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When my friend T-Bone Burnett (center above) first proposed to Robert Plant and Alison Krauss that they do an album together, all he had in hand was that they were both great singers who respected each-other. When he began sending them tunes to consider recording, they both had to confront the fact that he was asking them to stretch across the traditional genres (Blues for Plant and Country for Krauss) that they had inhabited for years. The success of Raising Sand(Triple Platinum) speaks for itself.

But what’s really interesting is how their current tour is forcing the audience to cross these lines as well. A review from last night’s first New York show, demonstrates the dialectic.

Things closed in an elegiac manner with “Your Long Journey,” the tune that ends the album. Miller strummed a plaintive autoharp as Plant and Krauss entwined their voices like two sides of a story being told at the same time. After gently caressing the Doc Watson ballad of love, loss and eternity, they reluctantly relinquished their hold on the audience members, who were left to begin adjusting their concepts of what American musical traditions can mean in the 21st century, especially when they’re re-imagined by a British hard-rock king and a bluegrass-pop crossover queen.

This strange mixing of the coutry music of Appalachia and the blues of the Mississippi Delta is an eye opener for a lot of people including Robert Plant. In an interview with the Guardian a few weeks ago, he describes a tour bus stop on their progress into Tennessee.

Poking his head into a family restaurant, he saw “a 10-year-old, porky little kid with a hat on, playing fiddle like you wouldn’t believe, with a 16-year-old, 6ft 4in kid with a banjo, and the two of them were just standing on this little raised dais, while people were eating catfish, and they were just wailing. Why did I only think that Howlin’ Wolf wailed?”

Why indeed? I’ll try not to stretch the analogy, but it seems to me that the plaintive wail of poor people’s music crosses racial boundaries, in the same way that working class politics should cross racial boundaries. If Barack Obama can reach those Alison Krauss listeners, he will build a permanent Democratic Majority.

This could get interesting-Dennis Kucinich has demanded a recount of the New Hampshire Primary “Mr. Kucinich’s letter cited “unexplained disparities between hand-counted ballots and machine-counted ballots.”  Salon’s reporter is skeptical, but thinks the recount should go on. Needless to say, Obama would have the most to gain as the hand count precincts (and the exit polls) had Obama ahead. Only the Diebold Computer counted precincts went in Hillary’s favor. I doubt this is the incident of Diebold’s notorious vulnerability to hacking that many investigators have been looking for, but its critical the hand count go on.

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The Packers this afternoon were like the Pack of Lombardi’s era: Pure execution. Run to Daylight.

 One question, can some football historian tell me which NFL star was the first to introduce the “Rasta” haircut? Bob Marley would surely be smiling.

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What’s up with Country Music? On my way home from the pool this morning, I was flipping through the radio channels and came to what I thought was the country music station, but for the next ten minutes I listened to music that would not have been out of place on any “easy listening station”. Everybody sounded like old Eagles records or sappy piano based ballads. Of course I’m old school and the best moment for me in Country Music was when my friend T Bone Burnett won the Grammy for Oh Brother, Where Art Thou. This huge success (15 million CD’s sold, I think) spawned a genre more to my taste called Alt. Country. But the old Country radio stations would never really play it. It would have been one thing if they had played the old classics like George Jones and Tammy Wynette, but this mellow country stuff is dreck.

BTW-T Bone’s new Record with Robert Plant and Alison Krauss-Raising Sand is amazing. Is it country? Who cares? Its beautiful.