opposite directions, the splintery roadway only lasted from 1915 to 1926, when it was replaced by a mix of asphalt and concrete built on sand pilings.

California's Old Plank Road would eventually become part of US Route 80, and then Interstate 8. But the idea of the plank road, which had taken hold in culture long before as rural travelers and highway companies sought ways to cross soft or boggy ground, would live on in this old traditional tune, first recorded by Uncle Dave Macon on 5-string banjo, with guitar by Sam McGee, in 1926, and subsequently covered by a whole mess of my favorite tradfolk performers, including all of the above. Technically, I suppose, the tune could refer to any number of "plank roads" - but its title contains the name of one in particular, so we'll let it stand.

Little Black Book: Griselda

Yo La Tengo: Griselda

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"Come won't you walk with me Griselda, wearing that dress that moonlight shines through, I am a sad and lonely boy, since your mother said I couldn't see you." That´s Yo La Tengo, with a deceptively simple song from their delightful cover album Fakebook (´90). I´ve never heard the original by Peters Stampfell´s Holy Modal Rounders by the way. Anyone?