I constantly hear people my age (around 45-50) say that “Music has gone to the dogs, man!” They bemoan rap and dance music, as well as the drugstore cowboys who wail about their own favorite topic: “My baby done gone.” Well, Sparky, as an oldtimer who remembers Bobby Riddell in Bye Bye Birdy, I have seen many musical style come down the road and just as many go.
Modern music, they say, began with freed black slaves in the south picking up discarded band instruments when the Confederate military bands threw them away as they trudged home after a defeated army. This is just folklore but it makes sense for a small part of the music. They learned on their own and began their own style of playing around the blues and gospel songs they knew so well. But this is not as much blues as it is folk music.
Music that comes from you life lives on despite the trends set by marketers in cubicles trolling for keywords. But I can’t knock their way because in 1965 a group called The Monkees was put together by marketers taking all the similarities that kids liked - The Beatles, clothes styles, comedy - and then generating a band and a television show. And before that they took Ricky Nelson off Ozzie and Harriet and made him a teen idol. And before that they got white guys to sing black guys’ songs - Elvis Presley - and made money that way. Well, that and paying off disc jockeys.
“Montana Slim” never came from Montana he was Hank Snow and he came from Nova Scotia, which is hardly cowboy country. But he learned singing while he was out on the choppy Atlantic being a fisherman and then taught himself trick riding with a horse. And the Jackson 5 were so bullied by their father that they went on to great success at the cost of Michael’s identity. This is sort of mass-production but under a baseball bat.
The point is that the Baby Boom generation is so hung up on their songs that the marketers now get radio stations to play great songs like Layla - which used to be one of my favorite songs - over and over until now it’s a bad noise.
Frank Sinatra thought Elvis was just a passing fad and would go down fast if he broke a hip. Sinatra also was disgusted with The Beatles and he hated the music of the mid-60s’ until his daughter, Nancy, became famous with These Boots Are Made For Walkin’ . Then he, himself, made a minor hit out of Something.
I’m not a fan of gangsta rap. But then I’m probably the only one my age who doesn’t like U-2 (Irish guys with presumptuous names like Bono and The Edge who preach from pedestal aren’t my bag). But U-2 are one of the biggest bands in the world and rap is a huge musical form. Yes, I said musical.
Because it doesn’t matter what keywords that the instant internet polls spit out it’s all music for, and of, the folk. That will live on around campfires and kitchen parties because that’s the way it was always done before.