Side A
Artist	Song
The Clash	Know Your Rights
The Sundays	Summertime
September 67	Lucky Shoe
Boston Camerata with the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community	Father James's Song
Johnny Cash	Folsom Prison Blues
Patti Smith	Gone Again
Radiohead	High and Dry
Squirrel Nut Zippers	The Interlocutor
Morphine	French Fries With Pepper
Herbie Hancock	Chameleon
September 67	Poor Boy
Soul Coughing	Lazybones
Side 2
Sleater-Kinney	Dig Me Out
Beastie Boys	Funky Boss
James Brown	(I'm a) Greedy Man (Pt 1)
Aretha Franklin	Think
Beck	Today Has Been a Fucked Up Day
Johnny Cash	Rowboat
Booker T and the MGs	Soul Dressing
Patti Smith	Beneath the Southern Cross
PJ Harvey	Maniac
Radiohead	Subterranean Homesick Alien
Squirrel Nut Zippers	Hell
Soul Coughing	Disseminated
Prince	The Human Body
Radiohead	Bulletproof (I Wish I Was...)
Jeff Buckley	Corpus Christi Carol
Side B
Artist	Song	Buy
Soul Coughing	Super Bon Bon
Beck	Rowboat
The Sundays	Folk Song
Digable Planets	Black Ego
Radiohead	Planet Telex
Sleater-Kinney	Little Babies
Soul Coughing	4 out of 5
Lyle Lovett	Penguins
James Brown	Night Train
David Byrne	Fuzzy Freaky
PJ Harvey	Somebody's Down, Somebody's Name
Elvis Costello and the Attractions	Beyond Belief
September 67	Giant
Side 4
Johnny Cash	Delia
Beck	Fourteen Rivers, Fourteen Floods
Daniel Lanois with Emmylou Harris	Shenandoah
Radiohead	Fake Plastic Trees
Boston Camerata with the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community	Mother Ann's Song
James Brown	Grits
Squirrel Nut Zippers	Put a Lid On It
Radiohead	My Iron Lung
Digable Planets	Dial 7 (Axioms of Creamy Spies)
Radiohead	Let Down
Patti Smith	Dead to the World
Soul Coughing	Sleepless
U2	If You Wear That Velvet Dress
September 67	Bring Back the Weight

Comment:

This mix was recorded in September 1997, in preparation for our post-wedding road trip through the western part of Virginia, across Tennessee to Memphis and Graceland, and into the North Carolina Smokies to visit my grandmother who was unable to come to the wedding. Accordingly it's long (two 100 minute cassettes) and a little all over the map.

The emphasis was on up tempo (well, for me, anyway) and on "folk," "American," or the journey. With a few nervous notes poking through here and there as I had last minute pre-wedding jitters.

About some of the more obscure tracks and bands:

"Know Your Rights": "This is a public service announcement...with guitar!" I wish I knew then what I know now about how badly our rights could be trampled or I would have saved this one. In 1997 we weren't too bad off.
September 67 - Short-lived band featuring Shannon Worrell (see her other songs on my mix tongue tuned to the undersong) and Kristin Asbury, recorded by David Lowery of Cracker. The band did one album and a few shows on the Lilith Fair tour (and contributed a song to the live soundtrack album). Most of the songs are really closely tied to the Charlottesville area or Virginia in general. "Lucky Shoe" opens with "Welcome to Barboursville, the ruins there upon that hill/Hold still for Jefferson/His ghost is there, his ghost has won/My heart..." The closing song on the last side, "Bring Back the Weight," is a song dedicated to Worrell's former bandmate Lauren Hoffman, which opens, "Little rock and roller/Your soul is too old for America..."
Boston Camerata and the Sabbathday Lake Shaker community - Joel Cohen took his Camerata and another Boston group out to this, one of the last surviving enclaves of Shakers, to learn and record some of the traditional Shaker music before it passed along with the Shakers from the earth. "Father James' Air" is a wordless hymn of praise said to have been composed by the movement's founder after he was flogged for heresy.
"Gone Again": All the songs from Patti on this mix are from her comeback "Gone Again"; most are strongly folk influenced, the exception being this shamanistic song.
"Today Has Been a Fucked Up Day" - Beck with a four-track and a banjo, recorded well before "Loser."
"Rowboat" - two versions of this song on the mix, Johnny Cash's cover and Beck's original. Beck's version is actually more strongly "country," with a pedal steel lead, but Cash's is more intelligible.
Digable Planets, "Black Ego" - Whatever happened to Digable Planets? Their second album sunk like a lead balloon, is what. This is unfortunate, as tracks like "Black Ego" combine far left wing revolutionary rap with hypnotic jazz grooves. "Do you wish to waive your right to remain silent?" "Hell yes!" In the same vein as the Clash's "Know Your Rights"...
PJ Harvey, "Somebody's Down, Somebody's Name" - Both the PJ songs here are b-sides circa "To Bring You My Love." This one is a monster, an apocalyptic blues with a vicious guitar riff.
"Delia" - The classic murder ballad as envisioned by Johnny Cash in the mid-90s. "She was low-down and triflin', she was cold and mean/Kind of evil makes me want to grab my sub-machine/Delia's gone, one more round, Delia's gone."
"Fourteen Rivers, Fourteen Floods" - If the other Beck songs were goof-offs, this one is the real thing, Beck channelling Robert Johnson for some honest to God Delta blues. From the K Records release "One Foot in the Grave."

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