It’s calendar-flippin’ time again, kids, and the turn of the new year brings – with a certain amount of aggravating inevitably, as far as I’m concerned – vast amounts of media and individual civilian list-making and reckoning, all built on the questionable assumption (or page-filling, useful fiction) that something identifiable, memorable, and even significant simply must have happened over the previous 365 days.

I ask questions about this notion that “Years Matter” not because I’m immune to trying to pin down the flavor of an era or turning points in history, musical and otherwise. I write a lot about precisely those things, and I will admit to having a sort of “chrono” head. For many years, I even kept my entire collection of recordings not in alphabetical order or separated by genres, but come-what-may chronologically. It let me find sounds and styles that went together, and were heard in an era grouped together as a matter of course, with trends that popped up in country or R&B at the same time as in rock ‘n’ roll emerging by the chrono sorting. One record or disc would lead to another, connections would be made, even just for playing records, and ideas would happen. I gave up the system (mainly, anyway) when I got married, since I had no right to demand – as that clueless groom in the movie Diner did about his own filing system, back in the early ’80s – that my wife have at her command what act showed up when, according to me. (See how that dating thing crept in just then?)

If it’s unlikely that trends will conveniently rise and fall in discrete calendar units, it’s truly dubious that you can spot what mattered in a year at the time. Waiting awhile to consider what music characterizes an era, and even a year, makes for better understanding – a point underscored by the arrival of a new series of individual CDs from Bear Family Records, Country & Western Hit Parade: Dim Lights, Thick Smoke And Hillbilly Music, the first six discs of which are structured around each year from 1945 through 1950. (There are plans to continue it forward into the future.) Despite the title, the set puts together not by-the-charts hits from each year, but 28 records that exemplify the sounds, situations and themes that mark the time as that time.

Which means the 1945 outing, country as it is, still shows an abundance of unmistakable tones of the swing-band pop era (in Dick Thomas’ “Sioux City Sue” and Jimmie Davis’ “New Moon Over My Shoulder”, for example), topical songs that remind you there’s a war on (Bob Wills’ “Stars And Stripes On Iwo Jima”, Gene Autry’s Dear John letter song “At Mail Call Today”), and new songs from some of the 103 new independent labels that were just starting up that year, with a focus on C&W and R&B. (Informative liner notes from the reissue’s producer, Colin Escott, keep the context clear.)

Jimmie Davis’ “New Moon Over My Shoulder”

Just a year later, in the 1946 disc, war’s-end songs and metaphors such as the Buchanan Brothers’ “Atomic Power”, Merle Travis’ “No Vacancy” (about trying to find an apartment now) and Cowboy Copas’ “Filipino Baby” strike new, timely themes, and pre-war-derived swing sounds have noticeably dropped away. For a moment, fueled in part by labor action that sent the record companies looking for public domain songs, there was a foreshadowing of the folk boom ahead, as heard in T. Texas Tyler’s “Black Jack David” and Merle Travis’ “Dark As A Dungeon”, one of several songs he wrote that were meant to pass for folk. A year later, there are previews of rock notions to come in Hank Williams’ “Move It On Over” and the Maddox Brothers & Rose’s “Milk Cow Boogie” – post-Bob Wills, pre-Elvis.

It’s not at all clear that these milestones would have been unmistakable at the time. By the 1950 disc, the sounds are transformed – dominated by the smooth stuff, ready for the gospely southern-pop crossover sound of Red Foley and the duo of Tennessee Ernie Ford & Kay Starr, as well as electric guitar leads from Grady Martin and Hank Garland that mark a whole new era, not more sophisticated, but differently so.

This has me thinking. Could we really pick not the allegedly “best” records of 2008, or reveal not very much by naming the top country or Americana sellers? Perhaps, in time, Taylor Swift songs of this year may seem to nail this moment, for those of a certain tender age, anyhow. Maybe Abigail Washburn’s genre-and-language-jumping internationalism really will seem to be an early sign of something. A song such as Del McCoury’s “Moneyland”, which not only marked harder times but prophetically included government intervention, some of it debatable, seems bound for some future collection of emblematic 2008 recordings. (If they still have collections! Maybe there’s a twangish “coming of the download singles era” number out there we just can’t recognize yet as one of The Ones.) But I wouldn’t want to bet the variable-rate-mortgaged farm on what sound, if any, marks this year.

“Abigail Washburn’s genre-and-language-jumping internationalism”

If I had to take an early (probably too early) stab at identifying a sonic trend that may have spelled “2008,” it would be the increasingly prevalent soul revival within the country side – whether that meant Shelby Lynne’s keeper Dusty Springfield salute, Dolly Parton doing a terrific “Tracks Of My Tears”, the rise of soulful country singers such as Jamey Johnson, James Otto and Randy Houser, or the soul and grass tones of the SteelDrivers. I could take a big think-leap and suggest that, perhaps, the trend has suggested a broad reaching for credible emotional reconnection, and even that it might have presaged the oncoming Obama inauguration. But I don’t really know that, and I doubt whether anyone else does yet either. I know these sounds aren’t going way overnight because we’ll be flipping the calendar to 2009 shortly.

But, what the heck: I’ll take all suggestions and comments you might have, right here, on what songs or sounds you think are the marks of “2008.”