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Friday, December 14, 2007 12:00 AM

Flirting with disaster

Will Amy Winehouse's self-destructive behavior make her a music legend -- or will it just kill her?

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  • Friday, December 14, 2007 08:59 AM

    What's enough?

    "Living it may not be enough?" Why did this get a star?

    "Had enough," who's apparently channelling Newt Gingrich (unless Gingrich is channelling him) does a good imitation of every bourgeois reverse-racist blues snob of the last eighty years. No convincing white blues players or singers?

    Literally impossible to list them all, but off the top of my head, and in approximate chronological order, there's Bix Beiderbecke, Jack Teagarden, Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Williams, the Delmore Brothers, the Kershaw Brothers, Eric Von Schmidt, early Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk (on Mississippi John Hurt: "He's been dead for thirty years, and he's in better shape now than I was then"), Geoff and Maria Muldaur, together and separately, Tracy Nelson, Paul Butterfield and all his friends, Charley Musselwhite, Tony Joe White, Stevie Winwood, Georgie Fame, early Joe Cocker, Leon Russell, Chris Smither, Anson Funderburgh, Rory Gallagher, The Allmans, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, The Dixie Dregs, Stevie Ray Vaughn, the list just goes on. Add your own, please. The mind boggles.

    Obviously, it's not who was first, it's what you do with it and where in the soul it comes from. Cultural cross-fertilization is what makes this country, and the world, great. Denying it, from the left or the right, is what makes it a pain.

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