Monday, July 5, 2010

50 Years of myTunes: 1960-2010

Most everybody now has a personal iTunes collection.  I have around 10 GB of material. One of the first things I do whenever I add something is to tag the song with the year it was released.  I do this by overwriting the "genre" entry in the song (I detest sorting music into genre anyway and prefer the chronological tag).  I can click on that column and see my iTunes all neatly chroned by year of release.

A while back I started making friends and relatives CDs with music compilations for their birthday.  Amusingly, this actually led me to go looking for a few songs to fill a few gaps (for some reason the year 2000 is under-represented in my collection).  I now have material going all the way back to the 1930s for such lists.

To make a birthday CD I generally start with a person's "birthsong"- the song that was number 1 on the charts on a certain date. Everybody should identify their birth song.   Follow the links at this old Althouse post (link).  My birth song is Theme From A Summer Place.   Althouse even mocked it here.

LOL!

Other choices for the year 1960 from my list include:

Save The Last Dance For Me ~ The Drifters
Cathy’s Clown ~ The Everly Brothers
Only The Lonely ~ Roy Orbison
Merry Little Minuet ~ The Kingston Trio
Everglades ~ The Kingston Trio
Chain Gang ~ Sam Cooke
Perfidia ~ The Ventures
Walk-Don't Run ~ The Ventures



My favorite from that list is the timeless "Merry Little Minuet" popularized by The Kingston Trio (and not by Tom Lehrer):
They're rioting in Africa. They're starving in Spain. There's hurricanes in Florida, and Texas needs rain.
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles.
Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch. And I don't like anybody very much!
But we can be tranquil and thankful and proud, for man's been endowed with a mushroom-shaped cloud.
And we know for certain that some lovely day, someone will set the spark off... and we will all be blown away.
They're rioting in Africa. There's strife in Iran. What nature doesn't do to us... will be done by our fellow man.  
~Sheldon Harnick

6 comments:

  1. Hey, sorry I haven't dropped by in a while, hope no hard feelings.

    Listen, here's a special karmic gift just for you, if you're a real music lover. I'm not lover of christian music per se, and certainly not gospel - or so I thought. You really need to look into "Gospel Jubilee" music. That's the wikipedia description. Specifically, "The Fairfield Four". The harmonies you'll find are insane. They go back to the 40's or something, real old stuff. You can get a quick and free listen to a ton of their music on Pandora, just make a radio channel called "fairfield four" and they will do the rest.

    Cheers

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  2. ...hope no hard feelings.

    Never!

    Thanks for the special gift: The Fairfield Four, and I will check them out on Pandora.

    From the Wiki I see that Fogerty hooked up with them--figures.

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  3. What a great birthday idea! Thanks.

    In my family we pass around grocery bags filled with our CDs as a way of sharing what we have. You can load my CDs onto your iTunes if I can do the same with yours - that's the general idea.

    It's also an interesting way to find out what kinds of music others enjoy.

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  4. What is your birthday song Haz? Or did you already post it at Althouse?

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  5. Mix tapes. Hee

    Pretty old school there TY.

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