The fertile crescent

My ex-husband has a theory about how the arch created from connecting Nashville to Memphis to New Orleans is the fertile crescent of American music; that this area has a colorable claim as the birthplace of just about any form of American music. He's stil expounding on this in some of his newer pieces of music journalism. And it's a good theory. And of course in his view, American vernacular music was just about the only thing worthy of thinking about, except for Brazilian music.

So I lived in Nashville for a little bit, and I lived in Memphis for longer. I lived in the Mississippi Delta for a year, and now I've been in New Orleans for eight.

I was so young and unformed when I met him; I absorbed his theories and views and even after I left him I was following a map he gave me. I don't regret his geographical direction, but ithe imitated stance I received from him has stymied me for a long time--an attitude of arrogance, cyncism, a closure to a wide range of possibilities, the need to deem most of the world inferior, to explain and dismiss as a means of denying our own inadequacies. A contemptous "fuck it" to most everything.

This week I got an email about an article about Mississippi John Hurt that I wrote almost ten years ago, which still lives on the web. That article was the pinnacle of my living up to Edd's standards. I remember him telling me he was proud of me when that article came out. It might have been the last time I saw him.

Every once in awhile I look up his articles. Lately his articles have been appearing in the Minneapolis City Pages. Strange to think of one ex of mine reading an article by another ex and never knowing what they have in common. Except Mark only reads the NYT.

I suppose Virginia is on the fringes of Edd's map somewhere, as one of the sources of country music perhaps, but it's not at the center, not within the fertile crescent.