[John Sandford posting] Just sitting here working on the next Prey novel, and listening to some Ray Wylie Hubbard tunes, and he mentions a lot of other old blues singers, and I got to thinking about how music will affect your life and what you do and think about. I spent a lot of my younger years on what in Iowa were called acreages -- not quite farms, but my grandparents (where I lived for the first three years of my life, when my father was in the Army during WWII) had cows and chickens and occasionally pigs and a hayfield that had to be cut, and I can dimly remember, my uncles using scythes to cut something -- Im thinking hay, but Im not sure you cut hay with scythes. Anyway, you didnt when I was old enough to throw bales of hay, walking behind a tractor and baler. And we lived on another acreage between my fifth grade and ninth grade years, and weeding beans and freezing sweet corn feeding a furnace with coal and hand-cut wood and cutting the heads off chickens and fishing with cane poles. And I hated county-western music. ANY Hank Williams song would send me screaming out of the house, as would anything with an accordion or done in 3/4 time -- Im talking polkas here, and waltzes. My grandparents were born in that area of Europe where Lithuania, Germany and Poland come together, and it was polka music wall-to-wall when we were at their house. When I was old enough to have one, my first real musical hero was Elvis: rock on. I hated Pat Boone. If Id been driving a bus with the Kingston Trio or Peter Paul & Mary on it, I would have driven off the the nearest bridge. Later on, I developed a profound distaste for the Beatles (who are pop singers) but loved the Stones (who are rockers.) In fact, I always thought that there existed this philosophical line, one one side of which were pop singers, and the other side of which were rockers. Folk singers were really not on my scope at all. (Still arent.) Eventually, those lines kind of blurred for me. Prince was purely a pop singer (I thought) but I really liked Little Red Corvette and even the Raspberry Beret song. Actually rather than either rock or pop, Prince more reminded me of old time crooners like Frank Sinatra. Still, I leaned toward the rockers -- especially the midwestern guys like Bob Seger and John Mellencamp. The last few years, though, Ive come back around to country music, the very stuff I originally tried to flee. In my opinion, the best country song writers are now the best song writers, period. I think I may be drawn to them because my job has always involved stories, and country has the best stories. Im really, really tied of rock songs about teenage angst. Sure, people get hurt when they fall in love, but theres no depth to the songs or the sentiments -- just more bullshit something cranked out by a forty-year-old guy in an office building in LA. The real reason to listen to rock, now, IMHO, is the music, the melodies, the beat, rather than the words. Maybe its always been that way? But I think not -- rockers until the last fifteen or twenty years would actually sing about stuff that was interesting, or at least novel. A few still do, I guess -- the county rocker Lucinda Williams does some terrific stuff, and I always wondered why people would listen to Taylor Swift when they could be listening to Lucinda instead. Listen to her cover of AC/DCs Its a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock n Roll) sometime. Anyway, so here I sit listening to Ray Wylie, sort of weirded out by this long circular trip. Even grew some corn last year. And some music by a Russian rock group that sounds suspiciously like...polkas.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 02:28:33 +0000
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