Time Done Been Won't Be No More

by William Gay

[jamiereadthis]

I think William Gay at his best is William Gay talking about music, and William Gay using music to talk about every other thing. William Gay writing his way through Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music is the thing in my life I never knew I needed.

For anyone who loves to hear Gay spin his yarns, the ones that aren’t fiction are just about every bit as good as the ones that are. Both are found here, and both are worth this rare book, where Gay himself belongs right alongside the subjects he writes:

“In the end Johansen’s music seems to be saying that the world doesn’t change, only the guises it goes under, only the masks it wears. Appearance is nothing. The essentials remain. Love is still love, and loss is still loss. Death was ever death and will remain so. The dark is as black as it ever was, and the light is what you struggle toward, and that seems to matter as much to David Johansen as it did to Rabbit Brown or Harry Smith.”

Or, that sentence could add: William Gay.