Goodbye, Old Paint

Have you ever enjoyed something so thoroughly that telling your friends about it never even enters your mind? That doesn't make any fucking sense, but if there is anything recommendworthy that I've kept to myself for way too long, it's the Root Hog Or Die show on New York's East Village Radio.

Root Hog Or Die is a weekly program hosted by Nathan Salsburg. It features fantastically old and rare folk, country, and regional music which is often pulled from the Alan Lomax Collection. So we're all on the same page, Alan Lomax was a folklorist who travelled across the States in the mid-1900's recording folk music that would otherwise have been lost. Lomax worked with his father on the Archive of Folk Culture for the Library of Congress, which includes more than ten thousand individual recordings. Salsburg has full access to this collection through his position as production manager of the Alan Lomax Collection, which is now being released as a CD series.

I can't really tell you how poignant some of this music is. There's nothing else like it. I've been listening to the show since the middle of last year and I still look forward to it every week.