The item among Jimi Hendrix’s scant output of just four original albums that seems most eligible for a Grammy nod, it would seem, would be the first one, Are You Experienced? Released in the U.S. in August 1967, it would have been considerable for a 1967 Grammy — awarded at the Tenth Annual Grammy Awards Ceremony, held in 1968, of course. The Tenth Grammys was a highly unusual affair, as it represented the first year that Grammy voters even showed much of an interest in rock music. The Beatles won Best Album for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band, and Jimmy Webb’s song “Up, Up and Away” as recorded by the 5th Dimension got the nod for Record of the Year; just the previous year, Frank Sinatra had taken both of these categories. Artists like Sinatra dominated the early Grammy Awards — after all, the awards only started in 1958 — and would continue to dominate them right up through 1967. Although the choices would seem conservative by the standards of today, the artists who won in the years immediately following — Blood, Sweat & Tears, the 5th Dimension (again), Simon & Garfunkel (especially), and the Carpenters — were like revolution come down to the Grammys.

It all comes down to the nature of “peerage,” and in 1967 a guy who plunked down an amp, plugged in, and played “Louie Louie” wasn’t really a “peer” to the scores of industry people voting for Grammys back then. The “recording industry” of 1967 consisted of scores of engineers, arrangers, song pluggers, publishers, radio personnel, and musicians that belonged to unions. Any project made by a “talent” — at least in the major record industry; the Columbias, the RCA Victors, Capitol, Reprise, Decca, Warner Bros., etc. — would have large groups of these people working on it, or promoting it when it was done. The concern for professionalism was very high; in most session photos of the period, engineers and many musicians are seen wearing ties and suit pants even in a “casual” mode. EMI’s engineers in Britain wore white lab coats like doctors at the time the Beatles began recording there. “Pros” these people were — a session man from Decca once remembered that arranger Sy Oliver could produce eight arrangements in a day. The rock format, with its comparatively small group of guitars, bass, drums, and singers represented a challenge to this industry and all its people. Resistance to rock in the major record industry was strong throughout the early 1960s; the majors viewed rock as a game played by small labels until the Beatles proved just how much money was potentially in the game.

Sometimes the established system would collide with rock in unusual ways: Lee Michaels did not play any of the keyboard parts on his 1967 debut album for A&M, Recital, as at age 16 he was too young to join the musicians’ union. Michaels demonstrated all of his keyboard parts to a union man, who “played them exactly as I did. It was amazing,” he later remembered, “but I was still crushed.” The early Grammy Awards for rock, or rock-flavored pop, apart from the Beatles and Sam & Dave, were awarded to artists that utilized these resources of additional musicians — backing singers, choruses, orchestras, and arrangers. The Fifth Dimension used such resources in a big way, Simon & Garfunkel to a lesser extent, and so on. This would be the norm for quite some time to come.

It is a tribute to Jimi Hendrix’s visionary spirit that he was so ahead of his time that he couldn’t have been considered for a Grammy during his lifetime; the Grammys themselves were still “young” and simply not ready for him. Neither was the audience that saw him on his first American tour, made in 1967 in support of the Monkees; Hendrix and the Experience were spinning the heads off little girls and terrifying their parents; this mismatched bill didn’t last long. In the retrospective view, Hendrix revolutionized electric guitar playing and his small body of work remains central to “classic rock” radio. However, in 1967, he was mainly an FM radio artist — not everyone then necessarily even had an FM radio — and one doubts that even he would have approved of winning the Grammy over Sgt. Pepper’s. Like it or not, Jimi Hendrix just simply wasn’t on the Grammy radar screen, and he did not stick around long enough to register a blip there. That same condition applies to so many artists active in the late 1960s that seem like icons to us now — Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Doors, the Velvet Underground, and others mentioned in these internet “think pieces” that did not win Grammys. Perhaps instead we should be asking why the Monkees didn’t win; of all the pre-1970 rock acts who fit the Grammys’ admittedly still-emerging requirements, a Grammy nod would have helped the “Prefab Four” the most.

