Driving from North Carolina into West Virginia along the turnpike, heading toward Parkersburg one summer not so long ago and stopping at the restaurant near the Beckley exit, one heard Benny Goodman's "Sing, Sing, Sing," inappropriately muted but unmistakable, coming over the loudspeakers in the dining room. This was not nostalgia but the authentic voice of a cultural backwater. Until a few years ago—and perhaps even now—it was possible to tune in a Parkersburg radio station and hear the music of Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, and Artie Shaw played without coyness or apology. Far from being samples of cultural anthropology, they represented a taste that had simply not changed since 1945. If there is some temptation to place this evidence of cultural lag alongside statistics pertaining to West Virginia's generally declining economic condition in the postwar period, and to suggest poignant interactions between commerce and art, it may also be said that an inundation of top-40 rock can be a depressing price to pay for prosperity.