#1
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Old or New?
I find that I like listening to guys like Merle Travis, 'Moon' Mullins, Doc Watson, Jimmy Rodger, Delmore Bros, early Chet, Norman Blake, Tony Rice, etc. a lot more that the flashier new guys like TE, Bryan Sutton, David Grier, et al who have 'supposedly taken things to the 'next level' (whatever that is). The older I get, the farther back I go - Ernest Tubb, Mac Wiseman, Floyd Tillman, Bob Wills, Blind Blake, John Hurt, Piedmont blues, Charlie Poole. It just seems that the music is purer with more 'soul' than anything being put out these days. Used to like Doyle Dykes but he gets a little carried away at times and don't even get me started on TE. Anybody else fell this way?
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#2
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I get your point. Our tastes in music differ and, for most of us, even change for ourselves, during our lifetime. I find it interesting what I sometimes find "good" in music, as well as what I can no longer endure. Some artists cover both categories, for me. : )
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#3
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Yeah, I like to add some older corny stuff to our repertoire but also material by people like the Romeros and Cahalen Morrision etc.
This is by Lulubelle and Scotty (app 1940) https://youtu.be/5DhBVOkOT_E
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Silly Moustache, Just an old Limey acoustic guitarist, Dobrolist, mandolier and singer. I'm here to try to help and advise and I offer one to one lessons/meetings/mentoring via Zoom! Last edited by Silly Moustache; 12-17-2018 at 12:37 PM. |
#4
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Quote:
Quick backstory: I was a punk rock kid all through the 80s. I listened to mostly extreme and obscure music, experimental stuff...and still do at times. Around 1992 I was in a record shop and bought a CD for a buck or two in the cutout bin called "Are You From Dixie?" which was a compilation of brother teams and duos of the 1920s and 30s. The cover said something about "historic reissues of original hillbilly recordings." I bought it as a joke. I thought it would be hilarious to make fun of these ancient recordings of backwoods hayseeds I'd never heard of, like Darby & Tarlton, The Delmore Brothers, Dixon Brothers, The Blue Sky Boys, The Monroe Brothers (featuring Bill Monroe before his solo work), Allen Brothers and others. I expected to put it on and start laughing and cringing. Then I got home and popped it in my stereo with a "knowing grin" on my face. Within 30 seconds of the first song, my grin turned into a dropped jaw. I mean, dropped to the floor. My whole being, heart and soul, was immediately affected. I was struck not only by the amazing playing, but the rawness...the "realness" of the music. The music's own heart and soul. Popping that CD in the player changed not just my musical life, but my whole life. Interestingly, my best friend was living in another part of the country. Right about the same time I stumbled onto country stringband/old time pre-WW2 country music, my friend had started getting into old pre-war rural blues. He began playing acoustic slide guitar and fiddle...I took up banjo and mandolin (we both had been playing rock instruments in bands for many years) and we began feverishly trading cassette copies of the CDs we were buying...he would dub tapes of his reissued blues CDs to send me; I'd do the same for him with old time country. It's a journey that hasn't ended yet. I'm still discovering old artists from the 20s and 30s and have an equally deep love of early rockabilly rock and roll and country of the 1950s and 60s.
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"A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." - John Shedd |
#5
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An awful lot of what is done today ( musically) is over produced. Technology can tweak the smallest of things and make the end product too polished, too perfect.
Some of the artists you mentioned were/are more of the what you see is what you get people. It seems that your tastes run loosely toward country flavors. But the over production shows up in many or most kinds of music today. Another aspect of what is happening today in music, is what could be described as "sameness." Most of the folks you talked about were/are pretty distinct. So, I betting you have a lot of company with your take on music and going back to older artists and different times. |
#6
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I don't like going back to stuff that old even though I grew up with it. The quality of the recordings were not that great and a lot of the music was quite basic in many cases. That said, I like listening to a lot of the older stuff versus the new. I have been listening to a lot of these classics lately.
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#7
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I have a friend who has cousins in the fabulously successful Mexican band Mana. They sell out the biggest venues available world wide. I gave him some Howling Wolf, Muddy Watters, early BB KIng, and Elmore James CDs to pass along, wondering if they had ever been exposed to raw blues.
