Robert Christgau Word of the Day

Di·as·po·ra n.

1. The dispersion of Jews outside of Israel from the sixth century B.C., when they were exiled to Babylonia, until the present time.

2. The body of Jews or Jewish communities outside Palestine or modern Israel.

3. A dispersion of a people from their original homeland. The community formed by such a people: “the glutinous dish known throughout the [West African] diaspora as... fufu” (Jonell Nash).

4. A dispersion of an originally homogeneous entity, such as a language or culture: “the diaspora of English into several mutually incomprehensible languages” (Randolph Quirk).

(dictionary.reference.com)

Flatlanders More a Legend Than a Band [Rounder, 1990]

In 1972, Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and leader Jimmie Dale Gilmore--drumless psychedelic cowboys returned to Lubbock from Europe and San Francisco and Austin--recorded in Nashville for Shelby Singleton, and even an eccentric like the owner of the Sun catalogue and "Harper Valley P.T.A." must have considered them weird. With a musical saw for theremin effects, their wide-open spaceyness was released eight-track only, and soon a subway troubadour and an architect and a disciple of Guru Mararaji had disappeared back into the diaspora. In cowpunk/neofolk/psychedelic-revival retrospect, they're neotraditionalists who find small comfort in the past, responding guilelessly and unnostalgically to the facts of displacement in a global village that includes among its precincts the high Texas plains. They're at home. And they're lost anyway. A-
(www.robertchristgau.com)