The articles “The Day Kennedy Was Shot” and “When We Were Good” reminded me of the tendency we all develop as we grow older, and not necessarily wiser: nostalgia. We speak of our childhoods, our musical idols, our movie gods as if no one ever had any before us. And maybe they did not have such things to reminisce about as we do, but everyone certainly has something or someone over which, or whom, to wax nostalgic. My childhood event was the Challenger explosion. I remember watching the replay, as it must have been a replay because I recall knowing the explosion was going to happen and feeling dread in my stomach. One of my students told me recently that after I mentioned it in response to her paper over 9/11, that she asked her brother, ten years her senior and my age, what it was all about. For the first time, my response to this was not an internal eye roll, but more of an understanding that time moves on and my historical benchmarks are, in fact, historical and fade into history books as they fade out of the culture’s very short span of attention. They stay in my mind, just as Marcus’ first listen to Bob Dylan.
On the subject of nostalgia, does a desire for some dreamt of past influence us to search for the folk? With nostalgia, we imagine a more pure past, with minstrels instead of recording artists. That is the place the Lomaxes intended to keep Leadbelly, in his prison past, confined in his prison work clothes, singing for their supper. What is nostalgia to the study of folklore? What is nostalgia to the study of Bob Dylan? ;)
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