About

Pandora (that’s her name), the lady that always helped me at the Times Square post office, asked me once what a “blob” is. You know, she said, like on the Internet. My name is Nathan Salsburg; this is my blob. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; raised up in Louisville, Kentucky, where I currently happily subsist. I am employed by the Alan Lomax Archive / Association for Cultural Equity in various curatorial and archival capacities in the service of the late folklorist/musical anthropologist’s life’s work.

I also curate a recording imprint called Twos & Fews in association with Chicago’s Drag City label, trafficking in similar musics as those covered herein. I also do some musicianeering — as the old-timers would say — under my given name, also covered here.

I started this blob as an opportunity to cover folklorically related subjects as time and inclination allow, but want most for it to provide assistance to the adventurous sonic surfer in his/her travels throughout the Internet’s democratic (and free) clearing-houses of traditional, local, site-specific musics: “The World’s Mp3s.” You can read record reviews in ten thousand other locations, though there’s some room here for various vernacular-culture related bits that might be arguably suitable for public presentation. See “Root Blog or Die.”

Caption: At Churchill Downs for the Kentucky Oaks, moons ago, before those awful apartment-block towers went up and dwarfed the twin spires. The straw-and-silk hat was a gift to my father from an old man who never learned to drive named Jesse Hyman. Jesse’s apartment was flooded during Wilkes-Barre’s legendary Flood of 1972, and my father helped him for many hours cleaning, moving, damage controlling. Jesse, who reportedly was hardly in financial straits, gave my father his hat as a thank-you. My grandfather was furious, and slammed his fist on the table, shouting “How dare he give you his hat! Don’t let him give you his hat! You give it back!”