Etiquette
Very important checklist for baby-boomers who want not to sound like senile old bores:
Music, Inadequate Postscript to the Posts About
I recently wrote a whole series about the music of my past, how my town was the home of a specific musical tradition that's being lost in the commercial music industry. I'm not satisfied with it. It's cool to have all those music videos on the Meow but respect for people's privacy kept me from developing the point the article needed...
I grew up hearing this music and the message that "You can do whatever they're doing. Here's a guitar--play a tune--or would you rather use the piano? Maybe the gift of composing a good song for the first time has not descended upon you, yet, but ANYbody can learn how to sing and how to accompany a song." I think most of my schoolmates did. It's true, too. We weren't all great musicians. Didn't want to be. The most talented and dedicated musician in my class spent most of his adult life playing in backup bands. But two out of three of us have been paid for musical performances of some sort.
I do feel concerned that young people preserve this understanding that they have the ability to sing and play instruments, just as we did, and that making music is not a matter of buying lots of amplifiers and synthesizers and other overpriced gadgets; it's a matter of being able to harmonize with friends.
How important is a "local" quality? I think it's valuable to notice the differences between what the Carters and Jimmie Rodgers actually sang, in Bristol, and the commercial sounds that grew out of it in Nashville and Memphis. Does not mean that anybody, even the Carters, need or ever did need to be limited to singing A.P. Carter's versions of songs he heard somebody in Hiltons or Gate City sing in the 1920s.
Joe Jackson made a good point, too (see above). Talking as if "the former days were better than these" can keep older people from recognizing new talent. Don McLean actually became famous with a song about "the day the music died," when three musicians died in one plane crash, in 1959. Those men were gone; they left McLean to carry on. The music people my age grew up hearing on the radio was shaped by mourning for Elvis Presley, for Karen Carpenter, for the Beatles as a band, for John Lennon as an individual, for Sara and Maybelle Carter (or, in some places, Andy Gibb--the same winter), for Hank Williams, and so on. They left this world, and younger people who played their songs as tributes to them carried on. We have to continue encouraging young people to sing. They're not the people whose records we now have the option of playing back endlessly. They are themselves. Some of them are decent singers too. Some of their best work will be the records people will play back endlessly, in some time after my time on Earth is over.
One of the very few things the Kingsport Times-News gets right these days, since it's been sold out to some sort of absentee-landlord conglomerate that deliver to us the absolute bottom-most worst of the new columnists, is that they actively try to highlight new local musicians. I try to link to the ones who have posted music on YouTube, Discord, Rumble, etc., as I find them. It's too soon to say which ones are going to be part of the next chapter of local musical history.
The important thing is to give the young a chance to carry on the traditions. Recordings and new remixed releases can actually interfere with that.
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