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Nostalgia is a "gay" and great experience

Jacques COULARDEAU | OLLIERGUES France | 09/27/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Turn nostalgic and get into that selection of 60 old-time country classics. Of course that's not a concert in a honky-tonk. Of course it is not a concert in the music entertaining park in Nashville. It's not even the old 78 rpm's or even 36 or 45 rpm's that used to scratch. That's not the live broadcasting on the radios before FM sound. It has been re-mastered and cleaned up. But the tunes are there, the old voices are there, the words and the music are there. Be nostalgic and relive three hours of the deep bluegrass prairie, the deep resonant range up in Texas or Arizona, or up in the eastern mountains. The music is clear like the song of a lark in the morning in some garden of Eden. And it sings love and love and love, love as a pleasure and even divorce and departure as a pleasant liberation. The best character is the gay ranchero who is more a gigolo or a playboy or a pleasure lady's man with no attachment nowhere but a quick love affair anywhere he sets his feet and saddle. But don't be mistaken by fables told about cowboys. He is gay like a laughing clown not like those who get married in New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles. The main theme of this music is the territory, but both concrete in generic details and abstract because it can be nearly everywhere. It is this open territory of cowboys, this nature that is endless because crossed by no highway nor spoiled by no urban development not to speak of the sprawl. And the honky-tonks are along the desert roads or tracks, some kind of rendezvous points in the middle of nowhere like some Zabriskie Point in the great plains or the high plateaus. Nostalgic but the metallic sound of the banjo and the definitely major tones make that nostalgia something that has to be desired, that is deeply human and humanizing. You can only be a balanced and full human being if you reach that knowledge of that nowhere territory where freedom means the sky and liberty means the wind and the sun. Even a lament becomes a celebration of the fate of all cowboys as a happy adventure in which separation and severance are structural pieces of the puzzle of life. So just add the smell of beer, unluckily the smoke of tobacco or whatever that is still there in so many of these faraway drinking places, and the poor mikes, and the loud sound and you may reconstruct that atmosphere of a honky-tonk somewhere in Paris, Texas or Nice, California. Then you may decide to look for your old records and listen to them again, or to look for un-remastered recordings of old pieces. Have a good experience.



Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines

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