The song’s second verse goes like this:
“You know they call them killer whales/But you seem surprised/When it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank/Where you can’t turn around/It took half your leg and both your lungs.’’
It’s grisly stuff, the kind of violent, elemental imagery you might expect from a scratchy Appalachian recording crackling and hissing on the hi-fi. The words could very well be set to an old claw-hammer banjo tune from Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music,’’ the definitive collection of old-time murder ballads, work songs, spirituals, and blues mostly from the 1920s and ’30s that’s piped into the DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum as you enter its new exhibit, “The Old, Weird America.’’
But the song, “People Got a Lotta Nerve,’’ is an original by Neko Case, the contemporary singer-songwriter whose temperament is as fiery as her red hair, from this year’s “Middle Cyclone.’’ With its visceral premise about nature rising up against man, the song is a potent reminder that the so-called “old, weird America’’ that fueled the 1950s and ’60s folk revival - and inspired Greil Marcus’s eponymously titled book about the characters who fired Bob Dylan’s imagination - is alive and well in popular music.
Of course, the vestiges of sepia-toned America have never faded out, but in the past decade, we’ve seen our country’s rural musical roots rear their head especially within the indie-rock and alt-country canons. We hear it today in Gillian Welch and M. Ward’s plain-spoken songs that blow by lazily like tumbleweeds in the Dust Bowl and in the mysticism of Fleet Foxes’ pastoral folk.
We see it in the iconography of Bon Iver, whose bearded frontman, Justin Vernon, resembling a modern-day Paul Bunyan, poses for press photos in the woods with a saw cryptically mounted on a log cabin behind him.
We’ve even witnessed a small but significant resurgence of instruments associated more with country’s founding clan, the Carter Family. British rocker PJ Harvey has taken to playing autoharp on her recent songs, and Canadian pop singer Basia Bulat strums one in the video for “In the Night.’’ Julian Koster recorded an entire Christmas album on a singing saw last year. Banjos now make regular cameos at concerts by indie rockers Grizzly Bear, the Decemberists, and Sufjan Stevens.
Stevens, whose Christian faith runs deep in his work, is one of the more fascinating entries in this burgeoning movement. He’s become a cultural curator of sorts, infatuated with chronicling historical footnotes and tales from the dark side of Americana. In 2003, he released “Greetings From Michigan,’’ the first of what he claimed would be a series of albums documenting each American state; “Come on Feel the Illinoise’’ followed two years later, featuring a song about serial killer John Wayne Gacy Jr.
Stevens surfaced a few years before the most recent wave of musicians who have been heralded for reviving Americana’s fringes. Looking like he just stumbled down from the mountains, Devendra Banhart championed a lo-fi brand of hippie folk with albums titled “Cripple Crow’’ and “Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon.’’ Joanna Newsom, she of the craggy croak and luminous harp playing, was anointed an unlikely leader of a cadre of colorful characters - CocoRosie, Vetiver, Josephine Foster, Will Oldham - whose music was as shambolic and mysterious as their own personas.
Lumped into a vague subgenre called everything from “free folk’’ to “freak folk,’’ they were the vanguard of a new strain of music that was so willfully odd, they weren’t going to be playing for big crowds at the Newport Folk Festival anytime soon.
In last year’s enlightening book “It Still Moves,’’ author and music critic Amanda Petrusich gave the genre a more encompassing handle. She devoted her final chapter to what she branded “the new, weird, hyphenated America,’’ noting the plurality of rural influences on a broad range of contemporary indie musicians (many of them based in major cities) such as Iron & Wine, Animal Collective, and Califone.
Petrusich’s new title seemed more appropriate, but it didn’t negate a niggling point. What, exactly, was “the old, weird America’’ to begin with? Dylan himself seemed befuddled by the term in a Rolling Stone interview this past April. He was asked if he misses “what some critics call the older, weirder America.’’ Dylan’s response was illuminating.
“I never thought the older America was weird in any way whatsoever. Where do people come up with that stuff? To call it that? What’s the old, weird America? The depression? Or Teddy Roosevelt? What’s old and weird?’’
In 50 years, surely we’ll have our own ideas of what was old and weird in the early 21st century. Take Larkin Grimm. Americana is often terrifying in the near-psychotic ruminations of this 27-year-old singer-songwriter who plumbs a deeply unsettling side of her Appalachian upbringing in such albums as “The Last Tree’’ and “Parplar.’’
Grimm is a good example of dusty old Americana’s legacy, and it’s easy to understand our culture’s enduring infatuation with it. By nature, old-time music is not pretty. The body count is usually higher than the fidelity, but it’s pure and uncensored and raw.
Strangely, even though it was once the music of the people, it now sounds about as foreign as American music gets - “chicken scratch,’’ as one colleague dismisses it. The stuff you hear in the “Anthology of American Folk Music’’ predated the notion of music as an industry, as a commodity. But it makes a strong case that, once upon a time, the most harrowing and moving songs needed nothing more than an unvarnished voice telling the story outright. And that message, some 80 years on, is and forever will be evergreen.
James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com. 
