Cities like Cincinnati or Nashville are like the corner and edge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. You can start with them and see how they connect into the more rural areas around them.
I love puzzles, I do one every day, often more than one. Generally it’s something that takes 20-40 minutes and can be finished in the morning before I get to whatever tasks I have. Right now I’m on a Sudoku kick.
As I was thinking about what to write in this particular blog post and how my life lately has had a lot of puzzles in it (the normal kind you find in a newspaper), I thought that maybe it was time for me to post something completely unrelated to Dollar Country here. As this was rolling over in my brain I realized that it is completely related because Dollar Country is just a huge puzzle that never ends.
Just recently I learned about the type of sudoku pictured above called Clueless Sudoku. It’s a huge 27×27 square that contains 9 separate puzzles but the interior square of each of those forms another interconnected Sudoku. This is the exact sort of thing I love, when you can really dig in and have a puzzle last multiple hours or even days. It feels like when you watch a movie then watch it with commentary and then watch the making-of documentary, it just keeps rewarding you on something you really want to learn about. This is big for a puzzle, but small compared to Dollar Country.
DC is like finding puzzle pieces in the real world and you know they have pieces that fit with them but you don’t know where are what they look like. One piece was in a thrift store in rural Virginia and a connecting piece was sent to me by a collector in Canada, how did these pieces end up so far away? The answer to the puzzle exists somewhere or perhaps some-when, mostly. When I find these records and research them I’m finding pieces of history and the people who made them are connected to each other in vast web that spans time and space but you have to research to find out how because it all happened 40+ years ago.
In that way I’ve dedicated my whole life to an unending, unfinishable puzzle. Eventually I’ll find enough pieces to put together some sort of idea of what happened in the past with all this music, but the whole story will never be known because it exists in the minds of millions of different people, many of whom are dead. The self-released 45 by someone in Berea Kentucky and an LP put out on a label from Louisville end up having the same backing band. The local record mogul in Lexington was the producer. Now, with just a few records, a picture starts to form about a community of musicians who knew and played with each other. It may turn out that one of them has a brother who also had a country career and released a few things in Cincinnati, now we’ve got another part of our puzzle coming into focus, and we can connect it a hundred other things through that city’s rich history of records and music.
Cities like Cincinnati or Nashville are like the corner and edge pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. You can start with them and see how they connect into the more rural areas around them. Hundreds of artists from Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky got their records pressed and/or released in Cincinnati and so the web of this puzzle and of history itself fills out and we get a clearer picture of it.
Dollar Country’s goal is to not only have the puzzle pieces but to try and lay it out in a way for other people to see it and add their own pieces. I’ve been adding dates and locations to records in the database and in the future I want to be able have maps that you can interact with by year. So if you set it to 1965 there will be points in the USA where records were released by artists in the database, settings to show you where those records were pressed and where those artists were from, and hopefully we will get a visual picture of how these tiny communities fit into bigger regional communities of artists and music.
Dollar Country is a puzzle with no end, but my hope is that we can have some cool pictures to look at even if we’re missing pieces.
