One of the plus points of doing more long distance driving is that I listen to more talk radio. There are some quite interesting programmes on LBC in the early evening on Sundays. On Sunday night Anita Dobson was selecting her favourite records. She included Ketty Lester�s Love Letters which I have sometimes thought might have something to do with Saturday Sun. Then she moved onto Jackie Wilson�s Higher and Higher explaining that it could always give her a lift. I heard it with post Standing in the Shadows of Motown ears � wondering if James Jameson was moonlighting on bass and savouring how the two rhythm guitars blended before the brass came in..

The next programme was an interview with the author of a new biography about Stalin - Simon Sebag Montefiore. He has had access to more data about his subject than any other writer � and has come up with a widely praised account of how the Communist elite saw the world. For example they had an unusual view of the relative value of the purpose of history and individual lives, even where the lives in question belonged to people they knew well, progress (and their own interests) came first.

I thought James might really enjoy it and I mentioned it in an e-mail to him today.

But I know he is overwhelmed by the reading lists that have been given him for his course. He has just been given his first essay assignment for his course on social and political history between 1500 and 1700. It�s a really interesting question about how society appears to contemporary members versus the historians overview. I have resisted weighing in � obviously. His first supervision is tomorrow.

Then later on, on Radio 3, as a variation on this theme, there was a fascinating programme about the history of the Delta Blues � about how ideas about the Delta Blues phenomenon were formed in NYC after World War Two. The prime culprit was a collector who lived in Brooklyn by the name of James McKune. Apparently he was the first person to start collecting old 78s of solo blues artists and field recordings. Quite quickly he gathered a network of like minded people who became known as the Blues Mafia.

They began to reissue their recordings in the early 60s some of which I must have got to here as a teenager. It is surprising that an interest in that kind of music diffused so rapidly across the Atlantic to (for example) West London. The US historian who has looked into this thinks that these early collectors created an influential mythology of the blues which is out of kilter with what historians now understand about how the music really existed in society � the myth was inspired by the power of the music. Eno mentioned that sounds bring a cultural inheritance. This story says that sometimes we may infer an inaccurate cultural inheritance to certain sounds.

Collectors like Lomax were, apparently, concerned to preserve the purity of the indigenous Negro music before it was lost by the forces of modernisation. In that sense they sound like Vaughn Williams and his chums collecting rural folksong in the UK. Why not mix the two?

McKune first heard the country blues when he was working in a record shop in the early 1930s. When McKune died in the early 70s he was living in the same building that the New York Dolls started and which became the avant garde music centre known as the Kitchen. He was probably killed by a stranger in a random encounter on the Lower East Side. Its hard to keep the romanticism out of this stuff!

And how might we reinterpret �Poor Boy� under this rubric? If as Radio 3 suggests, McCune�s creation of the mythology of the Delta Blues was influenced by the loneliness and alienation of his urban life?

I mailed Robin with the URL on the R3 website where this talk can be played but I got bounced out of her address. This is the URL:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/playlists/sundayfeat.shtml?focuswin

There�s a sequel next week at the same time.

Art news. White Panther inspired Detroit born video artist Mike Kelley has worked a lot with an artist called Peter McCarthy who has a show in the UK opening soon in a Grade 2 listed building on Picadilly designed by Edwin Lutyens, grand Edwardian architect, on Picadilly. Kelly and McCarthy�s idea of how art might work is about as far from Lutyens as you can get.

I heard Dancing Queen and then Knowing You Knowing Me in the pub tonight. They sounded like masterpieces from a distant era.

As Abba played, I was reading �Give My Regards to Eighth Street� � the collection of Morton Feldman�s writings. Cage and Feldman would drink late in the early 1950s in the Cedar Bar in Greenwich Village with the AbsEx pioneers. �The new painting made me desirous of a sound world more direct more immediate more physical than anything that existed heretofore. Varese had elements of this. But he was too �Varese�.