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Greg Krehbiel

“All Americans are two or three drinks below normal.”

by Greg Krehbiel on 12 August 2009

So says the first sentence of My Pious Friends and Drunken Companions, which I just picked up off the shelf in a library of old books.

It’s a book of songs, written in 1927. The point of the sentence is that it takes two or three drinks to get an American to sing.

In the old days, people used to get together and sing for entertainment. Then cheap access to professional singers (through radio, records, etc.) put a stop to that and people stopped singing … until someone invented the karaoke machine, and now people sing again.

Or so I’m told. I’ve never been to a karaoke bar, or anyplace with a karaoke machine.

2009-08-12  »  Greg Krehbiel

Talkback

1. Jordan Henderson
   13 August 2009 @ 7:08 am

   John Phillips Sousa testified before congress that the gramohpone would be te end of singing:

   From http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/John_Philip_Sousa

   These talking machines
   are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy…in front of every house in the summer evenings, you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord
   Vocal folds

   The vocal folds, also known commonly as vocal cords, are composed of twin infoldings of mucous membrane stretched horizontally across the larynx….
   left. The vocal cord will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape.

   He had a lot of it right, actually, if we disregard his Lamarckian view of evolution. Every convenience comes at a price. We might prefer recorded music, but it probably has limited spontaneous performance. Perhaps karaoke has brought it back to some degree.

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