April 15, 2016 (Friday)
Yesterday’s blog was about old music and the “Your Hit Parade” type songs. I sort of touched on church music, too, but not much. The main idea was that I really do miss those old songs.
I didn’t touch on country music. It has also changed. What is now known as traditional country or classic country is seldom played on radio stations and what is known these days as “pop country” bears little resemblance to the country music I knew as a child.
My uncle Lloyd Lowe took me to a big tent set up on the grounds of the old Buffalo Stadium in Houston to hear Roy Acuff and his band. The seating was old wooden folding chairs. The ground–especially the aisles–was covered with wood chips or sawdust, and the stage was only about six or eight inches above that. All the instruments were acoustic even though the whole band was picked up by microphones and amplified.
We brought home a little brochure-sized booklet with the words to all those songs, and I used to go into the back yard and pretend I was in that old tent or on the radio, singing aloud by the hour.
The music for that performance was what I would call country. Some folks would have called it “mountain music.”
When WSM Nashville got started in 1925, the announcer decided to call their Saturday night program “Grand Ole Opry” after trying another name for a short while. Many people in those hills and mountains tuned in on their battery-powered radios and the announcer, who named himself “Judge Hays,” invited the listeners to bring their banjos, fiddles, guitars and whatever they loved to play when they made music, and come to the studio to perform. They came. And the Grand Ole Opry was baptized in pure mountain music, sometimes called “hillbilly” music, and later was known as “country.”
The genuine article is hard to find. When you tune in to your local country station these days, you won’t hear Loretta Lynn, George Jones, Merle Haggard or Hank Williams, Sr. It’s likely you will be entertained by a new genre of some kind.
I resolved as a young man never to become the old coot who longs for the “good old days.” I didn’t know how old I would get and I didn’t expect this much change. So I’m breaking my resolution. I do miss the good old days of real country music, hit songs that I loved to sing with as I heard them, good old hymns in church, and a complete absence of “rap.”
All is not lost. You Tube is crammed with all the old stuff as well as the new. We can take our pick and listen to what we like.