Big Sound Saturdays: Pussy Cat Rag

Say fellers, I lost my little pussycat! Can you help me find it?

Thus spake Zarathustra, and the Lord saw It, and he said that It was good. This week’s mix is all about pussy! I do love a thinly veiled innuendo. Even though slant-songs like these do abound in old-time music, songs that are plain and simple About The V are a much smaller sub-genre. And lieu of a full-blown write up—I don’t want you to feel jet-lagged before you soak in every word of these goofy ass tunes—I’ll leave you with a few fun facts and, this time, a playlist. These titles are too good to hide.

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Big Sound Saturdays: Whiskey and Cigarettes

Oh my god DAMN I’m so EXCITED to share this one!!! Do you, listening pal, have any idea how many songs there are about whiskey in the blues & country cannon? The first thing I learned, after having gone through ten different versions of “Rye Whiskey” (including “Rye Whiskey Waltz,” “Way Up On Clinch Mountain,” and my favorite, “Bon Whiskey”—“Rye Whiskey” in Creole), is that there are also lots of songs about beer! Gin! Rum! I love these songs because they range from unapologetically wasted—Harry Choates’ “Rye Whiskey,” recorded in 1946, includes slurring and hiccups—to transubstantial, (this one for another mix) Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s “Drinking of the Wine.” Also, though, because lots of them do the thing where they try to fit so snugly into the pastiche of their own sounds that they end up sounding like a radical, whacked-out riff on the regular stuff: