Excerpt

How places and sounds have vanished, taken uniqueness with them. I’ve seen it happen. As a social critical artist and teller of tales in modest settings—front rooms, back kitchens, open fields, public halls, and many low bars—I’ve always chosen itinerancy over comfort and security. I’ve been shifting across the earth’s surface for well over half a century now and doing it on the cheap: no soulless or chic hotels, no tourist venues for me. Just sleeping in open fields, or cars, or crumbling castles, or down-at-heel inns; crossing much of Europe on foot; lurking in unsavoury places; tasting life in French, German, English, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Polish, Greek and Turkish villages.

And believe me, we’ve lost a lot: virtuoso spoon players in English miner’s pubs; Bulgarian store-front bars where women sang in high-pitched traditional tones while their moustachioed lovers watched with cynical eyes; grim Hungarian back rooms where Gypsies played cimbaloms, violins, violas, bass fiddles while garlic fried on a hot plate; German villages where roads were unpaved, the sun heated sweet straw, and ruddy folk squeezed accordions; Austrian country inns where stranger-hating men tickled zithers: dusty French towns undisturbed by tourism where house facades were neglected and hurdy-gurdies whined of fallow fields; wooden cottages on shore-lapping North American lakes where men sawed at violins and bears snuffled around the vegetable patch; seaside villages where frame houses sagged and wind-pushed screen doors made music of another kind.

Those spoon players, the fine moustachioed men, the singers with their high-pitched tones, and the hurdy-gurdies have all vanished. Lakes are churned by speeding boats. European towns are bland and tidy, housing developments have spread like relentless fungi, and traditional musicians have been humiliated out by youths screaming, ‘Get modern.’