Musical education

Good Saturday, everyone.  I write this from Lexington, Kentucky, the part of Kentucky that's NOT hosting the Kentucky Derby today (that's Louisville).  It's cool and rainy here.  Looks the same for the race as well.  Guess you can't have everything, even if you bought a special outfit for the occasion.

Here to touch on a subject near and dear to my heart, and that's music.  My whole family is well aware of my love of music, and most of my closer friends are, too.  My mom insisted that my older brother and I take piano lessons, but the music we were taught never really stuck.  I liked the stuff I heard on the radio better.

And that would mean late 60's AM radio music, so we're talking about a little Elvis, a little Beatles, Three Dog Night, Creedence Clearwater Revival and some other luminaries.  Not much later I developed a great affinity for other artists, like Elton John (as I write this, I'm listening to his latest recording with his longtime friend Brandi Carlile, and I highly recommend it), Jim Croce, the Eagles and lots more.  Kept adding favorites to the list over the next ten years or so and finally began to pay serious attention to the Beatles, who are still my all-time favorite musical group.  Worth mentioning that my mom was a huge Elvis fan and it's been said that you're either an Elvis fan or a Beatles fan.  I was the latter but didn't realize it for a while.

All are still among my faves, and I still add new ones here and there, like the highly independent country singer-songwriter Sturgill Simpson, who also performs and records under the name of Johnny Blue Skies, and the Latin-tinged country fusion group the Mavericks. 

I mention all of this because, as I've detailed here, I have five grandchildren.  Of those five, only one has really absorbed some of my musical interests.  She's our middle granddaughter and the oldest grandchild who lives in our area.  I have fond memories of her sitting in my lap when she was small, listening to the Beatles perform "I Am the Walrus" and singing "koo-koo-ka-choo" at just the right moment.

I had a guitar for most of my live from the age of twelve through about ten years ago, when I sold the one I had at that moment because I just wasn't playing it much.  I was happy to sell it to a woman who wanted to get it for her husband, but it sort of nagged at me that I had given it up.

Fast-forward to a year or so ago, and the afore-mentioned middle granddaughter received a guitar for Christmas.  She asked me more than once what I knew how to play (all by ear, I don't read music, but I can make heads or tails of a chord chart) and I played her guitar a little one time when she brought it with her to our house.

You can guess what happened next.....I eventually replaced my missing guitar with a nice Fender acoustic parlor-sized model, and we've played together a few times and both of us enjoy it, but finding the time to do it is the challenge.  She's a high school freshman, plays soccer and sings in the choir, and has a demanding class load.

She also has picked up a number of musical influences from me, namely the Beatles, the Electric Light Orchestra, and many others.  She got into vinyl records a while back and I took her out shopping a couple of times for used ones, which is a lot like a scavenger hunt.  Both of us had fun that day.

Just recently she mentioned that she has been lately listening to Billy Joel, a longtime favorite of mine but who has not released any new music in a LONG time.  Last time she was at our house we talked about his music quite a bit.

I hope I've been a relatively positive role model for all five of our grandchildren (and our own children as well!) and feel strongly that a love of music is a love of a lot of good things, namely self-expression and creativity.

I certainly hope that her curiosity continues and she keeps broadening her musical horizons.