Just Another Rabbit in the Road

Every Saturday from 7 to noon Minneapolis public radio plays a show called "Bluegrass Saturday Morning." We got hooked during my postdoctoral years, and continue to enjoy the show via live web-stream now that we have drifted south. We find it reassuring to know that even though many things in our lives have changed (jobs, cities; dinners for two), that announcer Phil Nussbaum's exegetical genius is still sharp as ever, and leveled with all the old fury at the one literary subgenre which admits no interpretive wiggle-room: namely, the bluegrass song.

Rolling in my sweet baby's arms
Rolling in my sweet baby's arms
Laying around the shack
'Till the mailtrain get's back
Rolling in my sweet baby's arms.

Phil would have a lot to say about this song. "Back in the days of the frontier," he would begin, in the crisp, quick tones of a male holding forth within his limited sphere of technical expertise, "mailtrains would pass between Chicago and St. Louis every 4 hours." (This is the same voice you offer hear men use to give directions, or discuss engine mechanics, or describe the precise location of a certain pub in a foreign city they visited ten years ago to a stranger with whom they have nothing else in common but the fact that the stranger is about to visit the same city.) And Phil would go on: discuss the fact that shacks were set up at track intersections, that those shacks needed occupants, that women were scarce. "Occupying those shacks must have been a lonely business" (and here he would give his Minnesota chuckle, a short nasal snort that means he has just said something spicey.) "In this song, the narrator wants to get in and get out before the next train", and with an exhuberant "hang on, here goes!" he would set loose some blazing Bill Monroe mandolin solo whose insistent catchiness would totally erase from our minds the fact that of all the songs in the world, few are in less need of an introduction than the one we are listening to.

This is not to criticize Mr. Nussbaum. I like his style. He seems to be a man who genuinely hopes to find meaning in the words of the songs he plays. Even when those words are Honey let me be your salty dog or I won't be your man at all, honey let me be your salty dog. Like any display of genuine interest, Phil's doomed but endearingly earnest quest for narrative coherence makes me wonder if he's on to something. If perhaps my own sneering ridicule is an artifact of a closed mind and a hard soul.

I should confess that Phil's influence is spreading. Not only do we listen to him every Saturday morning, but we've been edging ever closer to that most ridiculous of entities, the Bluegrass Family Band (think Big Mama Blunderpox in curlers singing harmony with her buck-toothed twin daughters while Pa shakes his scragglebeard over a plywood six-string.) Last Christmas I bought Catalina a mandolin, in the hopes that she would take it up and play the Monroe doodles behind my three chord chunking on the guitar. She hasn't touched it yet, but we've got time: I don't intend to hit the road until Zoogle masters the washtub base, and I probably won't start him on that until he can, say, take a bath (a useful backup skill if he loses interest in the instrument.) But little by little we are being won over, and I must say, I'm glad: Phil preserves some essential, doomed, naive enthusiam that I consider an essential feature of the good life. He is a glacier full of polar bears, with no signs of melting.