4 ms·

Some of Us Are Haunted by Washington Phillips

36 points by tintinnabula 10y ago

btown 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
    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.
  - inimino 10y ago
    There's quite a distance between primary sources and random YouTube uploads, however.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
_petronius 10y ago
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.pdf https://ourblues.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/unknown_bards.p... but all of his essays are great, I especially recommend the collection 'Pulphead')

36 points by tintinnabula 10y ago

btown 10y ago

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 10y ago
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 10y ago
  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.
- inimino 10y ago
  There's quite a distance between primary sources and random YouTube uploads, however.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

_petronius 10y ago

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