Music and an aging man

(It may take a while to get to it, but there is a point in here somewhere).

I've been thinking some lately about how my tastes in music have changed as I have aged and/or matured.

When I was young, I enjoyed what might now be called classic country: Charlie Pride, Merle Haggard, Johnny Cash. I even have some Porter Wagoner and Glen Campbell vinyl at home, too. And Statler Brothers. You should have seen my mother smile the day I dropped by after interviewing Freddie Hart at the Mason County Fair and gave her an album he had autographed for her after I told him how much she liked his voice. We were on his bus. He just reached up, pulled an album from a rack, tore off part of the wrapper and signed it, "Sadie, Angel."

Later I enjoyed baroque and classical. I defy anyone to sit through the best parts of Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert's 1985 release of Back's Brandenburg Concertos and say they have not heard good music. One of my kids even likes Mozart now thanks to my playing a few of his pieces.

My daughter has a hard time understanding how anyone who likes baroque the way I do can also like bluegrass. I tell her to listen sometimes to Handel's "The Harmonious Blacksmith" performed on harpsichord and imagine it on a five-string banjo. She has a violin, and she hates me calling it a "fiddle." Or she did have a violin before I took it in exchange for buying her an acoustic guitar this last summer.

After saying all that,let me say I cannot stand modern music. Oh, I'll listen to some Randy Travis or George Strait if it comes on radio, especially if it's Strait singing "Amarillo by Morning." But Garth Brooks and Rascal Flatts and others do nothing for me.

But Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline. ... I must be getting old. If old rockers and pop singers are turning to the old standards to keep their careers alive, maybe we'll get young singer someday who will discover the Roy Clark songbook and cover some of the great songs people like me grew up with.

But people like me don't buy that many CDs, do we? And that's where it is. It's the same reason newspapers have to keep up with the tabloids and the glossy magazines in giving us the blow-by-blow action of how Beyonce resents Jennifer Hudson's success.

And fools like me still read 3,000-word stories on how sulfur compounds emitted by coal-burning power plants might be slowing the rate of global warming. But that's another blog entry.