A Collapse of Time A vaguely nepotistic post about the power of the Internet

(that'd be Don Maddox...and my dad.)

So...as a general rule of journalism, one doesn't write about relatives. And yet, this story is so compelling to me that I feel I have to break that rule this One Time. Many of you probably know my step-dad, Jerry Faires, one of Santa Fe's finest bards and troubadours (both at once, he sings *and* does spoken word, that crafty devil.) Well, this time around, Dad got himself into a major collapse of time when he inadvertently used the Internet to hook up himself up to a childhood hero - without even trying. Here goes the story:

I think I'll go back down to Texas
A pilgrimage, yes, I suppose
I'd like to turn on that old car radio
And hear Maddox Brothers & Rose.

- lyrics by Jerry Faires.

in 1993, at the height of the indy music revolution, I happen to hit on a crazy idea that I should start a record label. At the time, the idea ran that record labels were documenters of a scene - as a music journalist for my local newspaper, I was already documenting the scene, but was I helping others to lay down tracks for the sake of posterity? I was not. And so I decided to start a label - and obviously, my first choice for an "unsigned, unrecorded artist" was invariably my Dad.

Think back to life fourteen years ago, my friends, when having a record really meant that you either had someone believing in you or you *really* believed in yourself...it wasn't like today, when anyone (including me!) has a disk full of tracks on-hand. No, "making a record" really meant you were giving your career a big push back then, and when I approached my Dad with the idea that yes, he too could make a record and put it on CD and release it like a major label recording artist, he was really quite thrilled. And it didn't surprise me in the least when he decided that the first track on the album was going to be "Maddox Brothers & Rose." (right-click to download MP3 to your desktop.)

I had grown up hearing the song. I had very little idea of what it was about. To me, the act in the title track was simply some kind of Grand Ol' Opry band that Dad had listened to as a kid - though by osmosis, I had almost been listening to them as well, everytime I heard his song about them, a quiet and understated tune about life in the Texas 40s and 50s, before TV and before rock'n'roll, a quieter simpler time that I would never really know no matter how many stories I heard about it...

The truth of the matter was that Maddox Brothers & Rose had been a seminal act of the hillbilly music scene of the '30s, '40s, and '50s, back when country music was called "hillbilly" music and rockabilly hadn't happened yet. The act was comprised of brothers Cliff, Fred, Henry, Don, Cal, and Bud, along with younger sister Rose Maddox, who together enjoyed nationwide popularity before they broke up in the late 1950s. Like many acts of the era, they were "gone but not forgotten," with their recordings appearing on a number of Arhoolie anthologies throughout the 1960s.

Fast forward to the year 2000 - I'm in a dot-com office building in downtown Providence, Rhode Island, discovering MP3s and a site called MP3.com. I pull out Dad's first record from my one-shot record label and "rip" the MP3s from the disc, then upload them to a page just for my Dad. I build him a little profile and forget about the whole thing.

Fast forward to the year 2007 - the phone rings at my Dad's place. A man named Don Maddox is on the telephone. His grandson downloaded a copy of "Maddox Brothers & Rose" from the Internet somewhere, and tracked Jerry down via google. He's eighty-three years old and he just called to say he really liked the song and wanted to talk to the man who wrote it. Long conversations ensued, and just last month, my Dad drove out to Ashland, Oregon to play a house concert for Don Maddox and his family, featuring the not-so-hit but still very dear song "Maddox Brothers & Rose" for the assembled throngs.

As my dad put it so eloquently, "Listen up, bubba, if you and me is still so spry at 83 as Don Maddox, we'll be lucky folks." The performers included my Dad and Don Maddox, who learned to play his instrument when his momma handed it to him and pushed him onto a stage during the Great Depression - playing fiddle to an old-timey song about him and his kin.

When you think about the Internet, and all the absurd connections it has created in the past fifteen years - many of my best friends (honestly) are people I met on or through the 'Net, and I personally maintain what might have been minor threads of a friendship with dozens of people around the world - there's still something mighty special about someone writing a song to some personal heroes, and then meeting that person through an innocuous download. I suppose I should stump a bit about file-sharing, but I'll leave that to other folks. Connections made and time collapsed in Ashland and Old Santa Fe.

PS: Though I abandoned "Silversmith Records" (the label,) Dad did not. He proceeded to release a number of other records, including the latest one, called "Radio," an excellent compendium of song and story. We made up a thousand copies of that first record, called "Dogs Bark...the Caravan Moves On," and though it's taken fourteen years, there are just three copies left from the original release. By comparison, "Radio" was released less than a year ago and 400 copies have already sold. That is - Silversmith Records actually turns a profit - a relative rarity for independent publishing anywhere.