When the universe conspires to make you learn something

This summer is a really busy one. I'm teaching a History of the Blues course (in 16 2-hour classes no less) and I'm also working as a "research" assistant for a folk song project. On top of all of this, I'm trying to do a lot of reading. I'm hoping my dissertation will be on something to do with American "folk" music. Yesterday, background reading and the folk song project overlapped.

My job right now for the folk song project is to "track" 83 trackless CD's of folk music from the Library of Congress. In addition, I have to make a track list. Usually this task is a fairly easy one....line up the LoC's database listing with the CD recorded, but sometimes either the database or the recording identification is wrong, which means I get to listen to folk songs and guess at titles. On one level it's research grunt work, but on another level it's a summer of getting paid to listen to source singers and play around with the LoC database. There are definitely worse ways to spend a summer (i.e. my summer spent washing dishes/cleaning kennels to pay for living expenses).

On top of this project, I've checked out Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock 'n Roll by Nick Tosches. I'm only barely into it, but at the very beginning there's a chapter about Warren Smith claiming he wrote a song he recorded in 1956 called "Black Jack David." Considering I had just tracked about three different versions of a song called "Black Jack Davey" I knew that wasn't true even before Tosches did a fantastic tracing of the history and evolution of "Black Jack David."

On top of everything, I found an incredible source singer identified as Aunt Molly Jackson. Good weekend, but lots of work left to do.