Jim Blanchard’s “Kooky Country” changed my life, and it might change yours. It’s not quite the Harry Smith Anthology for 60s and 70s country, but it’s close enough, and will totally school you. Besides being an awesome party album capable of getting a bunch of adroit New York types jumping around like those mental patients in the Cramps video, the album put Roger Miller’s “My Uncle Used to Love Me but She Died” in context with his crazed hillbilly contemporaries. Mind-blowing. That guy’s probably the best pop lyricist of our last century.
