Goodness Gracious, Indeed

You can have your Jack, and you can have your Lightning. You can go to Venus for all I care. I find my musical heaven on WRVU 91.1. Any given hour will find any genre you like. I had never even heard of jump blues (more horn based than guitar based and popular in the 1940s) until I stumbled upon Pete's Nashville Jumps show a few years ago. It's one thing to discover something cool that is a brand new sound; it's quite another to discover something cool that precedes your own earthly existence by thirty or more years.

Whether old music or new music, I find the best on WRVU. I awake on Thursday mornings to the mellifluous voice of Ashley on Alphabet. Her love for bands and artists from Bowie to The White Stripes is obvious and I thank her for making me aware of music I would not likely hear elsewhere. Silver Jews? Fantastic! Jeffrey Lewis? I had heard "The Chelsea Hotel Oral Sex Song" before, but she turned me on to his deeper and richer catalog.

I listen to WRVU (and college radio in general), not to hear songs that I like, but to hear songs that I don't know I like yet. To paraphrase The Kids In The Hall, request lines are for housewives and little girls. (Obscure enough reference for ya, Charly?) I don't call in and ask the DJs to play songs I like; I sit back and trust that they will play something that makes me call in and ask who that was.

Well, that happened again last night. While driving my shift, I heard a show called Goodness Gracious for the first time. It's on Sunday afternoons from 4:00 to 6:00 and focuses on traditional music from before WWII. (Here's the most recent playlist, and here's the latest show's audio stream.) After enjoying a version of "Black Betty" that I never knew about, I was struck by a song called "Old Rattler" that resonated with my pale white privileged skin. Sung by Moses Platt and James Baker in 1939, it's about a black man who has escaped a Texas state prison and is being pursued by the guards and a dog named Rattler. The N-word is all over the place.

Up until last night, the only thing I would think of when hearing of the year 1939 was The Wizard Of Oz. Now, I have a little reminder that life was going on then just as tough and cruelly as it goes on today. It was the year that The Grapes Of Wrath was first published. It was also the year that we refused 950 Jewish refugees entry to the United States. Left no choice but to return to Europe, many of the ship's passengers were killed in Nazi concentration camps. The more I read about history, the more I understand and appreciate the words to "Somewhere Over The Rainbow."

I thank the hosts of Goodness Gracious for playing some music that inspired me to think, research, and write.