On a Monday night in October 2016, Chicago guitarist Ryley Walker set up in a tiny Athens club and played the kind of long, wandering songs that owe as much to Bert Jansch as to the Delta. This crate follows those roots back down: to shellac country blues, to a guitar magazine's tribute to the Scottish folk master, and out into the college town itself. You'll find a post-rock bootleg from the 40 Watt, a few stray snapshots of old Athens, and a monochrome DOS program that once taught chords to bedroom pickers. Put the tape on and start digging.
1
A matrix of mics and soundboard from Walker's Caledonia Lounge set, with Primrose Green, Sullen Mind, and The Roundabout stretched out in a room built for a hundred people. It's the sound of British folk and American Primitive picking colliding in a Georgia bar, which is exactly where this crate starts digging.
2
John Hurt's gentle thumb, Blind Lemon's loose Texas runs, Skip James's eerie flicker, and a 1929 Paramount where Blind Blake's guitar and patter ride alongside Charlie Spand's piano on Hastings Street. Every restless, rolling pattern Walker plays has a great-grandparent somewhere in this stack of shellac.
3
A grainy, nearly black-and-white tape of Godspeed You! Black Emperor filling Athens's legendary 40 Watt Club on the Yanqui U.X.O. tour in 2003. It's the same small-town circuit of sweaty rooms and long instrumental builds that Walker's band rolled through thirteen years later.
4
Tucked inside this 2017 Acoustic Guitar issue is a tribute to Bert Jansch, the atypical Scottish fingerstylist whose Blackwaterside and Jack Orion records haunt every bar of Primrose Green. Read it, then go back to the seed tape and hear the debt plainly.
5
No postcards turned up, so here's an honest little scrapbook instead: the marble plaque on Athens's famous Tree That Owns Itself, a towering 1960s cloud over town, and a portrait of Alonzo Church, who ran the University of Georgia for over thirty years. Odd snapshots, but they're the bones of the town the van pulled into.
6
Guitar Teacher 1.43 is a monochrome shareware chord tutor that would print you a chart if you asked nicely. Before YouTube lessons and open-tuning forums, this is how a kid in a college town might have worked out their first shapes.
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