I make, and give copies to Joe and Helena today, a CD of stuff I’ve been listening to lately. I haven’t made a various tunes tape (I still think of them as mix tapes) since the wedding CD, I think. Have I? Before that it was The Blues of Throwing It All Away in early 2002.

The big, big difference this time is the iPod, what gadget I won in that contest at TAUG in April. Making a playlist in iTunes and listening to that is the easiest thing in the world. Can add, delete, rearrange with the fewest of mouse clicks.

James McMurtry No More Buffalo really started the whole project, wanting to put that on a mix tape. There’s this really strangely moving and complicated idea in the third verse, where he talks about looking out across the plains and seeing “the dust of the [buffalo] herds still hovering in the air.” But somebody else points out that “those are combines kicking up that dust.” It’s just sad and cool all at the same time. “Man, they were here. They were here, I swear,” he sings.

So added to that were the basic songs I have in fact been listening to lately. Tom Waits Day After Tomorrow. Peter Case Ain’t Gonna Worry No More, Underneath the Stars, and Palookaville. Neko Case, oh a whole lotta songs from her. Bruce Springsteen Long Walk Home. Patty Griffin No Bad News and Poor Man’s House. Billy Bragg and Wilco from the Mermaid Avenue album, a song that took me a while to appreciate, but then really blossomed into a real favorite, The Unwelcome Guest.

So then I started looking for songs that fit with those, and I started looking for a title. I worked with a bunch of lyrics from No More Buffalo, from The Dust of the Herds to Those Are Combines Kicking Up That Dust. Never really found anything that would encompass what the whole mix seemed to be adding up to. But that was probably because the whole mix wasn’t adding up to much.

And one other problem was that, thinking about this with Joe and Helena in mind, the Peter Case and Neko Case songs were getting to be a problem. I had made them both single discs of each artist with a lot of my favorites on them. So I didn’t want to then give them any of the same songs again on this. So then I scrapped those songs. But then I still wanted to put lots of Peter Case and Neko Case on, so I had to go scrounging for more songs.

The Peter Case was a bit easier, in that he had a rather larger body of work. And it was after I added The Open Road Song to replace Underneath the Stars that I realized that a theme was in fact emerging from the rubble. Something rather political. Nothing grandly political, but small humanist personal political maybe. So looking for more political songs got me to add Billy Bragg Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards and Black 47 James Connolly. (Although those are more macro than micro, politics-wise.)

And then that started to work to rearrange the songs as well. No More Buffalo, which had been bouncing between being first and being last, moved more to the middle. And Poor Man’s House became the ending song. And with that the cover changed. I’d been playing with a great old picture of Buster Keaton. But I started thinking about the politics of poverty, and figured Walker Evans, something from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, would do the trick. Thus the picture of Allie Mae Burroughs. I’m not sure if in fact it’s in the book, but I found it online at the Met’s great website. Knew as soon as I saw it that it was the one.

Talking to Joe later, seems like I did maybe give him some of the same Peter Case and/or Neko Case. I had changed the playlists by the time I made CDs for Helena. I knew that I was giving him another copy of Joe Strummer Johnny Appleseed. But, what the hell. It’s Joe Strummer, and it’s political (if a bit obtusely so). And it’s skiffle. What more could you want in one song?

In the end, the whole message of the mix and of this season and of this life is in Poor Man’s House.

Mama says God tends to every little skinny sheep
So count your ribs and say your prayers and get to sleep
Nothing is louder to God’s ears than a poor man’s sorrow