Not only where you live, but where and when you were raised, and what was customary in that time and place, is brought to bear here. Did you grow up in a culture where your elders listened to the words? When you were young, listened to a song/tune, and didn't understand some bits or pieces of it, did you ask someone older, "What was that word?" Did you get a civil answer? Was your question brushed off? Or did your elder grasp that this was a teaching moment, and encourage you to listen and learn?

One of the defining memories of my earliest years is AM radio broadcasts in the car, in the days when there was no sound system in the car except for the AM radio ( we weren't truckers, no CB for us). That was in the days before air-conditioning was standard in cars as well, and if we needed air we rolled down a window.

The nearest metropolis, with the most powerful broadcasting, was across the state line; I didn't grow up in Michigan and rarely went there in person, but I grew up listening to Detroit radio stations. I still remember the disc jockeys talking at a rate of about one hundred miles an hour, an absolute aural blur, and I recall struggling in vain to comprehend even one sentence of the announcements.

The hit single records broadcast on the radio stations were loud enough, goodness knows, but the car radio wasn't that hot, and the sound reproduction made mush of the singers' diction and pronunciation; it was no place to learn the lyrics of the songs you heard.

I still cringe at the memory of begging whoever was in the car to tell me what the singer just sang, and getting yelled at.

It must be my contrary nature that prompted me to persist, in spite of this convention and cultural setting, to listen and learn what songs I heard, all the way to the literature that I learned of classical music at the university level. As well as the traditional musics to which I was exposed almost exclusively by recordings, some of which came with liner notes or booklets with the lyrics in print.