MUSIC TO DISCOVER

Music has been a great blessing to my life. It has enabled me to discover other epochs in time, and puts me in touch with the minds of the people who created it, and the social and historical circumstances under which they did.
Music is part and parcel to those of all walks of life. I am particularly touched by folk music of all kinds because it reminds me of my grandfather who was a carpenter and stonemason who knew how to play the fiddle. There are still jug bands in the U.S., and I imagine throughout the world, who make music on washboards and improvised instruments.
Sixties pop music is where my love of the expression began. It was especially on June mornings that I could listen to it at leisure (after the school year had closed) on my transistor radio placed strategically on the nightstand. The pop groups I loved most were the Supremes, the Temptations, and the Miracles, whose discography I truly love re-visiting on Wednesdays.
On Tuesday editions of Melodies and Memories I get to discover the world of my mother and father. But it is not the Benny Goodman-like personalities of jazz who exported this indigenous genre to the entire world, so much as the pre-WWII figures, like Al Jolson or Irving Berlin, who emigrated to the U.S. from Russia, which so fascinate me.
Today I ran across a copy of Ennio Morricone’s original motion picture soundtrack to “City of Joy”. I did not see the movie, but the Dominique Lapierre book touched me deeply so I look forward to listening to this music together with you. Music is patrimony. It has been the purveyor of great movements toward social change in our recent past, and indicates pathways toward a better future.