Of all the famous fictional uncles of screen, stage, and page – Uncle Phil, Uncle Fester, Uncle Vanya, Uncle Buck, Uncle Tom, Uncle Remus, Uncle Scrooge, Uncle Scar, Uncle Ben, Uncle Jed, Uncle Owen, Uncle Rico, and of course Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius – the one I bet you’ve never heard of is Uncle Tupelo.
Uncle Tupelo was a character from a comic strip in the late 1980s by Chuck Wagner. He named the character by picking words from an encyclopedia at random, and couldn’t have known at the time that he was inadvertently helping write the first chapter of a new genre of music that would come to be known as alt-country.
Wagner’s friends were in a band called The Primitives. Their music bounced between traditional country and straight rock and roll, but incorporated bits and pieces of their influences, from Hank Williams to Sex Pistols to Black Flag to Dinosaur Jr.
The band was headed in the right direction, but needed a new name: in 1988, a different group in the UK called The Primitives had just scored a hit with “Crash” (a song which, to me, sounds like a rip-off of 99 Red Balloons). To avoid confusion, the American Primitives brainstormed a new name.
Perhaps a copy of Wagner’s comic strip was sitting in their practice space. Perhaps one of the band members fell asleep reading it the night before.
One way or another, they chose Uncle Tupelo, and the founders of alt-country had a new (and, I think, better) name. They would go on to do for country music essentially what Nirvana did for rock – strip it down, toughen it up, bring a mildly punk element to it.
The record that this song comes from (not-so-creatively named after the five-day span in which they recorded it) would be the last one they recorded before being signed to a major label in 1992; ironically, the year that the British band The Primitives would split up.
Uncle Tupelo themselves would themselves split just two years later, with one half becoming Son Volt, and the other half becoming Wilco.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The main guitar riff is anchored by that wonderful note, the seventh of the scale, that never fails to give a song a floaty feeling.
2. The playing isn’t perfect. A few times strings are accidentally muted, or accidentally ring out when they shouldn’t. Makes it feel like you’re at a live show.
3. It builds steam steadily but modestly, with a banjo popping in at 1.37 to remind you that this really is a country song.
Recommended listening activity:
Picking a cool uncle (or aunt) nickname for yourself.