On Music, Memories & Nostalgia

It’s common to look back, to miss loved ones and the milieu of long ago, and to shed tears over the years that used to be. The other night, for instance, Diane and I watched via YouTube the recent RTE special on folk-flavored singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith, whose music brought us together and formed the foundation of the first of our three-plus decades together. A 1986 appearance on TNN’s New Country, which found her performing songs from her The Last of the True Believers album, followed; we became misty not just from our communal memories, which began three years later, but from everything that’s changed from then to now.

There was a time, for instance, when a little-known, country-inflected folksinger was afforded a 30-minute block on a basic cable channel—not once, but several times. Comparisons to today can’t be had, as back then cable consisted of 30 or so channels, but I’ll try anyway: It’s akin to Kelsey Waldon hosting a special on Peacock or another B-tier streamer. It just doesn’t happen.

When I mentioned this topic to Diane, she laughed. “What doesn’t?” she asked about things that spur a wistful yearning for years long past.

Truth be told, I find myself fighting that feeling quite often. A snippet of a song heard while shopping in a store, for example, unfurls a litany of memories of my childhood. Neil Diamond songs from the late 1960s and early ‘70s remind me of my late mother, who bopped along to his catchy beats in our living room, while anything Johnny Horton leads me to remember my dad, who gave me his Greatest Hits LP in 1973, when I was 8. We lived in Saudi Arabia at the time; he and several other Raytheon employees ran a low-watt FM station for fellow ex-pats, recording LPs to 10 1/2-inch reel-to-reel tapes that they swapped out every few hours. The LP was someone’s hand-me-down, in other words—not that I cared. In a similar vein, many of the soft rock and disco-laden tunes of the late 1970s remind me of the fun days and nights I enjoyed as a freshly minted teen.

To answer the posed question: the music of my youth, 20s, 30s and even 40s makes me feel nostalgic. It’s why the early years of this blog are rife with nostalgic fodder, from my Of Concerts Past and Essentials series to posts about the magazines and newspapers that informed my worldview. When I re-launched The Old Grey Cat in 2014, I added the subtitle of “…on music, memories and other stuff” and tried to balance the old with the new, as I never fully stopped enjoying new sounds, but the pull of nostalgia usually won out.

A funny thing happened somewhere in there, however: At some point, fueled largely by First Aid Kit and Courtney Marie Andrews, I realized that there’s a wealth of young artists releasing wonderful music— and, as importantly, plenty of new memories to make. It doesn’t mean, as the other night, that I don’t occasionally find myself yearning for the days that used to be. But focusing only on the past guarantees one will miss the present.