Today is rapidly on its way to being yesterday. Tonight I can say that today I had an epiphany, but in an hour I will have to say it was yesterday. I looked into the present and saw the future while I was looking at the past.
“What the %$#@ have you been smoking, Jimbo?” many of you are probably asking. “We haven’t heard a word from you in a whole %$#@*+(& month, and now that you are communicating again, it sounds like you’ve gone off the &^%($*@ deep end.”
Well, I guess I better start at the beginning.
I was thinking this morning of the song Waiting For A Train, by Jimmie Rodgers, so I went online to download the lyrics to the song. While I was looking for them, one of the search results I found was a link to Jimmie actually singing the song. After I printed the lyrics, I clicked on to the link and it took me to You Tube, where I watched an eighty-year-old film clip of Rodgers singing the song to a couple of elderly women.
Jimmie sang:
My pocketbook is empty and my heart is full of pain
I’m a thousand miles away from home, just waiting for a train
I was able to follow along with the lyrics I had just printed off and look at the chord changes he made and made note of the key in which he played the song and the chords he played. If one knows the basic major cord fingering patterns, it is easy to read them while watching the video of a guitar player. Rodgers did a little fancy stuff with alternating basses, but he played primarily using major chords—no diminished chords or seventeenth-suspended chords, or anything like that.
Now, I can anticipate your next question.
“How does watching film from the early 1930s of some yodeling hillbilly plucking on his guitar for a couple of old ladies help you see into the future?” some of you are asking right now.
Well, posting videos on You Tube is the latest in-vogue thing, and all of this crap that people are posting on line is just that—crap. But, in among the crap is some important video and it is becoming a permanent record that will remain for years. Instead of just reading about someone or something in a book and maybe seeing a picture of them, future generations will be able to see them move and hear them talk, and dance and sing. And all those people that are posting all that crap—and that little bit of important video—are leaving a walking, talking video record of our time. Someday all that video—because it is so easily searchable, will become our history.
At least that is the view from here in Jimbo’s world.
