I remember as a kid a big event was going downtown to the main flagship store of Toronto's landmark, Sam The Record Man. Three stories high plus a basement, and who knows how many square feet, all crammed full of more records than you could think possibly existed. They had everything and the people who worked there knew everything there was to know about records.
You have to remember this was in the days before the chain store or the franchise diluted the purchase of a record into a mere financial transaction. It was also the days before the birth of the small independent record stores that started to spring up in the mid seventies to meet the demands of the burgeoning independent scene fuelled by the punks, and then kept alive by the incredibly conservative nature of the major labels.
Record labels sprouted up in the backs of record stores around the world. On a trip to London in 1980 I carried demo tapes for a friend, which ended up in the hands of people running small record stores in Piccadilly with names like Rough Trade and Beggar's Banquet.
But I'm getting ahead of myself; rewind the tape back to Sam's four floors of music. The scrap heap of remaindered bargains in the basement, the maelstrom of madness that was the main floor's popular and classical music sections, the calmness of the second floor's, blues, jazz, and folk sections and the mystery of what exactly it was they sold on the third floor. Record stores were still magical places in those days that fed the imagination and gave you an education in nomenclature.
While I could understand the rationale behind the rock and classical music sections; opera obviously went with orchestral works, and The Beatles belonged in the same section as the Beach Boys and the Rolling Stones, the folk music section was awfully confusing.
As everyone who was even remotely with it knew, folk music meant people playing guitars and singing songs about important stuff like the war or politics. You know Arlo Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, and Joan Baez. So what were all these groups with the funny names that didn't sing in English doing crammed in side by each with them? What did some half naked smiling woman from Brazil have to do with Simon and Garfunkel? (The folk section was a revelation for an 11 year old boy in more ways then one I'll tell you; my first indication that Europeans and South Americans were a little more liberal then North America in their display of the female form was the covers of record albums on the second floor of Sam's in the folk section.)
Article comments
1 - dj earball
Thanks for the thoughtful article! I have long appreciated Putumayo, and learned a few new things from this piece. When I first was digging into "world music" I thought Putumayo was amazing. Actually, I still think so, though I now know much more and have become acquainted with some of the other fish in the sea. Putumayo does a great job at introducing listeners to new artists, but you won't find a great deal of diverse sounds within any single compilation. It's a very different approach from, say, World Music Network, whose Rough Guides often take a wider variety of tunes falling under the umbrella of a nation or a musical style. Not that one is right or wrong; they're just different approaches, and will appeal to different listeners. The curious will find both to be great jumping off points for further explorations in global sounds.