Nanaco Sato’s “Lust – Love Underground” treats the death of Arnold Shultz as a reason to pick up the instruments again, turning remembrance into an act of playing. The song begins with his absence, but it quickly fills that space with guitar, fiddle, bow, and the image of Shultz walking the river with his “lonesome song.” His history arrives through places and gestures: Morgantown, Rosine, Mecklenburg, New Orleans, cracking jokes while “walkin’ the notes.” The portrait belongs to a musician whose legacy lives in what others learned from hearing him.
That legacy also carries a darker story. Shultz’s love of liquor ends with a poisoned bourbon and a death on the dance floor, while Bill and Charlie Monroe inherit his “railroad rhythm” and push it into the music that would become known as bluegrass. The song does not make the lineage tidy. It keeps Shultz present through the people who followed his playing, even as the music changes hands and names.
The final verse gives that history a purpose without turning it into a monument. “We can learn from one another / By the raising of the tune” makes playing together the way to send Shultz home, and the repeated refrain keeps returning to the same simple gesture: get the guitar, get the fiddle, play. The song ends there, with remembrance still in motion.
