I knew the song after the first few guitar notes.  I just never expected to hear it between the third and fourth quarters of a Patriots game.

The song was "You Are My Sunshine" sung by Mississippi John Hurt, and it was the sound track for a Chevy commercial.

I first heard John Hurt's music at college, and he quickly became a favorite.  His songs were the only sounds I could tolerate while suffering full-blown hangovers.  His gentle voice and fluid guitar went easy on my gin-ravaged brain and actually seemed to soothe my volatile stomach.  I'm not a musicologist, so I can't give you a technical explanation of why his music affected me in the way that it did, but there was something almost saintly in those recordings, a serene and humble wisdom earned from a life of hard times that cut through the chaos and clutter of my privileged existence.  It was the late '60s and given my fondness for all types of reality bending, John Hurt was a welcome anchor.

He was born in Teoc, Mississippi in 1892 and spent the majority of his life as a sharecropper and laborer.  He achieved some notoriety in the late 1920's with a few 78 rpm recordings for the OKeh label, but essentially disappeared soon after.  His music was rediscovered during the mid-century folk revival, and he became a popular performer in his later years, playing at the Newport and Philadelphia Folk Festivals in 1963 and recording several albums for Vanguard Records.  He died in Grenada, Mississippi in 1966, but still manages to hawk cars in 2010.

My initial reaction to seeing the ad was outrage.  John Hurt spent the majority of his life in hardship and even during the success of his later years, he hardly lived an extravagant existence.  His music was a direct expression of his struggles which I don't believe included a minivan in the 'burbs.   Chevrolet may have had the legal right to use his music, but the moral and ethical rights were another matter.

After a while, I managed to dismount my high horse and take a more nuanced view of the issue.  The ad itself wasn't offensive in spite of its mercenary motives, and it was a pleasure to hear the song again even if Chevy insisted on throwing in its own tagline.  I hadn't heard much of Hurt's music since my turntable died twenty years ago, and I had never replaced my LP's.  It was even possible that some kid hearing the song for the first time would be inspired to hunt down the source on the internet and become a fan.

I also realized that I was mistakenly thinking of Hurt's songs as if they were sacred relics.  At its core, this wasn't the music of the concert hall, folk club or festival stage, but the cotton field, dance hall and dive.  Although he was a great artist, I'm sure that John never thought of himself in those terms - that was simply the verdict of music critics and pretentious college students sitting comfortably in their dorm rooms.

In the early seventies, I went to Bentley College to hear another of my favorite performers, Spider John Koerner, who had started his career playing ragtime and blues in seedy bars around his native Minneapolis.  The crowd that night was almost reverent in its appreciation, applauding politely at the end of songs, but dead silent while he was performing.  The atmosphere became so sterile that he stopped in the middle of a song and told the audience, "You guys have to start making some noise.  I'm used to playing in bars where you can't hear a gun shot go off."

As with Koerner, Mississippi John Hurt's music was meant to be enjoyed, not enshrined.  And given his experience with poverty, I suspect he would have had no problem selling his stuff to Chevy or anyone else.

So thank you, Chevrolet, for rekindling my joy in his music and sending me to iTunes to replenish my collection.  And if seeing the ad also inspires some Patriot's fan to buy an Impala or Tahoe, that's okay too.