Sunday, March 16, 2008

Calling the Neddie Jingo Irregulars....

Some few weeks ago, I found a site that was utterly astonishing in its thoroughness and attention to detail. It documented absolutely every bluegrass song in the Classic Bill Monroe/Stanley Brothers Canon, with painstaking notes on recording dates, how many times each song was recorded, by whom, down to Child Ballad number, if applicable.

I've just discovered it's disappeared. Somebody didn't renew a domain name, it appears. Now all I get is a generic Search page.

This is fucking devastating news for my book. I was using that bitch like toilets hadn't been invented. A more useful resource you could not possibly find.

I know there's such a thing as the Internet Archive. Nothing that has ever been posted has actually disappeared. (I know this through dire, dire experience.) But how do I operate it???

Help me, somebody!

The original URL for that site was http://www.bluegrassmessengers.com/master/

How can I get that stuff back? Musical History demands to be rescued!

And I will be eternally, pleasure-you-in-a-way-that-will-endanger-my-marital-vows kind of way, grateful...

Edit Next Morning: Turns out, as you Irregulars pointed out to me (and I thank you from the heart of my bottom), that I'd accidentally stumbled across notes belonging to Richard Matteson of the Bluegrass Messengers, toward a book of his own, Bluegrass Picker's Tune Book, published in 2006, which you can get here, and which I've already this morning ordered. I found the notes quite by accident when Googling the lyrics of "The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake" for my "Soul Butter" post a few weeks ago. No violation of copyright (or privacy) was intended, and for any information I gleaned from the notes, the book (not the web site) will be rigorously and properly cited. I did email the site's administrator when I found the notes, to ask about provenances and sources, but never heard back.

Speaking of copyright violations, in the course of the search for the foregoing, someone linked me to a copy of the book at books.google.com. I was slightly horrified to find that the entire book has been posted by Google. Not, as at Amazon and similar sites, the cover and a few representative pages, but the whole flippin' thing! Surely -- surely! -- that's got to be a copyright violation. I'd read about Google's project to make every book ever published available on the Net, but only now do I see the implications. Are we authors about to get the same ass-fucking that musicians get from file-sharing? Why charge money for a book ever again?

10 comments:

Derryl Murphy said...

Google "Bluegrass Messengers." Then, click on "Cached," which is beside the URL. That'll take you to all the text, although any pictures, sound files, etc are gonna be gone.

Also, if the first hit is the site you're talking about, then the email addy for the guy is richiemat@aol.com, which might be useful.

Hope that helps. We'll negotiate the pleasuring later.

D

Anonymous said...

One page of the site was cached in Google:
http://209.85.165.104/search?q=cache:ZVeqnti4TC0J:bluegrassmessengers.com/fiddle.html+bluegrassmessengers&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=2&gl=us&client=safari

On that page was an email contact link to:
richiematt@aol.com

Hope this helps!

Melani

Anonymous said...

Also found http://members.aol.com/bluegrsmessenger/

Email the webmaster Michael@MichaelBarber.net

Bob Crain said...

Try www.archive.org, and put the url into the search window.

I got a bunch of links that look like what you're looking for, here:

http://web.archive.org/web/*sr_31nr_10/http://bluegrassmessengers.com/*

- The Playboy Millionaire

BreadBox said...

Neddie,
I think that it may be a problem with the site which may be resolved without extra hassle: I just clicked on the link and got an index of files which looks like what you want.

N.

BreadBox said...

Neddie,
You don't have an email address on the site --- email me and I'll send you info on how to get the stuff you need.

N.

Anonymous said...

Seein' as I played on most of that shit I oughtta be able to fill you in. Drop a line.

Anonymous said...

Are we authors about to get the same ass-fucking that musicians get from file-sharing? Why charge money for a book ever again?

those of us in the legal research industry are feeling the pain, too. Google's out to publish for free everything that companies, like, for example LexisNexis, have been publishing for cash, for decades.

Anonymous said...

KC Constantine once wrote a book about a very bad guy who was trashing libraries because they handed out copies of his books FOR FREE!

Where does it end?, I ask. Where does it all end?

Ol' Pal D said...

...well, actually he said nothing, broken, mean-ass half-smile across his face. "Welcome to my world," he intoned, brows dark and wrinkled, the words escaping from his mouth like those little... individual... ass-pellets one finds himself dropping, painfully, after a particularly bad night.