NCAA March Madness is now in full swing. By the end of the day we will be down to the Sweet 16. It’s one of the few things that will cause me to turn off the stereo and enjoy something else. So my post today will be brief so I can return to the madness. I’ll leave you with a representative sample of some fight songs of some of the participants.
Earlier this week I got in my van, turned on the stereo and… silence. My trial to Sirius/XM radio has run its course. Although saddened at first, I realized that my smartphone communicates with my stereo via Bluetooth and I have all kinds of music available right my fingertips. I have apps on my iPhone for Pandora, iTunes radio, and Rdio. With these tools I have access to literally millions of songs for free or for a nominal fee. This is a far cry from the tools we had in the 1970s.
My first car was a 1962 Ford Galaxy 500 my parents purchased from a friend for $100. It was equipped with only an a.m. radio. This simply was not adequate so I scrimped and saved from my $1.25/hr busboy job to purchase an under-dash mounted 8-track tape player. My stereo cost more than my car. Variety in those days was accomplished by carrying around a shoe box full of 8-track tapes.
There is no way we could have predicted back then that we would someday have access to almost every song we would ever want to hear on a device smaller than a single cassette tape (a technology that was still in the future in the early 70s). Perhaps this is why we don’t listen to music in-depth like we used to. We simply have too much music and too little time. Don’t get me wrong, I love that I can access anything I want whenever I want. My biggest problem is deciding what I want to hear. What a great problem to have.
For St. Patrick’s Day I thought I would post about Irish music. As I began researching the history of Irish music it became increasingly evident a simple post could never do justice to its rich traditions. Irish music is a subset of the genre of Celtic music, although the two terms are often used interchangeably. A nice introduction to Celtic music can be found at:
http://standingstones.com/celtmusic.html#anccelt
In recent years the popularity of such artists as the Chieftains, Celtic Woman, and Enya have brought Celtic music to the masses. After researching several choices on YouTube I selected this as a good example of Irish folk music. Enjoy.
