Shop small, they say, backed by a brief national marketing campaign, signage, slogans, all the rest. Yes, please. Please support small business, what's left of it, for I am a serial entrepreneur, married into a bookstore/coffeeshop located in a small town in the Appalachian foothills. Voting matters, and how we spend our money is a kind of vote that really matters. Still, if by small business we mean what the Google says — an enterprise with 100-1,000 employees and annual revenues as high as $40-million…yeah, we're not that. Not ever that. Never wanted to be.
Oh, and that marketing campaign, the money behind “shop small”? It's a credit card company, the one whose swipe fees – the percentage of each transaction they keep – are by far the highest in the industry. The one the rich folk carry. Noblesse oblige, eh?
Yes, this is about music.
And the crumbs left behind.
Blame the late banjo player Billy Faier, who made two albums for Riverside Records in the late 1950s. Mom liked to listen to music while doing the ironing: Billy Faier and Jean Richey and Mozart's “Figaro,” all that ingested, ingrained well before I was old enough to walk to kindergarten. “Hellbound Train” was Billy Faier's signature song, the same old cowboy poem Chuck Berry borrowed for “Downbound Train,” but they don't share a melody, not hardly the same song. Billy Faier's version scared me, scared me dead sober, sober almost to the end of high school.
