Just hoping I can fix it so that the Rumble vid can be limited access — I’m not out to tarnish the memory of my “kin folk” or to subject their memory to ridicule by making public a video done for sentimental reason of two octogenarians – one with arthritic hands – taking a stab at revisiting songs they played 40 and 50 years before. *Music being the thread relevance reference*

About 90% there now.

But here is the deal: lonely streets aside, music itself, is regenerative and uplifting; even if it only resonates for personal or sentimental reasons; even if you have to listen partly through the generous veil of memory, erasing the mistakes and skating past the clams. It might be your kid playing the recorder, or your mother playing Christmas carols, or a couple of old men getting together one holiday to see if they could knock out a couple of tunes they last played with any practice many decades before.

And maybe, even the Bee Gees. Though I’ll take that on the say so of others.

That’s a great Lileks post about the Bee Gees. However, it’s an HBO documentary, not Amazon. Lileks is right: they were brilliant, and they were taken for granted (or hated).

Now their music is having a renaissance of sorts online with “reactors” on YouTube, which is how I began to rediscover it. I plan a number of posts, some about them and some about other groups, based on what I’ve learned in the past few weeks.

However, something else – Lileks mentions David Bowie. He may not know that Bowie patterned a song after a Bee Gees song, and many other musicians admired them. See also this and this. There are plenty more.

https://youtu.be/zJbqwVAoc1Y

Nobody. (irony aside)

“500 Miles” is a 60s folk song I’ve loved since I first heard Peter, Paul & Mary sing it. It’s by Hedy West and was based on fragments of a song she heard her uncle sing when she was growing up in North Georgia.

It’s about loneliness, shame and having to leave home. Desolation.”

I followed the leads in your comments and see that Hedy West stitched her song together from “patches” of a song or songs sung by her grandfather.

I had never heard the Peter, Paul, and Mary version. But I suppose that anyone at least 4 or 5 in 1963, would have heard the Bobby Bare version when it first came out as a country crossover hit. And I doubt that anyone over thirty has not heard it, or part of it, at some point in time..

You are probably right that songs of lonliness and estrangement from current conditions, along with a longing for home, is thematically common in country music. It is in a sense natural to a pioneering people who at the same time have strong family roots and usually positive relationships with those close to them.

The holiday dysfunction stories so beloved of Hollywood, and the attitudes reflected in the parent child relationships of so many left liberal personalities, seem to represent an attitude toward life and emotional fulfillment less likely to produce this kind of material.

The Bobby Bare lyrics version comports rather well with Neo’s criteria, albeit being a little too specific with regard to the object of longing that accompanies the subject’s feelings of loneliness and estrangement in those indifferent and even alien seeming public spaces … i.e. streets.

But as you note, wanting to go home and to be with loved ones in familiar places ( perhaps to find it still somehow inaccessible as in Joe South’s famous tune) is very common in county music.

Wayfaring Stranger is a fairly good example which should have occurred to me before … though it looks longingly forward to reunion , rather than dwelling impressionistically on the bleak present. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FYdoEbzI2d8

I don’t know enough about poetry, much less foreign poetry, to kmow if this is a common theme throughout the world, or not.

I would suppose that along with assumed individualism, certain kinds of familial and interpersonal bonds and values are also requisite and must exist; along with social conditions which sometimes promote migration and travel- at least commonly enough for it to exist in the general consciousness as a theme. You cannot however be a values nihilist and make it work. [Though of course you can be one and still emit a wail of existential anguish. But , since it is presumptively as meaningless as the wailer’s own appetites and fears, it is just, ex hypothesi, noise without claims of objective resonance.]

Now, it has been a long time since I read “The Wanderer”. But without putting too fine a point on it, it too seems to me to track a cultural theme that in one manifestation or another goes way back in ours.

“Oft to the Wanderer, weary of exile
Cometh God’s pity, compassionate love ….

And happy the man who seeketh for mercy
From his Heavenly Father, our Fortress and Strength”

Country music and its broader themes, have a long history in “Anglo Saxon” culture.

I can’t think of any classical music for loneliness except maybe the section of Khachaturian’s “Gayne” which Kubrick used to excellent effect in “2001” to convey the stark isolation of space:

–Gayane Ballet Suite (Adagio) (2001: A Space Odyssey Soundtrack)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhYhREdQBn0

More traveling stuff here than strictly taken loneliness as such, though there’s loneliness in there too (“Einsamkeit”, for instance).

It’s about loneliness, shame and having to leave home. Desolation.
_________________________________________

If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles
A hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles, a hundred miles
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles

–Peter, Paul & Mary, “500 Miles”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCwj1GMKB44