Today in the NYR Online, Karen Solie remembers the time she took a guitar, a “lime-green cardboard suitcase,” “travelers’ cheques, a mickey of vodka,” and three volumes of poetry with her on a Greyhound bus to Austin, Texas, where she hoped to play music and “to start my life.”

Driven by a desire to sing harmonies and protected by the grace of strangers, she arrives in a city teeming with artists. “This was a long time ago, the 1990s,” Solie notes. “Those days of foreign film series and weird art shows, of listening to Townes Van Zandt, Gram and Emmylou, Neil Young, The Band, honkytonk and Delta blues, sitting on the floors of cheap apartments with shared bathrooms.”

Below, alongside Solie’s essay, we have compiled a selection of writing from the archives about lonesome American music.

Karen Solie
Harmony

You can practice a song a thousand times and still its first note sends you into the unknown.

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Geoff Mann
Whose Country?

It is impossible to talk about the blues, country, or where the two might overlap without talking about race, authenticity, and contemporary America’s relationship to its past.

—November 23, 2023

Sean Wilentz
Bob Dylan, Historian

Across the six decades of his career, the singer-songwriter has mined America’s past for images, characters, and events that speak to the nation’s turbulent present.

—June 19, 2021

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David Hajdu
The Royal Blues

“Her music is fiery, uncompromising, and devoid of self-pity. Washington, who made dozens of albums before she died from an overdose of prescription drugs in December 1963, was a rarity among singers, male or female, in the popular music of her era: an unflinching, even merciless figure who was also sensual and musically sophisticated.”

—June 23, 2005

Geoffrey O’Brien
Recapturing the American Sound

“Geographically the performers come predominantly from the American South—from Lake Providence, Louisiana, to Burton’s Fork, Kentucky—but also from as far afield as Los Angeles, St. Paul, and Cincinnati. They worked as, among other things, coal miners, ministers, carpenters, mill hands, tenant farmers, and, yes, cowboys. Many were professional or semi-professional musicians, traveling with medicine shows or performing on the street. What these recordings capture is not the folklore of private pastime but the repertoire of public performance.”

—April 9, 1998

Margot Hentoff
The You and Me That Used to Be

“Looking back, I am aware that much of my life took place to music as if it were a film with a score: phonograph or radio interminably on, conversations held under the sound of music because sometimes when there was no music and we were driving or sitting around or drinking in a bar, an awkward silence hovered. Something necessary was missing. Things did not go on well without music.”

—November 4, 1971