They were floored by the gritty striped down truth of it all, even through the language barrier. Called the music the real deal. Never heard it before. I've been drawn to the primitive earthiness of depression era rural hard times music that anyone can play on their porch. The simple emotional connection that gets lost in the glitz of virtuosity is timeless.
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#8
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The more things change, the more we stay the same.
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#9
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It seems that playing the acoustic guitar so much more in recent years has dictated or influenced the style of music I listen to now. I have always been 70's rock, 80's pop and heavy metal and some country from the 90's but now I find as I get older I am starving for something new. Harder to play metal on an acoustic. I have rediscovered artists that have always been there and that I have heard tons of their stuff but I never appreciated them like Glenn Campbell, Cash and Willie. It is as if everything old is new again! I guess that stuff has always been there in the back of my mind growing up in Tennessee.
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#10
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I've been digging all those guys and then some since the seventies. I still enjoy the pop music from the sixties. I can't get into much more recent stuff. The song craft leaves me cold. To be fair once a simple well crafted song of a basic subject has been created it can't be created again. You can't beat the classics.
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#11
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What you touched on that does get me is when the music takes a back seat to the production and polishing. To me it's like going to see a movie that is 95% CGI and special effects...where the story and craft and acting are secondary (at best) to the glitz and dazzle of computerized special effects. It's a separate discussion really, but another aspect of this is that about anyone can make music with the touch of a button now. It may require ears, but not necessarily actual skill. However, I am not saying all music made this way is not legitimate, or is pure garbage. There's room for it all. Quote:
One might think that the ability to instantly see and hear things globally might engender more experimentation and interest in blending styles and different cultural flavors. Some of that may have happened, but largely things seem more homogeneous. One artist or band has a smash and for a year and a half there's a rush to break other artists with attempts at soundalikes. I haven't heard anything much even remotely fresh sounding in country music since about 1982. And yes, I listen. There are some "alt country" and neo-folk bands that at least strive to sound like something other than every other run of the mill CMA act, but these people are rare, and the exception to the rule. When I was studying old rural pre-war blues, you could still hear regional differences between, say, blues from the Mississippi Delta as opposed to Texas blues as opposed to Piedmont blues. Those days are gone now in all genres of music, ironically because of the ubiquitous nature of media. And I'm not saying this entirely negative. But it's a different paradigm. Quote:
Even after electrical recording came along, for several years the only masters were copies of the original artifacts, so you listen to reissues from that era and there are going to be crackles and pops and hiss. Personally I like this, and I like the warm imperfections of analog tape recording which was the norm until about a quarter century ago. Almost the entire first century of recorded music predates digital. As for the simplicity of the music, hard to dispute that. I've never listened to music for complexity or technical skill myself, though those things certainly don't make music lesser, as a rule. I would argue that flashy playing and complex composition never made a sorry piece of music any better, however. Quote:
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"A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." - John Shedd |
#12
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Quote:
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"A ship in a harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for." - John Shedd |
#13
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You could make the case that even The Beatles probably wouldn't get signed today. A lot of the demise of music today is rooted in the lack of vision on the business side of things.
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#14
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Muddslide, that's a great story. Thanks so much for sharing it with us.
While I do have wide-ranging tastes in what I listen to, it's not so wide-ranging that it includes much modern country music or any rock. That's me and my own preferences; the old guys are what attract me the most. I call it "source music", the stuff so much modern music was built upon As a historian, we use source material for our papers and as a musician, I prefer source music on which to base my own interpretations.
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#15
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I love the old roots stuff as well. The soul, singing and picking are great. But...they were the first to record that stuff and are thus tough to hold a candle to. There are a lot of great newer folks just as good or better - the above mentioned Cahalen Morrison and Eli West, Gilian Welch and David Rawlins, Robert Earl Keen, James McMurtry, Joe Pug, Jeffrey Martin; go back a little farther and there's John Prine, Steve Goodman, Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams, and more. The thing I really love about these singer-songwriters is they are actually better musicians than most of the old timers and way better songwriters than them. The lyrics from the old timers are pretty predictable and trite compared to today's Americana artists. In blues, roots, C&W, folk and Americana, there really aren't too many new melodies or chord progressions to invent. With just 12 notes and a handful of rhythms, the possible combinations for these genres is pretty well played out. The only new things to bring to the table are the words.
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