For better or worse, when I'm feeling like I could jellify my body and slip through the cracks in the floor, I go take a walk through a graveyard near my house. There are tons of reasons why, but needless to say the iPod has to be a little more appropriate than if I were walking down the street.
Somewhere in there was "Nothin'", the Van Zant cover from
Raising Sand which only has Robert Plant singing, and therefore, a mean fiddle by Alison Krauss. It fits a walk through the graveyard so i'd rewind (?) the song to my favorite parts and really sat with the song a lot longer than if it had come up randomly.
Later on came to Johnny Cash's version of "Wayfaring Stranger" (which has the best accordion you've ever heard and eventually a fiddle. Listening to it, I thought to myself "Jesus, is this Alison Krauss too?" It struck me then that economy has too much to do with the sounds of the lesser played instruments.
In a musical landscape dominated by electric guitars, they all get their own sound, and its intentionally different. I don't know **** about guitars but I know that musicians that play them are as picky about them as they are their cars, healthcare providers, and where they buy their porkchops.
So what does this do for the listener? Sadly, I feel as if it severly downgrades the amount of experimentation that could exist. At this point it seems the only folks coming up with different sounds (to any noticible degree) are those making their own, and so its got to come from someone that has an established presense and can get away with this sort of thing.
Roots music may have a DIY ethos thats impossible to get away from (i mean its generally played on porches) but in that down-to-earth, home-spun mentality, theres still a rigid discipline thats silently mandated. Standards that have existed for centuries are constantly reinvented, but theres always a strand of originality.
The bare-boned economics of it is that, no matter how ****ty you make a guitar, theres enough interest in it, and enough ways you can learn that as long as its cheap, someone will buy it. But Fiddle, trombone, bagpipe, or accordion, they all cost too much, are too scare, and vary so little that new companies aren't springing up due to the looming bankruptcy that would come from it.
In roots music, necessity if the mother of invention; accidents the catalyst of progression. But no one plays the Lute any more, and if the genre is going to get as weird as the people and places in its own stories, we need to get medevil again and start coating our wood casings with cat guts, and insect entrails, we need to start building the musical version of soapbox racers again, because Jack White and Tom Waits can't do it alone, because in a tradition born from the tribal origins of the worlds children, the progression of time has only resulted in a regression of sound.