(the great Clarence Ashley with Doc Watson)

Love Songs in Age

She kept her songs, they took so little space,
The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had siezed her,
And coloured, by her daughter-
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord
Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.

Philip Larkin, the Whitsun Weddings
February 1964

Five Favorite Songs of the Day

The Coo-Coo is a Pretty Bird-Clarence Ashley, Anthology of American Folk Music

The Levee's Gonna Break-Bob Dylan, Modern Times

Critics will make obvious statements about how this song is somehow a comment on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, but this has the swagger of many a great blues song.

Love Would Come-Kevin Davis & Valerie Marincic

Hold on, Hold on-Neko Case, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

Mutineer-Warren Zevon, the David Letterman Show (more about this one later)

Happy Wednesday, friends!

andrew