“T]his is how American folk music works. Forgetting and disappearance are the engines of its romance. They are the motor of the will in the music to create characters, to insist on their mystery and to resist the impulse of society at large to turn the music into social science – or what the late Harlem critic Albert Murray called “social science fiction”.”

Griel Marcus, 2015, Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations.