The strange story behind the beloved Christmas carol “In Dulci Jubilo” — It’s the darkest time of a very dark year. I write to you all from the safety of my house and the snugness of my little office, greeting each with the very best wishes of the season. I want to tell a discursive story about one of my favorite Christmas…

This is a piece I wrote on Patreon some weeks ago that I’m sharing now. I hope you’ll consider becoming a patron. Patron Scott Thill wrote me the other day. “Found a song you should write about,” he said. “A bit too perfect for our times.” …

On America’s Necromarket I see that Kanye West gave his wife Kim Kardashian a hologram of her late father as a 40th birthday present. Kardashian described it as “a gift from heaven” and “so lifelike!” My feelings on the matter differ significantly: since the time Kim Kardashian was born, we’ve…

The Greatest Blues Song of Them All This is a sister essay to my piece on Skip James, which can be found here. L.V. Thomas was born in Houston, Texas on August 7, 1891. “I started playing guitar when I was about 11 years old,” she told researcher Robert “Mack”…

Menace as sexy energy. Saxophonist Otto Hardwick described his band mate James Wesley “Bubber” Miley as “a happy-go-lucky, moon-faced, slim, brown boy with laughing eyes and a mouth full of gold teeth.” Born in Aiken, South Carolina in 1903, Miley moved with his family to New York when he was…

Or, The First Time Most White Americans Heard African-American Music In 1866, Fisk University was chartered in Nashville, Tennessee. It was the first American college to make a liberal arts education available to “young men and women irrespective of color.” “It was the period after the American Civil War, and…

The Music of Skip James I’m taking the unusual step of publishing an essay originally written for Patreon, so y’all can see what I’m up to over there. If you’d like to read more of my writing about music and other musings, I hope you’ll consider becoming a patron. The…

A Musical Case for the Genius of Community Think of your favorite music scene. Was it the punk wonderland of Washington, D.C. in the 1980s? Or maybe Seattle’s grunge of the 90s? It could be the jazz, blues, and swing that came out of Harlem in the 1930s. …

Bloody moon rising with a plague and a flood / Join the mob Some art gets dated quickly, like sci-fi movies or disco hits. Other art exists closer to the unmoving hub of culture’s spinning wheel. It can seem prophetic to us, but only because what’s being communicated is never…