Today’s music video is Old Rivers, sung here in this clip by the actor and recording artist Walter Brennan.
This video was posted to You Tube by blizard7500
I find it amazing how much we take music for granted. It’s all around us, every day, and in everything we do. We have the car radio on whenever we are out. We have the radio on in the background most days, at home or work. It’s always there.
However, no matter what age we are, we always seem to go with the music we were raised on, the music that was current at the time when we first started to gain an appreciation of music, and that always seems to be our favourite genre, and sometimes, because of that, we miss out on those other genres, music from before our time, and music that is the favourite genre of our children, and for some of us, our grandchildren.
Now we have CD’s. Before that there was Cassette Tapes, and before that there were LP’s, Long Play Records and those smaller 45′s.
I came to appreciate music in the early and mid 60′s as that legendary British Invasion set in, so for a number of years that was virtually all I listened to. Sometimes the radio would play some older songs, and I actually came to appreciate some of that music also, something that strengthened over the years that followed. Besides the music of my era, there was just so much good music from our parents, and even grandparents era. I also started to appreciate other genres, Country Music, Easy Listening Music, some Jazz, and even some Classical Music.
A lot of it was just so good, and I found that there was so much good music I was missing out on just by locking myself into the music from my own era.
I collected those LP records and my collection grew, and now it numbers more than 300, probably closer even to 400. The music I really liked I would tape to Cassette, so if I wanted to play it, then I could just put the tape in the player, press play and off it would go. I used those UD C90 tapes with 45 minutes per side, and that way I could get one album on one side, and a second album on the other.
My youngest Son came to appreciate music in the early/Mid 80′s so our tastes were always different. What puzzled him sometime was that some of his music I did like, and he was still in that young person’s mindset that only the music from his era was worth listening to. Some time in the late 80′s early 90′s he started to hear music from bands that were still current, and were in fact from my era, Pink Floyd mainly, and he liked some of their latest releases. He remembered that I had all their music, and it was on those Cassette Tapes that I had recorded myself. Over a period of a year or so, all my tapes slowly disappeared, not only all my Floyd tapes, but all my Neil Young tapes, and then most of the others as my collection of aroun eight dozen tapes gradually diminished to just on one dozen, as he, umm, borrowed them, never to be returned.
All I had now was those existing LP records, and now, in the age of the CD, LP records virtually vanished, and from that so did record players. I sort of despaired that I had a large collection of Music, but, now, when my last diamond stylus gave up the ghost with no replacement able to be found, I would never be able to listen to that music again.
My sister came to the rescue here. She had a computer program that actually could convert the music from those LP’s to a digital format. She couldn’t work out how best to use the program, so she gave it to me to see if I could use it. Luckily, I found a record player with a pre amp, oddly enough, from of all places Radio Shack. I found some leads to plug into the computer and set about trying to work the program out. It took a while, and once that was done, I started the process of transferring all those LP’s to a digital format, and the program was such that a during the process, I could actually remaster them, and cut out some of the tracks that I didn’t want saved. That process of conversion took me ten months in all, just doing one or two albums a day or so, and each album took about two hours or so to play in full, and then work on the program. I saved all that music to its own dedicated Hard Drive, which is in a caddy of its own, and when I want some music, I just plug it in, pick out what I want to listen to, and play it through the computer, or ‘burn’ up a CD of my own.
During this process my good lady wife asked if I could do the same for some of her LP’s, and she had around 50 or so of them, including a good collection of Jim Reeves albums, around a dozen of them in all. While doing her albums, I found that a lot of those Jim Reeves songs were ones I had never heard, and some of them were really good, and this further enhanced my appreciation of music from another age and another genre.
Now, in this day and age of CD’s, we think ourselves lucky that we can get a CD with around one hour of music on it, and I have some with up to 80 minutes of music on a CD. The albums from my era were all around 40 to 45 minutes long. Here I was now with all these Jim Reeves LP’s. Most of them barely manage half an hour, and a couple of them only have five songs to a side and each song is barely two and a half minutes long, so that’s barely 25 minutes of music, and the shortest of them is only 22 minutes, so we are actually spoiled for music now we have access to CD’s.
Jim Reeeves started out as a Country singer and branched out into easy listening, and the smoothness of his wonderful voice enhanced any song he sang. From that I then started to become even more aware of the music from that era, and that genre.
The pleasure of finding these good old songs leads nicely into today’s song from that renowned actor Walter Brennan. I was barely 10 years old when this song was released, so it was before that time when I started to appreciate music, and even then, this song probably never did make it to Australia in a big way that it became in America.
This song, Old Rivers was written by Cliff Crofford in 1962, and released, almost as a recitation by Brennan over the music and backing vocals. He really puts some feeling into this touching song of an old guy who worked a farm near the young boy, who is narrating the song from his own old age.
This Walter Brennan original of the song was a big hit at the time of its release, and made it to Number Five on the Mainstream Charts at the time. It’s been done over the years by other artists but this almost recited version is the best version of this wonderful song.
Walter Brennan was best remembered as an actor mainly for the role he played in the long time TV Series The Real McCoys which ran on TV for seven years in the late 50′s and early 60′s.
However, Walter Brennan is in a very select group of actors, a short list numbering only five (three men and two women) who have won Three Academy Awards for Acting, with only Katherine Hepburn winning more than this. (four)
This song featured today is a wonderful old song, here sung with real feeling.
by TonyfromOz
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