Amazon & I Have Confused Our David Wilcox’s

Dual-David-WilcoxWhen I was in college I lived in a large student housing co-op in the middle of downtown Toronto. It was dominated  by students from what was then called Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (RPI.)

While I did not attend RPI officially, I attended numerous social functions on the campus. It was there that I was introduced to David Wilcox, one of Canada’s leading blues/rock guitarists. True to the tales of my beer-soaked room-mates, his live show was awesome.

A few years ago I was filling some holes in my music collection and started to seek out some David Wilcox titles. By then I was living in the US and found that south of that border there is another David Wilcox that is a prominent American fold singer and songwriter. He’s not the blues guitar master of his Canadian counterpart, but he is a very good songwriter nonetheless.

The confusion over the dueling David Wilcox’s gets deeper in that, while their musical styles differ, they both have a well-developed sense of humor. I think that I could be forgiven for hearing David Wilcox (American) “Blew ‘em away” and thinking it was the same David Wilcox (Canadian) that I once heard shamelessly profess, “I’ve got a bad reputation in this town.”

Quite recently I’ve been again addressing some gaps our local music library. This time trying to replace some music that for whatever reason I only have in MP3 format. These days almost everything we have is stored in FLAC format, with the original CD somewhere in storage.

This time around I see that Amazon is just as confused about the dueling David’s as I was at first. They return results for an artist referenced as “David Wilcox (American)” but within that result set they show albums for both artists.

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They even show some albums marked as “Import” for the Canadian songwriter. Worse yet, they return only one album for “David Wilcox (Canadian)” but accompany that result with a lengthy list of the other artists songs for MP3 download.

This must be infuriating for both artists. Both are fine craftsmen. Highly recommended.