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11:45pm June 13, 2012

In the process of digitizing a country record.

And I’m realizing how much of what I heard as a kid was country. But I had no concept of “country”. (I remember once my brother tried to explain to me something about “country” music. And then I decided there must be “country music” and “city music”, because I had a record called “the country mouse and the city mouse”. But I had no clue what they were or how to tell them apart or what kind of point my brother was actually making.) At least not until I was a teenager and wasn’t surrounded by my parents’ music anymore. And then “country” became “what I listen to when my dad drives me around”. But I never, ever connected it to the stuff I heard when I was younger. As with any broad style of music, country has dozens of styles, so I noticed those, but thought it was just “music” for the most part, with no names or categories.

There also seems to be some sort of difference in what each of my parents was willing to listen to. My mom once agreed to tape some tapes of my dad’s for me, and according to my dad she was outraged that some of the songs “promoted adultery”. (Very few songs that I ever noticed, but enough to piss her off.) And some other stuff about them she didn’t like, but I don’t remember the specifics.

But I’m starting to think that, as far as my early upbringing goes (in terms of what actually got played around me the most), that bumper sticker applied “There are only two kinds of music, country and western.” Except more than two, because there are zillions of styles of country and I never equated them all with each other. I can hear it now, but I’ve been exposed to a lot more music now. I’m also totally unaware which songs or singers were popular, except the ones I heard on the radio maybe. But my parents played so many over and over that don’t even exist in MP3 form, or not their original form, that I thought must be really popular because I heard them a lot. And that’s why I’m having to buy records one by one and digitize them. (That and neither I nor my parents know how to safely and cheaply ship records, and all they have at home is a record player, no tape recorder even, so they can’t tape stuff and send me the tapes. And record player/tape recorders like the kind I have (which also has a USB audio cable), I would gladly get them one, but it’s out of my price range these days.

But I’m no longer surprised when I find out that yet another song from my early childhood is country. It seems like nearly all of them were either country or specifically children’s music. (And a few 45s of various bands.)

Of course if they don’t know how to ship records without breaking them, I don’t know how they plan to get me all my childhood records I left at their place. (They’ve been sorting them out from their own record stacks. Both stuff from early childhood, and the records I used to find in free bins as a teenager. I remember finding an entire perfectly clean set of Beethoven’s symphonies for instance. And they had actual record stores back then too, and I got used stuff there. Do they still have those now or have they entirely phased them out?)