I have been stocking up on music via the NY Public Library's Freegal service. I get 3 free songs a week, which I've used to choose musicians that I don't often know much about. That's how I got turned on to Elizabeth Cook, for example, who's now one of my favorites.
This weekend I also shelled out cold cash for:
* Rosanne Cash's latest, The River and the Thread. The deluxe edition, at that, since I love that Jesse Winchester song "Biloxi."
* A compilation called Hard Times Come Again No More: Early American Rural Songs of Hard Times and Hardships. I love the eponymous Stephen Foster song & every once in a while I check if there's a version of that song that I don't have. That's how I found this album. It has a bunch of people I already knew, like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Barbecue Bob, along with some songs I haven't heard for years: "Starving to Death on a Government Claim" and "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live."
* A Dixon Brothers comp, How Can a Broke Man Be Happy?. They're a South Carolina duo of mill workers, Dorsey & Howard. Dixon wrote "Wreck on the Highway," which Roy Acuff stole (& paid up later). Not sure if he wrote a song I used to play: "Sales Tax on the Women," which is on this record. The chorus: "1 cent, 2 cent tax, that's how my money goes a'spending. Take off my hat & hit me with a bat if they put a sales tax on the women."