Music Spans Generations

“You don’t strike me as someone who would like For King and Country,” my friend said. “My sixteen-year-old niece loves them.”  Implied was that someone fifty-plus years older than her niece should stick to Lawrence Welk’s ah-one-and-ah-two? Cue bubbles. Or perhaps would not like soul-thumping music enough to drive two hundred miles to a rock concert?

No matter, I took it as a compliment. Many people do tend to favor music from their own generation. I seem to have absorbed my father’s love for every generation’s music and almost every genre. After retiring from teaching in 1984, he bought and borrowed hundreds of music cassettes to record his favorites from each on mix tapes. On his playlists, Keely Smith and Diana Ross shared the stage with Sam the Sham and Boots Randolph. My dad might have said, “I have absolutely no musical talent; I just love music.” I could say the same.

Almost five years after Dad’s passing, we just discovered the extent of his hobby—about a dozen cases, twenty-four tapes each, of music cassettes. Before taking them to donate and/or resell, I popped a couple in my car’s cassette player. As I tooled around that day, memories flooded my car. Richard Clayderman’s piano stylings of the theme song from Chariots of Fire took me back to friends and feelings from the early 1980s. More time-traveling reveries with the gentle “Ballade Pour Adeline” from 1979. And “Memory” from Cats.

A few days after hearing this generation-spanning music, in an odd coincidence, I finish reading Mitch Albom’s The Magic Strings of Frankie Presto on the day Aretha Franklin dies. So I go from the book in which famous musicians from many generations and genres share memories of a dead musician, the fictional, brilliant musician Frankie Presto. From the 1940s into the 2000s, their paths crossed with Frankie’s in unusual ways. I close the novel and turn on the TV to see famous musicians from many generations and genres sharing personal anecdotes and praises of the exceptionally gifted Aretha Franklin.

By the way, For King and Country gave the expected high-energy concert. We old folks stood a few feet from the stage the entire time. I admit that an hour later when I got back to our hotel, my eyes still spun from all the strobe lights, and oh, I may have been a little deaf. But the group’s beat still pulsed in my chest, and my face glowed with that pleasure.