Reblogged on kommonsentsjane/blogkommonsents.
11/12/2023
Plenty – my favorite at this point in time is – Daniel O’Donnell from Ireland who specializes in country western music; but – he can sing anything. At the present time he is touring the U.S. We have seen him many times in Branson, MO, since the early 2000’s.
People in the U.S. should see one of his shows – and you will be hooked.
*****
“The Relentless Pursuit Of Common Sense”
Huh! Just What Is It With Country Music?
Posted on Fri 10/20/2023 by TonyfromOz
By Anton Lang ~
Sometimes, the most difficult thing about making a Post like this is picking the ‘right’ words for the title of the Post itself, and that was the case here. It needed something to attract readers.
This Post, by its very nature is necessarily long, so I hope readers are not put off by its length.
All of this below is something that sneaked up on me, and while I say ….. ‘sneaked up’, looking back on it all now, it has taken 60 years to do that sneaking up, and it did that sneaking up on so many different levels, that it’s only recently that it all finally came together, coalescing across the last six Months, and I have only just now actually realised what happened across those 60 years.
Before getting into the explanation, I’ll include a video of a Country song here, and this is just indicative of the whole point of all this.https://www.youtube.com/embed/nEXEhUO7npo?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
This video was posted to You Tube by kkiilljjooy
This wonderful song, released in 1968 marked the comeback of a legend of music, Jerry Lee Lewis, a Country song ….. performed by the original wild man of rock and roll, and why comeback? That story of why Jerry Lee recorded a Country song is so interesting, and I detailed all of that in a Post I made when Jerry Lee sadly passed away around this time just last year, and that Post is at this link.
All my life I have loved music, across (nearly) all the different genres of music, but like most people, it was mainly popular music, and the main source of that was the radio, (and in my time, just AM radio at that) originally, and then collecting LP records ….. of that same music I first heard on the radio.
See the point there?
And that point for me ….. radio, is pretty much a similar thing for anyone else, and yet ….. it is completely different, because I live here in Australia, and while that might seem obscure, it goes to the whole point of the title above, and I’ll get to that a little later. And for American readers, you would be surprised what part Australia does have in an appreciation of Country music.
I came to that appreciation of music in 1964, in the weeks just before I started High School, (Huh! Surprise surprise nine out of ten people say) but it didn’t really begin until some years later when I heard a Neil Young song (umm, on the radio) in 1972, and that was when I started my collection of Long Play records, and I still have all of them now, around 400 or so of them, and I’m just not ready to part with them yet, even though I don’t have a record player any more. However, I do have all of that music and much much more on a dedicated Music Only hard drive with more than 20,000 songs on it, and hey, even I know I’ll never play them in my lifetime, but I can find almost anything. Even though I came to my own music appreciation in what I might think of as ‘The Golden Era’, (the 60s and 70s) I have found that I like music from across the ages, and across all genres. At the time, what has become known now as ‘The British Invasion’ was beginning, with so much new music being played, virtually each and every day. It wasn’t all that trendy to like the music from your parents era, but what I have found, (and noticed early on as well) was that there was so much really good music from their era as well, and from even further back, and that led me to a more rounded appreciation of music. During that time I started my own musical journey, it was also not really all that ‘trendy’ to like C&W Music, (Country and Western as it was referred to at the time) as that was looked upon as perhaps hillbilly music, at least that what was most people my age said, well, out loud anyway, because if you drilled down, some of them were pretty good really ….. And therein lies the quirk I’ll get to later.
I have been a contributor here at our Home Site since March of 2008, so all but sixteen years now, and I first started my Sunday Music Posts around Christmas of that same year, and that continued every Sunday for ten years, and on occasion since then, and there are almost 600 of those Music Posts.
To this day, I still love music.
Sadly, In April, my absolutely wonderful wife of 42 years passed away, so I am now on my own, and that’s where all this Country Music thing started, and as I wrote above, it was on so many different levels that all came together, hence I mentioned how it just sneaked up on me.
Our Son visits me on most days on his way home from work, and he’s here for around an hour, so that’s good, but mostly, I’m on my own. I’m managing really well. One of the things I actually miss is her not being here to talk with during the day, and note I said ….. ONE of the things, because Barbara was more than just having someone to talk with during each and every day, but the home is now just so deathly quiet, and here’s where our Son helped me with that. Before Barbara passed, I had already subscribed to a couple of TV streaming services, as free to air TV was basically, well, just awful. When Barbara passed, one of the first things our our Son mentioned was that now I was on my own again, I should resume playing the guitar, which I have done. I played for fifteen years from 1972, when that music appreciation began, and at the same time, I learned to play the guitar, and was reasonably good at it. And, well you know, after you marry, priorities are different, so I stopped playing. I thought I would have to start all over again, but what surprised me most was how easily it all came back to me. The lady who was one of the owners of the shop where I purchased my guitar is also a music teacher as well, and she told me that I would be surprised just how easily it would come back, as it’s mostly muscle memory. Now here I had a ploy. I thought that if I was going to play guitar again, then I needed some incentive to actually keep doing it. To that end I purchased my lifelong dream, a Martin Guitar. I always wanted a Martin guitar, well, because Neil Young played one. Now that I could afford it, I sourced a Martin, a 1986 Martin D35 in perfect condition. Okay, it cost me, but now I know, hey that’s a costly guitar, you better be actually playing it, and I am. Our Son then put me onto a music site called EChords, where it shows every guitar chord known to man, up and down the fret board. That site also has a library of, well impossible to count, every song known to man, and every chord structure for that song as well.
