PUPPETS OF MUSIC

We, all humans like to think we are makers of music, the creators who pull the strings. I beg to differ. I think we Homo Sapiens are mere puppets of any kind of natural or invented sound waves.

As a child my earliest, strongest and most beloved memory is music. Like many children my early life was full of stress, constant moving, new schools, new people and extremely stressful situations to adapt to. But, when the sweet sounds of music entered my world all these stresses faded away and the world was at peace and so was I. I was a child in the 1940’s and 1950’s before the age of extensive radio and certainly before music came to be a recorded commodity sold to highest bidder at the beck and call of mere commercialism. It was music people made themselves, my family, community and church with acoustic stringed instruments such as guitar, Autoharp and dulcimer. It was music played and sung by neighbors for the joy of it in their natural voices untrained and beautifully simple. It is called by various names, folk music, traditional music, gospel music, spirituals etc. To me it is simply music at it’s best telling the lives and feelings of real people and the unvarnished truth of their existence.

Music should serve the human spirit period, it doesn’t serve matter being by it’s nature evolutionary and anti-matter. All forms of commercial music are frankly financially successful attempts to transform that which is spiritual into that which is tangible, flesh, matter and in the anti-spirit of our capitalist system deadly to the very essence of music.

I’ve often wondered how certain well-known musicians, well songwriter/musicians in our modern American Culture can possibly write songs about something they have never experienced in real life. If you’ve never been in poverty how can you have anything to say to the human spirit about poverty other than an imagined empathy, which sinks to the ridiculous when done merely to sell recordings and make money? How can you write a song about what it is like to be in prisoner if you have never been imprisoned or about rejected love if you’ve never been rejected?

The first recorded music I remember hearing was the Original Carter Family out of Maces Springs Virginia. I was happy to hear it because they made music just like my local culture, family, friends, community and church did. When I first heard Rock and Roll like a baby listening to sweet music I was startled by the discordant notes and abrupt changes that to me were totally out of place and frankly sounded disturbingly awful and anything but musical.

Pray God; the music people make themselves will survive to continue to enhance our humanity and the Human Spirit. Delightfully puppets of music.

Terel