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 as the production manager of the Alan Lomax Collection, a CD series of recordings made by the late folklorist/musical anthropologist. I also serve as the Archive’s catalog editor, struggling as we do whipping the many thousands of hours of recordings and mountains of film negatives into on-line shape, which are coming available for your enjoyment and edification at the Archive’s website.

Other elements and things, as Tony Joe White say: I produce and host an internet radio show of vernacular music from around the world called “Root Hog Or Die,” webcast on East Village Radio dot com. I 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 a little musicianeering – as some forgotten, by me, old-timer from West Virginia once put it – under my given name.

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!”

Personal:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=636783851&ref=profile

Musical:
http://www.myspace.com/twosandfews
http://www.facebook.com/groups.php?ref=sb#/group.php?gid=110853628927

Personal-musical:
http://www.myspace.com/nathansalsburg