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Lord I was born a ramblin’ man

January 28, 2008 in hobbies, music | 2 comments

The alert among us know that this is the second song lyric I’ve used as a post title. This time I have no thought-provoking questions or reports on how I spent my time off over Christmas.

No, this time I just want to plug a long-time favorite band of mine, a group I grew up listening to. In the late 1970s I was about four feet tall and singing along with my cousin Tim a.k.a. Levi, on songs like “Clementine”, “The Old Double Diamond”, and “Buckskin Lady”. He performed with the cowboy group The Starlite Ramblers. The recordings were on 33 rpm records (I’m going to confuse the youngsters with this reference).

In the ’70s, Tim was a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. Thirty years later, he’s all of that still, and you can now get all the original music in digital versions, as well as some more up-to-date tunes as well.

At that time, they were providing the antidote to disco music. If you have an extra twelve bucks, and you’d like to hear legitimate western music, I cannot say it loudly enough – go to their web site, buy a CD and give it a listen. By the way, you can try before you buy – they have mp3 samples of most songs.

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Time passes much too quickly when we’re together laughing

January 6, 2008 in Uncategorized | 4 comments

First, a question then an explanation.

The question: How long has it been since you listened to a favorite album, CD, or cassette from beginning to end, without stopping? I’m wondering if our rushing, ever more “productive” tendencies are taking the good out of our life.

The explanation: I got the idea to use a song lyric as the title of this post after I thought for a while about my recent (and very unusual) twelve day stint away from work. I had taken a few days off during the holidays, resulting in almost two weeks of vacation. After the first day off, I began to forget about scheduled duties and my concept of time and itineraries soon slipped away. I even stepped outside my house without wearing my watch a couple of times – the equivalent of being stark naked for me at any other time.

So, what did I do with this newly liberated time? Many things, but one of the long lost joys that I revisited was listening to music. Not just throwing a CD in while I’m exercising, or taking the mp3 player with me as I run out the door, but really listening, and sitting down. Relaxing and trying to figure out what an artist had in mind with a particular song. In the case of a concept album, what did s/he intend to convey with the whole work?

To say that my musical taste is varied would be accurate, but I listened to a relatively narrow range of music between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Frank Sinatra’s Las Vegas box set was high on the list, while a Dropkick Murphys CD also made the cut. Shannon Brown is a country favorite (she also has a very nice name) from here in Iowa, and her last album was produced by John Rich of Big and Rich fame.

Eventually the whole experience took me back to a time, around ten years ago, when I sat with a friend of mine who also has a fairly eclectic taste in music. That night, we discussed the merits of Texas Swing as a style of American Folk Music and whether or not Bob Wills was and is the King of Swing. I’m not sure which was more valuable to me, the relaxation of the present time or the memory of the past. I’m glad I got to enjoy both.

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