TAV FALCO (himself)
AND THE unapproachable
PANTHER BURNS
INTERVIEW
by Igor (Nov 29, 2002- Belgrad)
W
(About your being in Delta)

The blues are many things to many people. I mean, there's different kinds of blues, you know. There's a sad blues, celebration blues, and heavy emotions and conditions in celebrating the blues. So, in Delta blues, you have particular kind of … a sort of spirituality, because it's all about the land. In the Delta, you have a long tracks of flatland by the river. There's not a lot of relief, and lot of this land was cleared for many years for the further cultivaiton of cotton… you don’t have a lot of protection from the elements, you don't have many places to hide, a kind of wide open territory. Everywhere you look, you see evidence of share croppers - the men who are living in the blues, hardworking in the fields, and their hardship shacks. So then, there's a kind of loneliness, a kind of loss, an exploitation in life. Confined to the land , and the plowing & planting & harvesting of the earth, and working all your life for the boss man, there was stil l time for celebration, however, forlorn. Celebrating by picking a guitar or a banjo or whatever instrument a man could get his hands on or fashion out of a piece of cane bamboo, if necessary. Blues started as a holler, an utterance, a howl, then became a song... of loving a woman or unlucky in love, of winning a crap shoot, or of loosing money in a fit of gambling, or losing a daughter drowned in a flood, or a husband who was hanged for looking funny at a white woman. There is no limit to the kinds of blues that a man or woman can sing. In a fatal kind of way, there is no escape from the delta and the farming hill country surrounding it. It's difficult to get out of there. You have to drive a long distance, or you have to go out on the road and walk… Men, walking by the road… Many people used to dream to ride the train out of there… And the train became a symbol. And the sound of train became an aural symbol of the blues. Sound of the wheels on the tracks… And the train became of symbol of travel to unknown… People who worked on the trains were celebrated by the bluesman. Engineers and the brakemen… and it was a good job at those days. If you worked on the railroad, you were part of society, of the new technology, and you went places... to the cities & the bright lights & hot & cold running water & flushing toilets, & you enough earned money for big dice games & smart, pretty city girls… So, the train became a very important symbol of the blues… of escape, of romance.…