who can't seem to learn to hit "tab" to get out of "from" but maybe in the next reincarnation ....

OK. I was an honest-to-God archivist for the last 11 years of my life as an employed person, but I never think of myself in that category when I get on threads like this. I just imagine myself sitting on a hard stool at any open mic, hoping my axe is in tune.

I don't believe that just because we can now save crap, we will drown in it. I'm hoping that the better performers who actually go to the trouble of researching will have enough sense to choose better rather than worse material to resurrect and perform. On the other hand, what tends to irritate this crotchety old man at open mics isn't usually old material, it's the new material that is either technically horrible, macabrely [neologism?] "dark-side" or just flat lacking in any "redeeming musical value," to parallel the usual excuse for pornographic lit.

Several of you have a great deal of knowledge--more than I possess--about particular bygone singers and songs and the corpus of material preserved from them, but I think you're looking at the "information science" aspect more than the music aspect, and I don't think civilization, as we laughingly call it, will end because we can preserve everybody's farts. Now that I think of it, there's another thread from 2005 that has surfaced again right now, about how "information science" is really so blunted that we're not actually saving a lot of what we think we're saving. We change media faster than we can transfer material, so really the big Cray in the liquid nitrogen pool does NOT hold all past wisdom, and we have to keep on juggling things in our heads.

I applaud Brendan's unequaled sensitivity in this matter, and may I say I'm honored just to be on the same thread with him. :)

Shimrod, yeah; "ya gotta have heart--miles and miles and miles of heart." But Brendan, yeah, you've gotta be able to pull it off with some degree of style. So that's why I like Leadbelly, Guthrie and Dylan when their stuff is sung by someone else. Where's the middle?

Dick Greenhaus nailed it. That's why I go to an open mic with 24 slots and end of really liking about 6 performers. (I'm best, of course, as long as Brendan stays home.)

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