warning: major, LONG thread drift!

McGrath,

Personally, those intergenerational tensions showed up in areas other than music. My Mom got her guitar from my father's uncle when he died some 40-ish years ago; she got the Pete Seeger record and book and was off to the races. I was 3 when my mother accompanied me on a recording of kiddy songs to give to the grandmothers for Xmas.

I teethed on Prokofiev and Pete, oh and Paul Robeson (he knew my grandfather), kindergartened with Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, Chopin, Bach, Marian Anderson...Primary school added Haydn, Handel, Herb Alpert, Sergio Mendes and Brazil '66...and on through life.

My father taught me to play ukelele before I was anywhere near big enough to hold a guitar, even my mother's small Martin--and I was a tall child with large hands. As soon as I was almost big enough, I was putting the uke chords on the guitar. My parents showed me what to do with the other two strings. And then I tried the banjo. All this to a backdrop of a women's barbershop chorus, which my mother conducted. My father played French horn when I was young; had both an F and an E-flat horn as I recall--tough going for 8-year-old lungs I can tell you, but I could press the valve levers just fine!

In other words, it was all music to me and still is, including genres at which my maternal grandmother turned up her huge nose (not inherited, thankfully!)

Other people can debate classification all they want. I figure that all music is fusion and you can go crazy trying to name its ancestry and/or its present forms. Like some kinds of 'blues' are maybe Afro-celtic? Puhleeze.

My job is certainly not to compartmentalize something so closely woven as music--I'll leave that to the marketers. I'd rather sing, accompany myself acceptably on guitar, harmonize, get my lazy behind back to the banjo, and speed up on cello.

I have an idea that there has been a thread about the sort of tension you mentioned, but maybe it just came up under another topic.

END OF THIS CHAPTER OF THREAD DRIFT!!

CH.