David Cantwell writes:

I wrote the following piece for the current issue of Kansas City’s weekly paper, The Pitch.

A couple of weeks from now I’ll spend a weekend proofreading the upcoming installment of the magazine No Depression. This issue marks an anniversary of sorts—this will be issue number 75—but for a lot of us the occasion will be more heartbreaking than celebratory. No Depression has dug around the rootsiest corners of American popular music for 13 years. But now, due generally to a rapidly changing music business and, especially, to a one-third decline in the magazine’s ad revenue in just the last two years, the May-June, 2008 issue will be No Depression’s last.

I’ve been proofing the magazine every two months for years now, but with only rare exceptions has it ever felt like work. In truth, each time the next round of PDFs began arriving in my inbox, there was a part of me that was amazed all over again that the magazine existed at all. Most music coverage, for far too long and with no end in sight,  consists of little more than a frantic scrambling from one next big thing to the next, an icky-squishy collection of celebrity profiles and snarky 150-word album reviews.

No Depression felt like another country. The rag’s specialty, to borrow from poet Wendell Berry, was “the use of old forms,” exploring the ways that musical styles and genres persist—honky tonk, bluegrass, punk, old-timey, gospel, the blues, good ol’ rock ‘n’ roll, and so on—even without the endorsement of Total Request Live, college radio, alternative weeklies, or Grammies. Each ND arrived like a long, deep breath, a pause to consider where we’d been, where we were, where we might be headed and then to decide—this is a essential value of all ongoing traditions—just what it is from the Now and the Then that we might yet need yet further on up the road.

Detractors, I know, like to think of any interest in the musical past as one form or another of nostalgia, but such dismissals are usually wrong. More than anything, No Depression argued that our forebears have something to say to us that we could still stand to hear, not least of which being that our new stories are bound up with their old ones. We cannot shape a future, at least not any future we’d want, without deep grounding in the past.  Plus, out-of-the-spotlight artists like Mavis Staples and George Jones, gospel singer Isaac Freeman or a twenty-first string band like Old Crow Medicine Show, each a subject of major features in the magazine, were all making great music and people needed to know it.

No Depression was named after an AOL newsgroup that lifted the title from an album by the band Uncle Tupelo, on which they’d punked-up an old Carter Family number called “No Depression in Heaven.” This was in 1995, when so-called “alternative country” acts like Uncle Tupelo spin-offs Wilco and Son Volt, and Uncle Tupelo-mimics like Blue Mountain and Whiskeytown, were whispered to be the Next Big Thing (along with Techno!). To no one’s great surprise, America proved resistant to Twang-mania’s charms.

But No Depression thrived, quickly outgrowing the self-deprecating description of its early years: “The Alternative Country (Whatever That Is) Bimonthly.” Soon enough, and in no small part due to the campaigning of its several senior and contributing editors, ND began to cover bluegrass, soul, blues, folk, any sort of country too loud or too twangy to make it on the radio….really, just about any sort of popular music that remotely could be termed “rootsy” or what some now call “Americana.”

In some ways, No Depression never stopped being the fanzine of its origins. This was especially true of its new releases review section, which even 13 years on still rarely included negative reviews. Mostly, though, this we’re-just-fans-writing-for-fans approach was a key to lasting as long as it did.

ND was entirely a desk-top affair. It didn’t have an office or even meetings, and it remained the vision of its co-founders and editors in chief, Grant Alden and Peter Blackstock. Indeed, the pair routinely passed on feature queries simply because they didn’t like the artist in question’s new release or even because they figured the act was already famous enough to guarantee them plenty of coverage elsewhere. Better to shine ND’s light where its illumination was needed. So instead of, say, Bruce Springsteen on the cover, a natural fit for the magazine’s aesthetic if ever there was one, it would be some far less well-known singer-songwriter like Patty Griffin or Mary Gauthier, Kelly Willis or Kansas City native Iris Dement, or Buddy and Julie Miller.

Or it was the “King of Rock & Soul” Solomon Burke, or the forgotten mid-century R&B diva Little Miss Cornshucks, or a country legend like Ralph Stanley, Merle Haggard, or Porter Wagoner. Or “younger” alternative-country artists like Alejandro Escovedo, Robbie Fulks, and Gillian Welch, the Bottle Rockets of St. Louis or the Drive-by Truckers.

(An incomplete roll call of regional acts that made it into the pages of ND would include not only Dement but Mike Ireland and Holler, Howard Iceberg and the Titanics, Hadacol, the Wilders, Rex Hobart & the Misery Boys, the Bindlestiffs, the Starkweathers, Split Lip Rayfield, the Domino Kings, the Morells, the Original Sinners, and Jeff Black.)

All of those acts, as well as the hundreds more who were featured in its pages over the years could count on No Depression to provide the consistent notice they knew they’d never get anywhere else—and that they needed if they had any chance at all at building a career.

And the worthiest among them saw those careers essayed at unheard of lengths: A cover story I did last year on Porter Wagoner ran to 9,000 words! It’s hard to imagine just where any of these artists will ever be taken so seriously again.

The magazine never grew into its somewhat grandiose new cover tag, “Surveying the Past, Present and Future of American Music,” but it came nearer that mark than any other rag in the rack and I think was always headed in the right direction. Now, “barring the intercession of unknown angels” (to quote the latest issue), and excepting whatever limited version of the magazine may or may not continue online, No Depression will head only in the direction of the sunset. Like a really great country weeper or soul lament, it breaks my heart.

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