Are you writing of yourself? Barely that. Of music? Barely that.
If I call them the oldest songs, the obscurest songs, it is to set them into a past that did not occur. Songs out of phase with time, songs that seem to repeat in their lyrics, in their old-time sound, what was never recorded, not even in Harry Smith's anthology. And even that phrase: old time music seems to miss them.
Old time, the wearing out of time - the past, now, is not an archive with an origin, with delimitable boundaries. There are no genres, and not even singers - only parts of song and half-remembered performances, only unrecorded records and the forgetting that wiped out memory in advance.
Will Oldham, how is it that you were older than time? How is it that you wiped time out? Perhaps because it was the name Will Oldham you wanted to wipe out, as surely as Bill Callahan wanted the word Smog whispered when he placed parentheses around it. Namelessness: it's the songs that matter, says Will Oldham, not Will Oldham. Hence his changing names. How to call yourself nothing at all? How to drive away the name from music?
Old time: what returns with Will Oldham is what never occurred. How did he dream up his old wierd America? How did that America dream itself in him? The oldest songs, the obscurest songs: how is it you weren't recorded until now? Because they are older than time, and older than memory. Was it forgetting that dreamt of you, Will Oldham? Was it oblivion that gave itself your name?
Around the grit that finds itself by chance in an oyster's shell can form the pearl that is made of the inside of that shell. Alien particle, outside inside, how did you find you way into the heart of Will Oldham? Because what grew there was a pearl; what was dreamed there were songs too old for memory. Remember, heart, that splinter around which you came to yourself.
But that remembering is too strong for one man, and Will Oldham is a horde, not a man. Half-beast, animal half changed into man, how can you sing of what was always forgotten. Animal-songs, songs of wolf and lepoard, Will Oldham is a crowd, not a man. He falls asleep; the animals wake up. And when they sleep, he wakes up. Another America is waking with him. Old America, oldest America, archive of parts of beasts and parts of songs, how is it you stir yourself in him, Will Oldham? Because he is made of the old, wierd America; it is what turned itself out to make him. And will it turn itself inside out again? Will it leave him, Will Oldham? Will it strand him and strand us on the beach of the present?
Do not place your faith in names. The songs, not the singer. Unrecorded recordings, unmade, unmakeable albums: how is it that your best work has never been heard? Because it is what unworks itself in your recordings, what turns them aside from every ear. Refusal: the songs retreat; they hide themselves in the past. Somewhere, far away, they are becoming animals again. Somewhere they are howling and running in the forests of the night.