Here are two of those things, both sad, as it turns out: Charles Westover, known to the pop world as Del Shannon and the author and performer of timeless hits like “Runaway” and “Little Town Flirt,” died on this date in 1990 in Santa Clarita, CA, and Jimmy Smith, the man who for all practical purposes invented soul jazz and completely remade the Hammond B3 organ over in his own image, died on this date in Scottsdale, AZ in 2002. That’s a lot of great music right there, and while February 8 rose out of the roulette wheel to claim these two musicians for its own, stilling both forever, their legacy and work are still with us. Life happens, and life happens on specific dates, then moves ahead one click, and life ends on specific dates, too, and then moves on another click. Here’s a suggestion for today, a day that seems at first glance to be a lackluster placeholder between football and broken hearts: Take a moment to think about Del Shannon and Jimmy Smith, and maybe even add a track or two from each to your iPod. February 8, like every other day of the year, really has no sentiment or mercy, but these two musicians, who share a death date, had plenty of both. Here’s a tip of the hat to Del Shannon and Jimmy Smith.

Del Shannon - Runaway
Del Shannon - Drop Down and Get Me

Jimmy Smith - Prayer Meeting
Jimmy Smith - The Sermon

Truthfully nobody knows where Cotton-Eyed Joe came from. The song itself, a feisty, irresistible dance tune, dates from before the Civil War, and was firmly established as a fiddle piece by the mid-1800s. It has been recorded countless times in endless variations by everyone from Doc Watson, the Skillet Lickers and the Red Clay Ramblers to Garth Brooks, Michelle Shocked and, in perhaps its strangest incarnation, as an urban dance number with sampled beats merging with fiddles and banjos in a fascinating (and for some, irritating) cultural collision by the Euro-dance combo Rednex. The lyrics vary considerably, aside from the “where do you come from” chorus, in the different versions of the song, no doubt due to years and years of square dance callers pulling in whatever floating verses fit their needs at the time. It is, after all, a dance tune, and has prompted dancers to fill the dance floor for well over two hundred years now, an amazing bit of musical survival.

The Skillet Lickers - Cotton-Eyed Joe

So who is Cotton-Eyed Joe? To be cotton-eyed is to have an abnormal amount of white surrounding the iris of the eye, a medical condition that can be brought about by drinking wood alcohol, which blinds, or the effects of any number of illnesses ranging from syphilis to glaucoma and the viral disease called trachoma. Legend has it that Cotton-Eyed Joe was a pre-Civil War slave musician whose tragic life turned his hair white and was famous for playing a fiddle made from the coffin of his diseased son. In the song, Cotton-Eyed Joe is obviously a rambler, coming into town and leaving under mysterious circumstances. Michelle Shocked suggests that he was actually a roving abortion doctor in her version of the song from Arkansas Traveler, which tips things into some pretty heavy territory. Others have pointed out that Cotton-Eyed Joe isn’t a person at all but the name of a specific non-partner spoke-line dance and that one doesn’t meet Cotton-Eyed Joe, one does the Cotton-Eyed Joe.

Whatever its origins, Cotton-Eyed Joe has had an incredible run as a popular song, and in the Rednex version, which contemporary DJs have been quick to add to their standard set lists, it is played constantly at sporting events and makes an appearance nightly at countless clubs, discos, square dances and wedding receptions. It really is an amazing feat and this simple, bubbling melody is now into its third century of filling up the dance floors.

Cotton-Eyed Joe,
Where do you come from,
Where do you go?

Nobody really knows the answers to that. It has been a long journey and it isn’t close to being over, and even as you read this post, someone somewhere is stepping out on the dance floor to Cotton-Eyed Joe. Not bad for a little fiddle tune.

Rednex - Cotton Eye Joe

First, there’s the music itself, which is crafted to seamlessly mirror the group’s past, and in fact, the first single from the new album, a version of J.D. Souther’s “How Long,” was in the Eagles’ live set list way back in the early ’70s, and it sounds like nothing less than “Take It Easy” part two. It’s interesting, too, that the first two singles off of Long Road Out of Eden were issued initially to country radio, showing that the Eagles had a clear view of what their fans were listening to and where to target new fans. Rock fans have never been kind to aging rock stars as a general rule, while country fans, on the other hand, are famous for their undying loyalty. Then there’s the decision to exclusively release the album through Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores, a move that helped not only keep the price down on what could have been a pricey double-disc set, but also targeted with uncanny precision the kind of audience the Eagles were aiming at, and it wasn’t hipsters and rock critics. So what to make of all this? Long Road Out of Eden isn’t a great album, but it does work pretty well as a sly facsimile of the group’s history. It isn’t expensive, so purchasers get a lot of bang for their money, and by partnering with Wal-Mart, the Eagles got to step outside the money-grabbing maze of major label record companies and keep most of the loot for themselves, not to mention solving the problem of national distribution. It’s all pretty shrewd and fiscally smart. And it worked. The Eagles sold a gazillion copies of Long Road Out of Eden, had a hell of a payday, and still got to sing songs about runaway greed in a culture willing to feed on itself until death. Take it easy, indeed, but make sure you’ve got a good marketing plan.

