A story.

Many years ago, I met a young couple who came to the folk concert series I was running. The wife was extremely, embarassingly enthusiastic about my music. The husband liked it pretty much, I think. He was a biologist and went to Africa with his wife to study mountain gorillas. While he was off in the mountains all day, his young wife was left in the pygmy village to entertain herself as best she could. She brought along a cassette player and played my Secret Life of Jerry Rasmussen album on Folk Legacy. (This is not a plug, it's a story.) The pygmy children loved listening to the music and the one song of mine that they loved best was a doo wop song I wrote titled Ten Pound Radio. Even though they spoke very few words of English, they learned the song and sang along phonetically.
When she told me the story, I got a big kick out if. It shows how universal music is, and how it can make a complete circle. I was a white kid growing up in a lily-white southern town who fell in love with black rhythm and blues whose roots stretch back to Africa. A lonely young wife sat outside her tent in a pygmy village in Africa playing the song I'd written (and I sing all the harmonies, multi-tracked.) African pygmy kids learning a song written by an ageing white kid from Wisconsin. And the circle is unbroken.