Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

I have a knack for finding records at thrift stores, digging through the dust and crinkled cellophane and finding that one elusive gem. I chalk it up to the persistence of the hunt that finds me going back week after week, month after month, while some would just buy the damn thing on eBay. After digging through the Mantovani, Mitch Miller, interminable copies of Carole King's Tapestry , I had begun to give up hope that I would find something halfway decent. Then, I pulled a Jerry Reed record that I was unfamiliar with, The Man with the Golden Thumb . I've long been a fan of Reed's humorous songs and his criminally underrated guitar work, but I had no idea how good this record would be. The title track has shown up on Greatest Hits collections, and is just another in a number of good novelty songs about guitar players that stem back to Reed's early hits, such as "Guitar Man," which made it to number 53 on the country charts in 1967 before Elvis Presley too...

Many of Gene Vincent's early rock and roll peers turned to country in the 1970's. Jerry Lee Lewis had number one country hits as he mined the deep vein of country singer-songwriters, and rerecorded old hits in different styles. Johnny and Dorsey Burnette, who recorded some of the wildest rockabilly sides for Coral in the fifties as The Johnny Burnette Trio, became pop singers. Others like Eddie Cochran and Buddy Holly, who each had already recorded pop and country songs before they died tragic deaths, would have probably also gone in a much more country direction. Gene Vincent's Self-Titled record, which was later reissued as If Only You Could See Me Today, has a slight country sensibility, but manages to effectively capture the zeitgeist of the time period, while showing Vincent in a much more adventurous light. Recorded in 1970, shortly before Vincent's 1971 death, at the Sound Factory in Hollywood with members of the Sir Douglas Quintet, the record is surprisin...

Wikipedia defines blue-eyed soul as "rhythm and blues and soul music performed by white artists . . . and first used in the mid-1960s to describe white artists who performed (such music) that was similar to the music of the Motown and Stax record labels." The term has been increasingly used to describe many white artists who take a soulful approach to music or sing certain kinds of torch songs. I was surprised to not find an entry concerning the form in The Rock Snob's Dictionary but the style doesn't seem to hold the cache of such genres as Americana or 70's AM folk. Even so, the entry for Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham shares some anti-hipster disdain for the "Memphis-based song writing duo invariably praised for being 'real soulful for white boys'" with tongue firmly entrenched in cheek. While the style does have its share of detractors, there is no mistaking that such songwriters as Penn and Oldham wrote some of the best soul songs of the 60...