Introducing Salut! Live Readymades: wonders from the archive
November 14, 2016
Must be New Guitar effect. My wife Joelle bought me a Yamaha for our anniversary (45th for heaven's sake) and I am newly enthused about music. My friend Joan Dawson warned me to expect sore fingertips for a few weeks before they hardened again and she was right.
In Joelle's honour, I am learning her favourite song, Imagine, not one I would have thought of singing had it been around when I was running folk clubs in the North East. I've also been seeing how much I remember of the Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Ralph McTell and Tom Paxton songs I once knew, not to mention the traditional ballads.
But if this site has readers, they would know I have in the past few days been posting, at Twitter and Facebook, old Salut! Live posts featuring YouTube clips of songs and artist I included in an old Song of the Day series, later updated. Find most of them at http://www.salutlive.com/song-of-the-day/
I have decided the simplest way of doing this is to give the new project a generic title. Salut! Live Readymades seems to fit the bill so I will also get round to inserting that as a category into all that has appeared here as a Song of the Day.
What I have not quite worked out is whether additions to the category should also fall under the Readymades handle. Logic suggests not; simplicity may differ. We'll see when i get round to that part of the exercise.
Any value that Salut! Live may have lies in the wealth of the archive. Skip up and down the sidebar columns and you find links to articles that were worth reading when published and still are. Well, that's my story so I shall stick to it.
Whether you just dip into Readymades or make a more detailed exploration of the site, I hope you find something to please you.
A new guitar is always a welcome arrival and addition, I've found over the years. I know exactly what you mean about those sore finger-tips too. I quit for over ten years but had returned to guitar following a noisy spell with banjo-ukes and ukes (I'm a huge George Formby and Ukulele Orchestra of GB fan.) I met up with Doc Watson at his home in Deep Gap, nc. We shook hands and he immediately sensed/felt the hard tips and asked if I picked guitar. After a while we discussed my ten year lapse and he rather discouragingly said: 'You've lost it then. You can never pick it back up. You'll never catch up with where you could have been.'
Posted by: Iain Patience | June 26, 2017 at 04:24 PM
Well this may be what i want to happen rather what is happening but while my fingers have lost some dexterity, I feel I can still do most of what I could 30-40 years ago when I thought I might just advance to some kind of acceptable standard. I never will, but that was the case back then, too. At 68, I feel I could go out at the great little music bar I often visit when here in France (Gecko, Le Lavandou) and offer acceptable versions of a few of the songs I know. I may, of course, be wrong! But I hope to give it a try ...
Posted by: Colin Randall | June 26, 2017 at 09:04 PM