The second thing our Son suggested was now that I already had some streaming services, then some of them had music as well, and I could just play that music during the day, as background to allay the ‘deafening silence’. So I just turn on one of the three I now have each morning and it plays all day, and the libraries of music that THEY have are also comprehensive as well. So, now there’s always some background there for me.
Okay, streaming services, and note how I mentioned the MANY different levels all of this morphed into. I was aware of the documentaries of Ken Burns, and over the many years I have watched some of them on free to air TV, and they were always good. Now I have streaming Services, I have watched a further six of them, and the research he does for these documentaries is just so immensely comprehensive. I have not seen one I didn’t like. And that leads into the next piece of all of this. Ken Burns made a documentary in 2019 about Country Music. Now, when you think documentary, you think yeah, maybe a couple of hours. These Ken Burns documentaries are so comprehensive, so each one is way way longer than that time length, so it’s a commitment of time to actually watch them over a week or two in fact, as there are eight episodes, and each episode is two hours, and one of them was two and a half hours, so, almost 17 hours all up. Okay, I started watching it back before my wonderful wife passed, and around two weeks back, I started the whole Series again. It was just so fascinating, detailing the History of Country Music, and while you might get locked into thinking ….. Country Music, this is the history of Music in America. You don’t have to be a fan of Country Music to like this Series, as it is just so well done, and so interesting, the whole of it.
While Country Music had been around for so many years prior to the age of electricity, it came to the fore when the music actually started to be recorded, and one of the first recorded pieces of music was from one of the original Country Music ‘megastars’ The Carter Family. AP Carter, his wife Sara, and Sara’s sister Maybelle, the first generation of Carter Families. One of the first recorded songs was their version of The Wabash Cannonball. Sara has the autoharp across her lap, and Maybelle is holding her guitar. Maybelle was the mother of three daughters, Helen, Anita, and June, and June later married Johnny Cash. This is such an amazing song, part of the history of United States music.https://www.youtube.com/embed/LMiU_aknPDA?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
This video was posted to You Tube by VinylCountryMusic
I just had no idea whatsoever just how good all of this music really was. There was even a section on Martin Guitars, and as I noticed, (now owning one of them myself, so I knew what to look for) nearly all of the stars played Martin Guitars. (see, again, so many levels) In those early days this music was so immensely popular across the whole Country, and all people had access to in those early informative days was radio, mostly battery operated, and they all listened to the Country music shows broadcast on AM Radio across the U.S. with vastly huge powered Transmitters of the ‘big ones’, and perhaps one of the biggest of them all was in Nashville Tennessee, WSM radio, and that radio station broadcast The Grand Ole Opry every Saturday night, listened to by millions, Coast to Coast, so huge was the power of the Transmitter.
So, after watching the Series all the way through, I now viewed those music streaming services in a completely different manner. I just played the music I liked, and again, semi locked into the thinking from the 60s and 70s, I didn’t play any Country music collections at all, no idea why, just the way it was perceived. So now, I started to play them on those streaming services, and seriously, there’s many hundreds of hours of music just in the Country Music selections on those three services I do have. On one of them, the collections of music go back to the 40s, so I just started there, and went up by Decades, and each Decade had between 100 and 150 songs, covering many hundreds of artists and bands, names synonymous with the history not just of Country Music, but Music.
Now, while I’m playing a Hank Williams song here, this also is just indicative of the music per se. Now, this iconic song is perhaps one of the most known, songs (umm, again, note, just ONE of them) in Country Music, and is just so like the actual life history of Hank himself, and it has always been a particular favourite of mine.https://www.youtube.com/embed/lCgicPdsxxg?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
This video was posted to You Tube by RockinREDNECKREBEL
Okay, everyone knows the song, and how big it is, and what it means, and how closely it mirrored Hank’s life. However, Hank didn’t even write the song. It was written by Leon Payne, ‘The Blind Balladeer’ who wrote hundreds of songs in a prolific career. Hank Williams recorded the song in 1949, and despite the song being so iconic ….. now, Hank’s version of the song barely even charted at the time. Now, while there are many versions of Hank and this song, I have picked this version because on this recording are the musical instruments that Country Music brought to us, and made so popular across so many years, the Guitar, (lead, rhythm, and Bass) the Mandolin, the Violin (the fiddle) and the steel guitar, all instruments now so synonymous with Country Music.
Now, all of these songs, and so many hundreds more of them were all on those streaming services I had, and while they were playing in the other room, (I didn’t need to watch as it was playing) the songs just poured out.
