November 17, 2002
WORTH TWICE THE PRICE:
"The Best-Known Tune Humans Have Ever Sung" (Tim Cahill, November 15, 2002, Slate: well-traveled: Dispatches from the front lines of travel)The white folklorist Alan Lomax, who traveled through the Delta in the 1930s and '40s recording music for the Library of Congress, said, in 1992, "Nowadays everyone sings and dances to bluesy music, and the mighty river of the blues uncoils in the ear of the planet. Indeed the blues may have become the best-known tune humans have ever sung."
Personally, I find the quality of Slate to be very uneven, but it doesn't get much better than Tim Cahill writing about the blues. And, what the heck, it is free. Posted by Orrin Judd at November 17, 2002 1:11 PM
Comments
I like Slate
quite a bit, although, as you say, its very uneven (and its Fray section is a zoo), but its always amusing to remember that Slate
's genesis was Microsoft's conviction that unless it supplied content (Slate
, MSNBC, MSN, etc), this World Wide Web thing would die.
Even more amusing, they thought we'd pay for it.
Posted by: oj at November 17, 2002 5:49 PM