1001 Albums: #3. The Louvin Brothers - Tragic Songs of Life (1956)

The Louvin Brothers - Tragic Songs of Life
Capitol, 1956

The extent of my knowledge of the Louvin Brothers is that they were super religious (this album cover in particular is what I immediately thought about when this album came up on the list). Listening to Tragic Songs of Life, you can hear how influential it was to country music and bluegrass. And yet as pure as this record is, it made me realize that blues is incredibly underrepresented. For instance, the only John Lee Hooker record is from 1989 and Robert Johnson only gets a cursory mention in someone else's write-up. I suppose it's a matter of scope and you have to start somewhere, and I'm sure there will be some that crop up as we go along, but considering how influential the genre was to modern music it seems odd not to at least start there. After all, the is a very rock-centric list, so it would make sense. It's not like these guys weren't releasing albums, despite blues being rooted in the pre-album age of singles and 78s. I think I'm just miffed because it's a genre I want to learn more about and you have Elvis listed before Muddy Waters.

The racial politics of Rock and Roll are a whole can of worms I keep dancing around as I, for instance, try to listen to Elvis' debut without recalling the "It's your cousin, MARVIN Berry" sequence from Back to the Future where Marty McFly rewrites history and has a white man creating modern Rock and Roll. I wrote a paper for an African American Music class I took in college that hinged on that scene. The thesis was essentially about white colonialism in music, in which African-Americans create a revolutionary sound that is co-opted and further popularized by white guys time and time again from Rock and R&B to Jazz to Hip-Hop. Anyway, that's a brain detour, back to the Louvin Brothers. This is as enjoyable as anything on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, and a very pleasant and despite the gospel influences isn't preachy and in fact has a whole lot of sin scattered across its tracks (not excepting murder! See "Knoxville Girl," which is a terrifyingly upbeat account of a man murdering his beloved in surprisingly gruesome fashion).