You Know That Song? (Veda Hille, Silver, 2002) ... played on accordion!

Way back in 2002, the offbeat music genius Veda Hille was commissioned by the Vancouver Folk Music Festival to cook up a song cycle in honour of its 25th installment, and she did not disappoint. While folk music, like all genres, is built incrementally on the shoulders of giants, it usually slows down to ingest one influence at a time before starting in chewing on another, but in this brilliant mash-up Hille threw a rapid sequence of all-time folk music classics into the blender and made an incredible Frankenstein out of identifiable chunks of them, fished out of their context and stitched together like Public Enemy's Bomb Squad production team stitching together Parliament and James Brown samples. For a layman as a song I don't know if it floats or sinks, but as a brilliant postmodern trick musicians can play on other musicians, it is second to none. I have memories of bringing it to a Creaking Planks practice and challenging us to do "this". The problem is, they pointed out, that she already had done so. Well, of course there are many ways to play this particular trick, but rather than rewriting her joke I just sat on it for a couple of decades and am now simply re-telling it straight and verbatim, for the benefit of those who forgot or never heard it in the first place. Folk festival season is approaching and we need to get into the right mindset.