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I'm not saying I'm giving up on the man. Just like I'll hang in with Elvis even when the E-haters bring up "Spinout" and druggy toilet death, I'll let the dick-and-chick cracks roll off me. See, the fan of the ambitious Southerner and other grand thinkers knows about the flip side of large-scale dreaming: failure. And we don't just expect minor oopsie-daisies along the lines of "Old MacDonald" or "I didn't inhale." No. We know that eventually our hero will fuck up on a global scale and cause calamities that will be photographed and recorded and remembered. We're talking before-and-after pictures, Young Hot Elvis turning into Old Fat Elvis, Repairer of the Breech becoming Blow Job of the Month. The more they get, the more they lose. Those are America's rules.

Back to Britain: Because everyone was talking about Lewinsky, I talked about her, too. Because everyone I talked with was a musician, the conversations turned to Harry Smith. One of the chats was with Jeff Tweedy of Wilco, who was working on a record in Ireland. I had read in the great English music magazine Mojo where he said that Smith's "Anthology" -- a six-CD set featuring the above-named Boggs as well as dozens of even more obscure performers with names like the F. Ming Pep-Steppers doing "Indian War Whoop" or Chubby Parker offering "King Kong Kitchie" -- "creates an American world that I always hoped existed."

When I asked Tweedy to map out that world, he said, "America sounds like an experiment on those records. It sounds like some weird petri dish. There are no preconceived notions of what music is supposed to sound like. That's why early rock 'n' roll is folk music, or is so invigorating on a folk music level. It doesn't have anybody involved in it that had any idea what it was supposed to sound like. Howlin' Wolf didn't go into a recording studio and say, 'We need this amount of compression on my voice for me to sound like me.' They cut an acetate and they listened back to it and it wasn't them. It didn't sound like them. It sounded like something better."

Something better. Isn't that what public work or public office is supposed to be? A version of ourselves that's bigger, more daring, more impressive? You get that out of reading the story of Dock Boggs while listening to his records. The story of Boggs, as adapted into liner notes by Greil Marcus from his book "Invisible Republic" on the gorgeously produced new Boggs collection "Country Blues" (Revenant), is a parable of one man's America, lost and found. The records of Boggs -- 12 songs are heard here plus five alternate takes and four others by Boggs' Kentucky contemporaries -- can be heard as an encyclopedia of transgression.

"The American fantasy of public mastery," Marcus writes, "contains a fantasy of public suicide." It is very difficult this week to hear an intelligent, aspiring, poor white man from the American South singing that "Pretty women is a-troubling my mind" without feeling like you've bugged the White House. Boggs accompanies himself on the banjo, an instrument of African origin that can sound bright and bluegrass, though you'll forget that the second our hero rakes his boney hands across its strings. The song he's playing is "Country Blues," which is a title and a genre, not to mention a fact of life for an ex-coal miner like Boggs. And coal black is his voice. And coal black are the hearts of the men whose stories he doesn't tell so much as channel -- the murderer in "Pretty Polly," the inmate in "New Prisoner's Song," the drunk in "Sammie, Where Have You Been So Long?" These are the fables of fuck-ups, though the darkest line on this darkest of records is the one in "Old Rub Alcohol Blues" in which he says, "Have never worked for pleasure."

During the '20s, Boggs got to be a musician instead of a miner, making records and entertaining crowds. This freedom did not last. The Depression came. His wife thought his musicianing ungodly. Rediscovered in the '60s, he gave interviews to folkie Mike Seeger that Marcus cites at length. One telling anecdote recounts a book Boggs took to heart as a teenager, "The Standard Book of Etiquette." When asked why a coal miner would be practicing his manners, he replied, "I think a coal miner ought to have a little sense, and know how to meet the public, and speak very good English if he's to meet the king, or the president of the United States, he ought to know how to conduct himself, and how to act, if he's figuring on going into the White House."

Would that it were true. If Boggs were alive today, it's a seductive thought to imagine him hauling that old banjo into the White House to play for the man who lives there. But I wonder, would we see the prez as the singer or as the song? Would Boggs recognize the president as kin, as a man like himself who came from no place to become somebody? Or would he forsake his manners book and stare the politician in the eye, moaning all those tales of fools held captive to their evil choices? Luckily, Bill Clinton is a man with two faces: We don't even have to choose.
SALON | Feb. 6, 1998

Sarah Vowell is a former Washington intern.

If you want to order Dock Bogg's "Country Blues," e-mail Revenant Records at revenant1@earthlink.net.