And as I was travelling South, my weekly commute to Bucharest, I remembered having a documentary in one of the hundred pages opened in the browser. It was How Sweet the Sound, an exploration of folk music, Joan Baez and the 50ies and 60ies.
Don’t ask me how I got to it, cuz the story’s quite long. I guess it started two years ago when, while in Paris, I’ve seen a dozen records or so – we call them vinyls, nowadays.
Of course I bought them, although didn’t recall whether our record player was still working or not. And it wasn’t, but I got to bring them home, airport and stuff and then bought more and more records, especially while abroad.
A month ago or so I went to Lisbon, got to Carbono second hand records store, on Rua de Telhal, and, yes, found a double album by Joan Baez. Folk songs. As it happens, Google and YouTube know everything about me, so, pretty soon, Joan Baez came to be among the suggested songs by YT’s algorithm. But the song that was pushed to me via this slightly-more-radical-proposal by YouTube was Diamonds and Rust, one of the songs torturing me, always at the edge of my conscious mind, but never fully there. You know how it works, those songs from your childhood or youth that you kind of don’t remember, but still long for them in the back of your minds, somewhere.
Diamonds and Rust, sweet songs from the past that you never knew are so connected to you until you make the conscious effort of listening to the words and making a story out of them.
And with this, it all started. I realized that, except her revolutionary songs and some other pieces like Wagoner’s Lad, John Riley, Lily of the West and Railroad Boy, I didn’t know the lyrics of any of her songs. I won’t count here The House of the Rising Sun. And this Diamonds and Rust song is more than anything the key to unearthing a piece of the past – her being in the middle of the countercultural movement of the 50ies and the 60ies, shoulder to shoulder with Bob Dylan and her being a woman in love with him.
The kind of archaeology I like.
