Diverted<\/p>\n
A lot of thought and experimenting has gone into the Finding Aids<\/a> project lately, and I’m discovering how easily I can be diverted from the grander overall scheme of developing orderly summaries by things encountered along the way. Every Thing that one picks up has edges<\/i> that potentially link to other Things, and I’m sometimes sidetracked by shiny somethings. A few days ago I started to explore the vastnesses of my American music holdings, and so I’m wrestling with the sliding panoply of genres that belong within “Music of the Nacirema” (blues, jazz, old timey, bluegrass, folk, etc. etc.). Pretty much every item spins out into another Story, a facet (or several) of the glorious complexity of a musical landscape that spans more than a century. <\/p>\n \nThe epic of Stagolee is one such: a tale of Shakespearean scope and perennial fascination, based on an incident that took place in St. Louis in 1896, centered on a shooting over a John B. Stetson hat. There are hundreds of variants since the story was first published in 1911. Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians released an instrumental version in 1923, soon followed by Lovie Austin’s version with words in 1924, Ma Rainey’s (with Louis Armstrong’s cornet) in 1925, and Frank Hutchison’s in 1927. See the Wikipedia article<\/a> for more detail, and enjoy the variety in these examples: