Music is My Language

 I am from a family of people who love or loved music. From the Fisher-Price wind-up radio that played "This Old Man" to the current guitars that I punish with my less than stellar playing of them, I can't remember a time when music was not a soundtrack to my well-being. My father loves jazz and big band, and my mother loved pop music.  Between the two of them, we were exposed to a wide variety of music from classical to show tunes. To this day I can remember the theme music to the cartoons that I watched, the opening themes to shows like "Mannix" and "Green Acres" and some much more obscure ones. 

I shared a stack of records like "Dick Shawn Sings with his Little People" and "Tom Glazer and the Do-Re-Mi Children's Chorus - OnTop of Spaghetti" with my siblings that grew exponentially when our folks joined the Columbia Record Club. It was through this that "E Pluribus Funk" by Grand Funk Railroad, "Chicago at Carnegie Hall", "Seven Separate Fools" by Three Dog Night, and many more seeped into our consciences.  High School brought Album-oriented rock giants like Yes, Genesis, The Alan Parsons Project, and rockers like Queen, Led Zepplin, Aerosmith, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and The Police. Then came the funk, Ohio Players, P-Funk/Parliament. Of course, the Beatles, the Stones, Mott the Hoople, and David Bowie were in there. And what WING or WTUE were playing, I was listening. Jimmy Buffett and the Eagles were my senior high school favorites. Away to college and I discovered Elvis Costello, Warren Zevon, dug into Bob Dylan, The Band, McCartney and Wings, Styx, Bad Company, and Ian Hunter.

Moving to Texas and meeting my wife who was a couple years older led me to Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, The Fixx, R.E.M., The Cure, Prince, De Peche Mode, and Swing Out Sister. When we went to Corpus Christi, Robert Earl Keen, Guy Clark, Susie Boggus, Mary Chapin Carpenter Marcia Ball, Jerry Jeff Walker, Robert Cray, Joe Ely, and others entered into my musical lexicon as well as World Music, Tejunto, SKA, Reggae and other dance in the summer sun music. Johnny Rivers, Bella Flec, Lyle Lovett, Arlo Guthrie, Dan Bern, and Leon Russell showed up there. A trip to New Orleans introduced us to the Neville Brothers, Clifton Chenier, and Zydeco music. Austin City Limits made us big fans of John Prine, Bonnie Raitt, the Vaughn brothers (Stevie Ray and Jimmy), and cemented Willie Nelson as the all-time greatest at crossing musical taste lines. 

Our move to Iowa introduced us to Greg Brown, The Pines, Catfish Keith, Keven "BF" Burt, Dave Zollo, Dave Moore, The Replacements, Dar Williams, Girlyman, and reintroduced us to Melanie Safka, Lucy Kaplinsky, Richie Havens, and many more. Most recently, I have found myself listening to a lot of blues, jazz, and Americana music and revisiting artists like Boz Scaggs, Todd Rundgren, and Graham Nash.

I don't dislike modern radio music, but find it relatively lazy, even by pop standards. I love the lyricism of Rap and Hip-Hop but don't always like the maliciousness of some of it, nor the musicality. But it is fair to say that I can find something to like about most music I have heard. I look forward to my retirement years when I can both play and listen to more music. Last night I heard the song "Blues Run The Game" by Jackson C Frank who was a Folkie in the mid-sixties. I realize that a lot of great music seldom finds an audience until the next generation claims it. And isn't that the real beauty of recorded music, it can reach you wherever you are and whenever you live, and can speak to you in whatever language you need to hear.