Song that can't be bought or sold

Alan Jacobs has a lovely and deeply melancholy reflection on orally transmitted song and music, sparked by a recollection by the poet Edwin Muir, a native of the Orkneys. Here’s a particularly poignant reflection from Jacobs himself, one that chimes with memories of sitting with my grandparents on their front porch, eating popsicles and talking:

When my late father-in-law was a child in Columbiana, Alabama, his family was very poor, and could afford no musical instruments; so evening after evening, they just sat on the front porch and sang in four-part harmony. All of them experienced music in a way I never have and never will. Eventually they did a little better, financially, and Daddy C—as I would call him, decades later—got a cheap guitar from Sears as a Christmas present. But he had no one to teach him to play until a friend of his sister’s, a fellow his own age but from Montgomery, came by one day and taught him a few chords. That friend was named Hank Williams—and yep, it was that Hank Williams.

That’s a marvelous surprise ending, and the stuff family lore is made of, but Jacobs’s line about his father-in-law “experienc[ing] music in a way that I never have and never will” expresses what I was driving at in my memorial reflection on Jon Daker last week. That was a world in which a great store of music, stories, and culture was still traditional in the literal sense of being handed over or handed down, generation by generation. That world is disappearing, replaced, as I noted, with canned music by digitally tweaked and scrubbed professionals, with whom we compete at our peril.

There is great danger in this state of affairs. I feel this acutely in the case of my own children. Jacobs touches on this anxiety by quoting this passage from novelist and critic Marina Warner: “We are in danger of cultural illiteracy, of losing the past. If nestlings are deprived of their parents’ song during a certain ‘window’ at the beginning, they will not learn to sing. This sounds uncomfortably recognizable.”

And summing up, Jacobs writes:

Children will always play, when allowed to, and people will always sing. But will they play or sing anything that can’t be bought and sold? Will playing and singing, in the Western world anyway, ever again be anything other than a set of commercial transactions?

Read the whole post. It’s worth your while. And for a related point, listen to this piece by the late Roger Scruton, “The Tyranny of Pop Music.”