The issue becomes even more muddled for new and/or independent artists who face an uphill battle against their established/major label counterparts when it comes to exposure. The Internet may have enlarged the playing field, but it hasn’t leveled it — and for those who can’t make a multi-million dollar music video or get their album played on mainstream radio, a 30-second shot of fame looks very enticing. The Fratellis and Feist broke into the American market this year thanks to iPod spots, while Wilco allowed several songs from Sky Blue Sky to be used in Volkswagen commercials. In the United States, Ingrid Michaelson gained popularity when her music was used in the television show Grey’s Anatomy and a commercial for The Gap; across the Atlantic, Irish singer/songwriter Paula Flynn shot to fame when her cover of David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” (recorded as a joke and posted on her MySpace page) was used to advertise Ballygowan bottled water. It’s hard to admit, but these arrangements are mutually beneficial for both companies and musicians, even if they do make fans squirm.

So what lies ahead for 2008? Music lovers continue to decry the use of pop songs for marketing purposes, but who hasn’t discovered or rediscovered an artist thanks to a flash on their TV screen? With album sales slumping, will this be the new way for labels and musicians to turn up the revenue stream? And whose tunes will announce the latest from Nike, Nissan, or Nordstrom?

So what does he do on his first post-stardom solo album, Songs About Girls, but record 13 great songs with excellent productions and serviceable rapping that aren’t sell-outs at all (okay, we’ll pardon “I Got It from My Mama”).

Now, where does that get him? Number 38 on Billboard’s album chart so far. Anyway, give this record some attention, even though you might not want to, because it is one of the best R&B albums of the year (or at least a contender in the Most Surprisingly Good category).

• “Heartbreaker” (sample)
• “Over” (sample)
• “Impatient” (sample)

But the times are a-changin’, and as sample clearance gets more and more difficult and hip-hop gets more and more popular, rappers have been called upon to find the predecessor successor to Mr. Collins, one whose voice rings as clear in the studio as it does on record! And as the first decade of the new millennium stretches well past its salad days, the new king appears to be in the form of one Chris Martin, heartthrob to millions and father to Apple, who lends his falsetto to recent albums from Jay-Z, the Streets, Swizz Beats, and even Kanye West.

• Jay-Z - Beach Chair (sample)
• The Streets - Dry Your Eyes (sample)
• Swizz Beats - Part of the Flow (sample)
• Kanye West - Homecoming (sample)

The real question, though, is whether or not he can really fill such big shoes. Because while Collins’ melodies and cascading drum rolls have a severity about them that lends itself well to the often very dramatic (or at least kitschy) side of rap, Martin’s voice has neither the necessary resonance nor playfulness in it to really pull this off. He sounds serious, certainly, but it’s a whiny earnestness better suited to well, Coldplay, than an MPC. The songs he’s included on, unsurprisingly enough, all come near the end of the rappers’ albums, the requisite “reflective” cut with the (alleged) crossover appeal. Martin himself, of course, can’t be blamed for this. He’s stated in the past that he likes hip-hop, and his enthusiasm for working with the MCs seems to be sincere, but there’s something about his tracks that just reeks of falsity (added to the fact that they’re really not that good) and forgettableness.

Worse, however, are those who try to play off the Martin appeal without getting the man himself involved. I’m thinking in particular of DJ Shadow, who employs a soundalike, Chris James, on “You Made It,” from last year’s Outsider, and Lupe Fiasco, whose latest single, “Superstar,” from his forthcoming album The Cool, features a very lame, affected hook by Matthew Santos. I know I was just saying how much I disliked Martin doing rap, but at least it’s… him, not trying to be anyone other than himself. It may be fake, but it’s a “real” fake, while the Shadow and Lupe songs are knock-offs of an already shoddy original, the karaoke versions of a Pussycat Dolls song.

So perhaps the throne has not been relinquished yet. There’s still hope that another sweet-voiced rocker (please!?) will find his way into the hearts and minds of all the rappers out there. But until then, all I’m saying is — and I’ll put it out there like Fiddy — if Chris Martin or anyone who sounds remotely like him shows up on the new Wu-Tang album, I’m calling it quits.

(Though, honestly, at least that might be better than this, a song which, not so ironically, mentions “In the Air Tonight” by name.)