Upon reading this post by William Brafford, I immediately applied it to my feelings about participating in musical traditions, and found it resonates with those feelings:

"I find myself caught between traditions, and I often wish I could commit to one. In short, I find myself wishing I were a better partisan. When you’re a part of a tradition, you need to commit to it. When I satisfy my doubts about which political tradition I’m entitled to claim, I’ll join the struggle of hashing out the central conflicts of that tradition and arguing for its superiority over other traditions. But contributing to the growth of one’s tradition requires the virtue of proper confidence. We live in a world where many people lack that virtue."

This is part of the reason it's frustrating to be asked "what type of music do you play." I can say "Artful blues for the soul" like Don Campbell called our music, or I can say "Modern folk songs drenched in blues tradition," but few folks want to hear the long answer. They want me to give them a category or three and then leave me there. I have to have something to respond to that question with that sticks in yer head--but it's also got to be special to me, I've got to tell you something that I believe is as much of the whole truth as you're gonna get in under 30 seconds of my talking.

But let's un-digress: I grew up drinking in folk music from live performances and tape cassettes of musicians like Hobe Kytr and Dave Berge. That early influence dissovled without a trace as I listened exclusively to pop and rap music from ages 12 - 16, after which Bob Dylan hit me, and wasn't folk music wasn't really re-activated in my conscious brain until I discovered early rural blues music at age 17. From there I got into early Dixieland music while I was studying classical music in college. The music I make now draws on all of the above in various ways, and I can fit very few of my songs into any one of these genres comfortably.

All of which is to say that I, too, "find myself caught between traditions, and I often wish I could commit to [just] one." Of course, I won't give up any of the traditions that I draw on, not because I couldn't, but because it'd make me lose my deep love for music. The real meat of Brafford's quote comes when he talks of "contributing to the growth of one’s tradition"--I'll have to get to that in a later post.