Music Lessons from a Slow Learner

Slim Cessna's Auto Club (live recording) on a Sunday evening.

There's one thing I don't think I'll ever cease to love about "Western" and "cowboy" music. It's something in addition to - though it may well be inseparable from - the yodel-like calls and howls and wails. Indeed, it's the same thing I think I most enjoy in just about every sort of folk music I've ever heard, with the exception of the German, French and northern Italian varieties (excepting, in other words, all that "music of the folk" so-called in which every lapse into a minor key is something on the order of a major sin).

It's the yearning. 

Haven't I made myself clear? Then let me try again. 

It's the ineffable, lingering, haunting sense that, however much the singer may enjoy his present life, and this present earth, by the grace of everything holy there's got to be a better life somehow, somewhere, somewhen.