A Treasury of Library of Congress Field Recordings (Rounder)

(Being an attempt at suasion in the form of a series of otherwise unrelated conditional statements.)

You'll love this album

• if you own a pea coat, second hand, just a little bald at the cuffs.
• if you gaze out the window in mid-continental flight only to look down at the brown of the mountains, the dapples of light and dark made by the individual peaks' overlapping rain shadows, how low their thrust spreads upon the ground.
• the dissonance of traditions aside, if you reel with your own understanding of the last scene of Fellini's Nights Of Cabiria.
• if you agree with Sly Stone's observation that "there's a rhythm / when you don't know what you're doing" ("In Time", Fresh).
• if you take a walk through the neighborhood at twilight just to see your known world through a veil of rust.
• if you smell something sweets as peaches in the acridity of smoldering autumn leaves.
• if you've learned it.
• if you think a "Panegyric" is a patent medicine.
• if there is a ghost haunting your coal chute.
• if you find that the State Fair seems to stay in town a few days fewer with each passing year.
• if you can dance with your collar buttoned tight on your Adam's apple; if you can dance with a bow pendant at the small of your back.
• if you see a dirt road and think of mud pies.
• if you know from which song the lyrics "the children look up / all they hear / is sky blue bells ringing" have been quoted.

If you know a private, pathless place deep in the woods, then this is the CD you'll leave behind when you go there to your secret.

If you are the village idiot, and the lovely, chestnut-haired lass who you dare not court is leaving soon, or at least with the coming of the first snow, for a long visit to a far-off place, then you can sheepishly toe the dirt and make of this CD a fine going-away gift.

If you prefer coffee to tea, and pie to cake, then you will want your short-order cook to have this playing over his hot plates.

If you are crying because you think you're all alone, and you can't make the tears stop even though you know you're wrong, you're mistaken, you're mistook, that you are never abandoned, then you've heard someone down the hall singing along with you and Texas Galdden... and Bozie Sturdivant... and Jess Morris... and Woody Guthrie.

If the only empire in which you believe exists in the hereafter, then you'll find its anthem here.

~ Joe Milazzo