house music

well, it's sunday, which means it's flea market day. i hope to post some lookings and listenings regularly, if the flea market gods are smiling down on me...
i don't usually look for records other than cheap 78's at the flea market, but occasionally something 33rpm will catch my eye. perhaps it is the recently felt magnetic pull of victorian era imagery - or perhaps a connection to the eames's interests in the aesthetics of folk americana circa franklin & jefferson times - but the cover of this folkways 10" sucked me into one more vinyl vortex...
ballads of the revolution sung by wallace house for the most part, unfortunately, feels like a poor man's cousin to john jacob niles and richard dyer bennet's kind of learned folk singer approach on similar recordings - and i have to say 7 of the 8 songs here on volume 2 don't do much for me. fortunately there's "the dying sergeant"; which i believe in the land of haunting performances must be considered a masterpiece. here, wallace house sounds like a broken man, an unschooled singer, and most miraculously he pulls off singing the word "america" as "ameri-que" several times, and it all sounds human, unaffected, tragic and tender.
click&listen to: the dying sergeant
p.s. you can get a cdr of the entire lp from smithsonian folkways