An Introduction to This Sound Recording, by Alexander Gelfand, Ph.D Any serious consideration of American folk music must eventually grapple with at least two thorny questions. First, precisely who are these mysterious "folk?" Are they the simple, rural inhabitants of our nation's long-forgotten past—barefoot, unlettered, yet mysteriously drawn to rhyming epics about train wrecks, alcoholism, and infanticide? Second, have the wholesome songs that once poured from their toothless, impoverished mouths—the ballads and ditties that informed and educated, edified and entertained—also been consigned to the dustbin of history? Wonder no more. For as the music on this album so ably demonstrates, the "folk" in question are us. We are them. They are, in effect and inter alia, the same people we are. And their music—or rather, our music, the music that belongs to both us and them, we and they—lives on. Who among us, for example, has not woken up wearing someone else's trousers in the backseat of a powder-blue Chevette ("Last Night I Hit the Bottle"), or considered sticking a penknife, long and sharp, into a baby's skull ("Weilia Waila")? And who would not be shaken by a temperance song such as "Last Night I Hit the Bottle," with its dire warnings of the dangers of demon rum? Or stirred to their core by a sacred song of devotion such as "The Holy Ground," whose very title speaks to the staunch faith and upright moral character of those seafaring Irish immigrants upon whose backs were built these United States? (One cannot help but notice the presence on this album of yet another song whose roots can be traced to foreign shores: "Teenage Kicks," by the Irish group The Undertones, a collective that drew early inspiration from the presumably Latin folk ensemble, The Ramones. One could not ask for a better musical illustration of the great American melting pot.) And so the grand tradition of American folk music continues—music that touches us in our secret places, moving us in ways unimagined by the vacuous teenyboppers and salacious hip-hoppers whose clangorous "chart-toppers" dominate the barren wasteland of contemporary popular culture. They are not us. We are not them. And yet, thanks to Tangleweed, we got ours. Who could ask for anything more?