A nickel is a nickel, a dime is a dime

It's that time again, where I try and make up for the lack of any real content this week by offering you a sop in the form of a song.

"Talkin' About You," by Piney "Kokomo" Brown and His Blue Flashes, might be one of my favorite songs ever. Recorded in the late '40s, it falls into the category of jump blues, a subspecies of blues that could be loosely defined as what rock and roll was before white people got their sanitizing hands on it. (See here for more info.)

Amazingly, Piney Brown (who is not the same Big Piney Brown memorialized in "Piney Brown Blues, or his brother Little Piney Brown) is still alive and touring.

I first heard jump blues eight years when I moved to NYC. It was around that time that I grew strangely (though not unjustifiably) disenchanted with modern music, and so I decided that I was a 40something nerdy white rock critic type stuck inside the body of a 22-year-old girl* and refused to listen to any recording artist who didn't possess at least two of the following qualities:

1)dead
2)incarcerated
3)crazy

I could pretty much find everything I needed at the late, great Wowsville Records, which, of course, was run by Italians. (Pop quiz: Why do Europeans care more about American roots music than we do? Because we're assholes, that's why.)

Now that Wowsville is gone, the best resource for all things old and scratchy (of every genre) is Roots and Rhythm, where you can also buy City Jump Vs. Country Jump, the truly, truly amazing comp on which "Talkin' About You" is the first track.

I'm no longer quite as despondent about the state of modern music, especially because now we have the Arctic Monkeys to save us all, but, frankly, there isn't anything out right now that can possibly stand up to this.

If you'll excuse me, I need to go re-alphabetize my record collection by sound engineer and take an inventory of my WFMU t-shirts.

Talkin' About You, by Piney "Kokomo" Brown and His Blue Flashes

*And lemme tell you, I cannot tell you how many 40something nerdy white rock critics types I met at that time who wouldn't have minded being stuck inside the body of this 22-year-old.