Molly Tuttle channels Jefferson Airplane “White Rabbit” Northampton, MA 3/4/23

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OWjYoridqk

Molly Tuttle, Rolling Stones’ “She’s A Rainbow” Ossipee Valley Music Festival 2022

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFwd8dxJYYA

Or space aliens. Smokey The Bear is now a “furrie.”

Or from a flare dropped from an unobserved Chinese balloon.

(Though I suppose one could say the same about Rhythm ‘n Blues… Bluegrass ‘n Hillbilly? Baroque ‘n Classical? Rock ‘n Roll?)

TJ:

Back in my hippie days there was “Old & In the Way,” a Jerry Garcia bluegrass project, which included the astonishing Vassar Clements on fiddle, and John Hartford’s “Aeroplane” New Grass album. These two opened my mind.

Over time rock/pop musicians began to incorporate country and my ears got to hear it better. Then, as you say, the decline of melody and lyrics in rock/pop got to me. After I flipped conservative, the country worldview seemed more natural.

Plus, as much as I love the Beatles, the Stones, etc. I wanted to hear some new (to me) music. Which has also driven my interest in French music.

The Cowboy Junkies and Gillian Welch/’David Rawlings, while not strictly country, were important as well.

When I was young, I couldn’t get past Glenn Campbell and John Denver — not exactly the leading icons of the genre.

What changed for you?

For me, the decline of melody and song in pop music left me hungry. And then various county sirens and pluckers got to me.

But I wonder if life and loss aren’t truly required? I had a roommate at university from Greece. He said all the country tunes in the US sing about the same things his Greek pop music he grew up with in Athens does.

Today I went down the rabbit hole of “It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken” and wound up at:
________________________

It’s a great life, if you don’t weaken
But who wants to be strong?

–Faron Young, “It’s A Great Life (If You Don’t Weaken)” (1955)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MuZgDsvtF-s
________________________

Is that a great song or what?

The worst musical mistake I made was to look down on Country. So much fun. So much depth. And they can play.

The title is actually a longstanding quote of “interesting” origin:

–“It’s a Great Life If You Don’t Weaken”
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2022/01/11/weaken/

Personally, I think it’s a damn accurate observation.

But as Faron Young and whoever wrote the sing observes, “But who wants to be strong.”

At least not all the time.

It’s complicated.

https://nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/famous/oh-what-a-tangled-web-we-weave/

Did you know social spiders have “personalities,” aggressive vs passive, which can be operationally measured by spider researchers?

Did you know that there was an academic scandal a few years back which wiped out a decade of social spider research?

–acollierastro, “a scary science data story”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlas3TOi_CQ

I got totally sucked into this video. It’s such a great story, that some spiders have personalities and individual spider personalities can influence the spider community.

But [SPOILER ALERT] …

The lead researcher, Jonathan Pruitt, faked the data! And he had been faking data back to his doctoral dissertation.

So Pruitt destroyed his own reputation. He had been a fast rising academic star, but he is now a high school science teacher. He put the reputations of anyone who ever worked or studied with him under a cloud. The ~6000 studies citing Pruitt have to be reconsidered.

A. Collier is devastating in her recounting, but is nonetheless somewhat understanding in the end. The pressure in academia to produce papers, especially breakthrough papers, and certainly not replication papers is extreme, so the Pruitt scandal should not be surprising.

And who knows how much other fakery there might be, but remains undiscovered.