“He was wearing a maroon tank top, orange-and-pink pants, blue Crocs, and a pink Boston Red Sox cap, with ‘cam’ and ‘odia’ scrawled on either side of the ‘B.’”
The New Yorker published an article about Will Oldham the other week.It’s good, however short. I gather they couldn’t get much out of him. I wonder if they meant to zing him by calling him “The Pretender.” Regardless, I’ve been listening to my Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy albums all weekend and I’m better for it.
I liked this bit:
On Thursday night, he had called up Joe’s Palm Room, a venerable and predominantly African-American establishment, and asked, “Do y’all have music tonight?” The answer was no.
“Do you want some?”
No.
“So if we came down there with some instruments and played some music, would you like that?”
No.
“For free?”
Eventually, the staff had consented to let Oldham and his band play, or, at any rate, consented not to stop them from playing. A few fans managed to track him down, but many of the people in the audience had no idea that they were watching one of Louisville’s most celebrated residents, and Oldham seemed proud to have won over a few skeptics. His favorite review came from a regular patron who had been moved to shout, “Sing that shit!”
Comments
Everyone! This is from Dustin, who emailed it to me, so I’m posting it here:
that was interesting. i liked it. it would be hard to do a story on him.
i didn’t take ‘the pretender’ as a dig so much as an honest attempt at naming all that artifice he has going on. on page 3 they talk about bonnie prince charlie, the “pretender to the english throne” which is partially where the name comes from. and that kind of a pretender is claiming to have rights to some sort of throne, and the reference to the title of the merle haggard article from back then “ornery”, maybe he’s the pretender to that throne. but yeah also that he was so interested in acting and makebelieve when he was younger and so on.
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