Comix godfather R. Crumb is known for his love of century-old American music, authoring a book, R. Crumb's Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Country, and leading a band called the Cheap Suit Serenaders. Why then did he draw the cover of Lament from Epirus, a book about the folk music of a remote corner of Greece? The subject is figuratively as well as literally half a world away from Crumb’s interests, right?
Not so. Grammy-winning producer Christopher C. King’s Lament from Epirus argues that the mountains of Greece and the Mississippi Delta are closer than any map could show. King is a real-life prototype for the character Steve Buscemi played in Ghost World—an obsessive collector of 78 RPMs that echo the “weird old America” Greil Marcus described in The Invisible Republic. Dragged along by his wife on an Istanbul vacation, he came upon some curious 78s in antique shops and discovered something he never imagined: the weird old Mediterranean or, perhaps, The Invisible Byzantium.
What King found was music haunting in its strangeness by Greek performers from a century ago but somehow unlike the rebetiko and other genres with which he had passing familiarity. A trail of faded photographs, crumbling documents and fragile shellac led him to the music’s source, Epirus, a region straddling Greece and Albania. What’s more, he found that a few of those 78s were recorded in 1920s New York. Just as bluesmen made their way north to the music industry’s urban center, at least one immigrant from Epirus found his way to an American studio. Band leader Leroy Shield, who went on to pen the music for movies featuring the Little Rascals and Laurel and Hardy, recorded violinist Alexis Zoumbas in 1926.
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“A dark vastness opened,” King writes about the first time he dropped a needle on Zoumbas’ lamentation. “The sorrowful variations of these five notes tapped into a place within me that I did not know I had,” he continues. “They opened up in me longing, remembrance, and regret. It was some elevated state of having the blues with which I had no prior experience.”
Put it another way: Robert Johnson might have understood this music.
Much of Lament from Epirus concerns King’s journey to that mountainous region where—to his delight—he finds that many aspects of traditional culture remain in place. Some of that Byzantine blues can be heard in the memorials for the dead conducted under the tolerant eye of the Greek Orthodox Church. As King writes: “Unlike the more dogmatic, less pliable Catholic Church, it practiced assimilation rather than annihilation of folk beliefs.” Jesus and the saints are invoked alongside Charon, the Homeric ferryman who conducts the dead across the river Styx to Hades.
Lament from Epirus is also a fascinating essay about the author’s contempt for contemporary society, especially as manifested in its synthetic and soulless music. Lament is a complaint on behalf of distinct local cultures that have been plowed under by the relentless advance of a global monoculture, shallow yet tenacious in its bid to monetize and trivialize human experience. And don’t get King started on electric guitars! The twang of catgut is music to his ears.
Lament from Epirus: An Odyssey into Europe’s Oldest Surviving Folk Music (W.W. Norton), by Christopher C. King
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