And then the revelation kicked in.
Australia???
Okay remember above I wrote about my Sunday Music Posts, and now here’s where Australia kicked in to add another level to all of this. I allude to it in a number of those Music Posts of mine, and it’s basically all about population. The U.S. has a population of 340 million, and Australia has a population of just 26.5 Million, so the U.S. has 12.8 times the people we have here. I wrote a number of times that the U.S. had so many music charts, one for every genre of music, and there were, quite literally, so many of those music charts, and even Country Music had different charts as well.
However, here in Australia, with such a tiny market when compared to the U.S. we (Australia) had just the one mainstream music chart ….. the popular music Top 40, and that was basically IT, all there was, so while there may have been localised music charts in the Capital cities, and even they were still basically the same, there was no such thing as a dedicated music chart for each of the different genres of music.
So, now, back to those streaming services, you know, the many different levels in all of this.
Here I am listening to the dedicated Country Music collections from the 40s, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s and so on.
Umm, wait a minute there, I remember that song, and that one too, and, say, that one as well, and another, and another, and so on, and so on. So many of those Country songs were huge hits here in Australia, not as ….. Country Music per se, but as just plain old Music in general, popular music, music that made it onto the charts here in Australia.
So, here we were, in Australia so used to hearing Country Music, but not as Country Music, sort of buttonholing us into well, perhaps even ‘rednecks’ the perceived lovers of this genre of music. Here in Australia it was just what it was all along ….. you know, just really good music.
Another thing I noticed was that a number of songs were the same as I remember from those early days listening to radio back in the 60s and 70s, and then even listening to earlier music from years before that even. However, these songs on those streaming services were being sung by American artists, and I distinctly remember as a youngster, those songs being done by Australian artists, and some bands as well. As a youngster, you don’t look at record labels (well, radio!!!!) to see who actually did write the song. You just hear the song, and then the DJ tells you it’s ….. an Australian artist, so that’s all you know. And here I am now, hearing so many of those songs recorded by the original artist. There were the songs you knew from the original artist in the U.S. but a lot of those lesser known songs were hits here in Australia where they were ‘covered’ by Australian artists.
Okay, so here we have virtually all of those songs being done by the original singers, male and female, and bands as well, just so many of them, so much good music over so many years.
So, here in Australia, and coming from the 60s and 70s era, when perhaps Country and Western Music was not really something you admitted to liking, you were unwittingly attuned to Country Music because it was such a large part of a small market here in Australia. So, without even noticing it, you were ‘dialled in’ to like Country Music without even knowing it.
Look at this next really old video clip from 1962.
This is a song which went in the other direction, written here in Australia, and then covered by singers in the U.S. and this is a song with an amazing history.https://www.youtube.com/embed/dpRvAnhHfmc?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
This video was posted to You Tube by sallie6
This song was a Number One hit in Australia back in 1962. It’s title is ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’. The singer here is Lucky Starr, and he was one of the early, and young pioneers of what was then the newly called ‘Rock and Roll’ genre of music, just starting out in the late 50s here in Australia, and Lucky Starr was one of those pioneers. The man alongside Lucky Starr, and playing the guitar (well, pretending to anyway) is the host of the TV program, Bandstand, and that is the revered Brian Henderson, the most respected of all the Journalist News Reader in our rich history of news readers here in Australia. Brian also was the host of Bandstand, (an almost copy of the original Bandstand in the U.S.) and he hosted that music program for 15 years.
The song was written by an Australian, Geoff Mack in 1959, and it was then picked up, and recorded by Lucky Starr in 1962, and as I mentioned it went to Number One on the Australian Top 40 Music Chart. I saw an interview with Geoff Mack recorded not long before he passed away in 2017, at the wonderful age of 94. He was living on the Gold Coast in a Retirement Village just 25 miles from where I am sitting right now. When asked about this song, he referred to it as his ‘Superannuation Policy’. It enabled him to live a life of extreme comfort in his old age with his wife. The Royalties he earned from this one song alone enabled that life of comfort. Geoff Mack’s music publisher offered the song to Hank Snow in the U.S. and Hank covered the song. Geoff Mack used the large Atlas pages of the U.S. Continent to compose the American version of the song, and Hank learned it, and then recorded it, and it was a Number One Country hit for him. Years later it was also covered by Johnny Cash as well, and the royalties from both of those American versions (a hugely larger market than the small Australian market, both U.S. covers becoming million sellers) kept Geoff Mack comfortable in his old age. The song was also covered for another 19 Countries and Locales, as well as covered by around 20 other artists as well.
So, there it all is. It all just sneaked up on me, just like that, on so many different levels.
And it only took sixty years!!
Anton Lang uses the screen name of TonyfromOz, and he writes at this site, PA Pundits International on topics related to electrical power generation, from all sources, concentrating mainly on Renewable Power, and how the two most favoured methods of renewable power generation, Wind Power and all versions of Solar Power, fail comprehensively to deliver levels of power required to replace traditional power generation. His Bio is at this link.
*****
kommonsentsjane 