I will turn 71 in less than a month.
Recently while I have been driving my radio has been turned to the 50s channel on Sirius XM.
As I listen to the songs I heard as a child, through junior high school and even in to high school. I realize how many lyrics I remember from in some cases 60 years ago!
XM bills the station as the first decade of rock, although there are songs from before Bill Haley and Rock Around the Clock.
And there were many hit songs of that decade that I’m sorry, do not qualify in any way as “rock”
think of many hits by Perry Como.
Patsy Cline had hits.
So did Kay Starr.
Some were very religious — Ferlin Husky “on the wings of a snow white dove” for example.
Johnny Cash recorded Folsom Prison Blues in 1955.
I have heard two different songs from — wait for it — George Hamilton IV. And yes, as bad an actor as he was, he was worse as a singer.
Far too many are of course banal. Too many are out of tune.
Fortunately in the day of 45 rpms most were mercifully short.
Today in my final class, as the two young ladies present were working on relatively unstressful work, I decided to treat them to some of what I remembered.
Flamingos
Del Vikings
Skyliners
Fleetwoods
Five Satins
(yes, I had a thing for doo-wop even then).
For some amusement, Sheb Woolley, who played the scout Pete on Rawhide, a western TV show about a cattle drive that was the first notice of Clint Eastwood, playing Rowdy Yates. That song was Flying People Eater. One of the girls thought it was Elvis. So I played some Elvis, the two sided monster hit, first Don’t Be Cruel,and then Hound Dog.
And then I decided to show them the roots, and played the 1952 recording of Hound Dog by Big Momma Thornton and share a tale — it was probably the late 60s and I filled in on keyboard for a group of three girls singing in a small place in the Village. They were the 2nd act. The “headliner” was Big Momma. After the shows I took Big Momma and her band to the bar upstairs and we drank until the bar closed, even though I had to get to work at a job with computers that same morning.
As I drive and listen to songs, they of course bring back memories, some rather painful in my late childhood and early adolescence. Others? They bring smiles, memories of parties, or even of listening while doing homework.
At the end of next month I will attend the 50th reunion of my original college class, of 1967. While this music would have been part of the background of all of us, our shared musical memories are different, becoming dominated our freshman year with the British Invasion, starting with the Beatles.
This is a political site. As I listened to the music it spanned my first tv memories — the Army McCarthy hearings. It took me back more to simpler, less controversial times, at least for most of the latter half of the decade involved.
I revisit however briefly a long time ago.
And then I realize how long I have know some of these songs, and feel my age.
I was born in May of 1946. The current occupant of that office was born three weeks later in June. On July 6 of that year George W. Bush entered the world, followed on August 19 by William Jefferson Blyth,whom we know as Bill Clinton.
Music.
As a music major whose interest goes all the way back to medieval music, I deal with sounds of the past constantly.
But the songs of the 50s is my past.
As I get closer to the forthcoming reunion I will switch to the 60s, and listen more to the music i associate with my first two times at Haverford, 63-65 and fall of 66 (I returned in 71 and graduated in 73).
Music.
Of my past.
Nostalgia …...