Aunt Janny.(The Talk of the Town)(Janet Reno)(Concert review)

So Janet Reno was hanging out by the jukebox at Manitoba's last Wednesday afternoon, down on Avenue B. She was sitting in a booth, sipping from a bottle of water, and staring straight ahead, in the direction of daylight, which there isn't much of in Manitoba's. She had on a black pants suit and moccasins. Her eyeglasses were a bit smudged. The owner of the bar, Handsome Dick Manitoba, the lead singer for the Dictators, the proto-punk band, had fed the jukebox with dollar bills, granting Reno credit for fifteen songs.

Reno's first pick was "The Ballad of Ira Hayes," by Johnny Cash. The song's taps prelude rang out, and Reno said, "Ira Hayes," in a plain, flat voice, as though citing legal precedent. She had been, in her youth, a country-and-Western gal. "We would go across the Tamiami Trail, Miami to Naples, and you could run into some of the best jukeboxes around," Reno recalled. "We saved our quarters. When I was being shrewd, I could get five songs a quarter. You got an extra one if you dropped your quarter in right."

Reno was accompanied by her niece's husband, Ed Pettersen, a musician who had run with the Dictators in the early nineties. Pettersen, tall and voluble, with a shaved head and a wallet on a chain, addressed Reno as Aunt Janny and Manitoba as Uncle Handsome. They'd have made a fine pair.

In 1998, on a visit to Aunt Janny in Washington, Pettersen had played two of his compositions--folk ballads about Mexico and the Old West--on his guitar, and she was so taken with the density of historical detail in them that she urged him to consider putting together an entire album of songs focussing on key periods in American history. She felt that this would be a great way to teach young people about the country's past. On a piece of paper, she made a list of two dozen seminal events, eras, and themes. "I didn't know what Ed would do with it," she said. "I got back to my business as Attorney General."

What Pettersen did was assemble a list of four dozen classic American songs and invite various contemporary artists to record them. The result, nine years later, is a three-disk set called "Song of America," which carries the listener from 1492 ("Lakota Dream Song") to 2001 (Alan Jackson's "Where Were You When the World Stopped Turning?"), passing some engagingly odd covers along the way, such as "Stars and Stripes Forever," by the Hawaiian ukulele virtuoso Jake Shimabukuro, and "Little Boxes," by the indie weirdo Devendra Banhart. Reno ...