I’ve been spending a lot of time lately out at my dad’s farm, cleaning up his house so that we might eventually rent it. He’s in a retirement community now, and his former home is piled high with junk accumulated over the years (especially, it seems, caned food that has been there since time out of mind). But, because dad has a strong antiquarian interest, you run across interesting things in the process. Today I found a hymnal from 1926. And while I (actually we–Gina was with me. In fact, she’s the one who initiated this most recent round of cleaning) was working on clearing out his kitchen, I spun up some of his albums. I listened to Jimmie Rogers (“the singing brakeman”), an amazingly young Merle Haggard (“the workingman’s poet”) covering Jimmie Rogers, a few tracks from a Bill Monroe (“Big Mon” or “The Father of Bluegrass”) album, and two sides of Hank William’s greatest hits (which I would glady listen to over and over again).
I grew up on this sort of music. And because it was my father’s music, I hated it. I don’t hate it anymore. And some of it I like quite a lot from time to time. I think I began to appreciate country music the first time I really listened to and understood what Bob Wills was trying to do: combine country dance music with jazz, spanish, and (later in his career) rock elements. It was that fusion of influences that I liked and that led me, eventually, to appreciate (to some degree, at least) the more traditional stuff.
I also, and this is truly odd, found an old Yes album among my dad’s records. This one, an album from 1975 called Yesterdays must have found it’s way in by mistake as dad always had nothing but contempt for rock music (much less rock music by the kings of fusion). I listened to a few cuts and then spun up the Merle Haggard. I’ll give it another try some other time. The only Yes album I ever owned was Fragile, which I liked quite a lot. I also sat through Tales from Topographic Oceans once.