Southern Scratch

Southern Scratch is only the best known of innumerable chicken scratch bands that are now flooding dance halls in the Southwest. This Native American-Southwestern crossover is exclusively instrumental and is performed to be danced to. While it is the personnel of the scratch groups, rather than the music itself, that makes them Native American, they do reflect Indian values in their deliberate rejection of the cult of the individual: scratch musicians frequently shift from one group to another. ~ Leon Jackson