FEATHER DUSTING
Monday's Congress Avenue bird deaths prompted a wealth of speculation on the still-undetermined cause, none better than Austin cutups the Midgetmen's assertion: "This is retribution [for] when a bird **** on our guitarist's shoulder during a photo shoot last summer." Naturally, our avian friends have been intertwined with human-created music since long before Hans Christian Andersen's beautiful 1865 folktale The Bird of Popular Song. More recently, they swoop and soar through oft-recorded jazz standard "Lady Bird" (Chet Baker, Stan Getz, Dexter Gordon), classic Alan Bergman pop song "Yellow Bird" (Eartha Kitt, Lawrence Welk, Chris Isaak), and, it goes without saying, Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Free Bird," which appears on practically every Seventies rock compilation ever made. Then there's the Trashmen's "Surfin' Bird," also done by the Cramps, Ramones, and Queers; Leonard Cohen and Johnny Cash's "Bird on a Wire";
Stevie Nicks' "Nightbird" and her Fleetwood Mac colleague Christine McVie's "Songbird"; and Little Jimmy Dickens' immortal "May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose." "The singing-bird soared away, over mountain and valley, over field and wood," writes Andersen. "He was the Bird of Popular Song, who never dies."
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