Elegy vs Eulogy [View all]
Makes a nice title but Hillbilly ... is neither. An Elegy is a poem. It expresses sorrow at the departure of someone. A Eulogy is prose. It praises the recently past. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/elegy-vs-eulogy-difference-usage
It is good to know that being a crack baby might not be as bad as expected and environment has more long term effect on development. https://www.npr.org/2010/05/03/126478643/crack-babies-twenty-years-later
But then JD has gone on and on about his environment and drugs. Way to project Bro.
As far as JD and his throwing everyone under the bus goes, he apparently never heard the bluegrass, the mountain music was just not in him. His tastes may not be entirely off, https://slate.com/technology/2024/07/jd-vance-spotify-playlist-analysis-trump-vp.html
but Donald Vance doesn't seem to connect with the deep roots of Hillbilly culture. I don't think he ever flat footed, clogged or did a Virginia Reel to live music. He might have understood that there are those who found their high by listening and playing complex rhythms with mandolins and banjos weaving patterns while a high lonesome voice spoke of outrages perpetuated.
Mule Skinner Blues, perhaps the first Bluegrass song, speaks strongly about the evil of taking advantage of white privilege. While country music has perhaps cleaned up "The Cotton Eyed Joe" which is now about a womanizing handsome white musician, it used to be a warning about what happened when the white daughter of a slave owner fell in love with a blind, black musician. The woman in the song regrets the loss of love and wonders what happened to the blind musician and suspects that only her father knows.
If you learn only Country Music and never hear it's roots in the Old Time Music or songs in the same tradition, you might come up with a philosophy much like James Donald Bowman's.
If he knew the music, he might have understood the culture and he might have known what an Elegy was. I don't blame his editor, I suspect his editor was well worn down by an unreasonable client and ready to say, "Whatever."