RonPrice

The above 2000 word essay, which explores my singalongs and my two-2 ring binders from 1943 to 2014, is the story of the gradual evolution of singalongs and singalong booklets in my life. It is a somewhat long piece, and readers are advised to skim or scan the several paragraphs as suits their reading tastes.-Ron Price, Australia

FIFTY YEARS PLAYING THE GUITAR: 1962-2012 and SIXTY YEARS OF LISTENING TO GUITAR ++SINGALONGS: 1952-2012 Part 1: Being in the generation that came into their teens in the mid-1950s, I was there when rock-and-roll was in its first decade, say, 1952/3-1962/3. When the first wave of youth, those in their teens and twenties, joined the organization, the religion, I had become a member of in 1959 with the guitar as one of its centrepieces, one of its icons, I was there struggling to get singalongs off the ground. The guitar was the quintessential instrument and it was just about impossible not to get into the guitar if one had any sense of rhythm, listened to the top 40 and wanting to utilize singing as a socializing-teaching medium. After trying to learn classical guitar in 1962/3, I bought my first acoustic some time in late 1967 just to play top-40 songs. I think it was about October where I had been travelling-pioneering for the Canadian Bahá'í community. I gave it to an Inuit kid in Iqaluit on Baffin Island in May of 1968 after purchasing a second guitar. The kid’s name was Henry and he was in grade 3. Seven years later in 1974 while living in Tasmania, I put my first booklet of songs together for singalongs. Part 2: By 1974 I had enjoyed singalongs for over twenty years, my first experiences being around the piano at home with my parents and friends sometime in the early 1950s. We had a piano until 1957, a spinet, when it was sold for financial reasons. The singalongs that evolved in the 1970s were a combination of popular folk and rock, solid gold from popular music of the past and what was then a small repertoire of songs with explicit, overt, Baha’i themes and content. That first booklet of songs was revised again when I lived in Victoria Australia, from 1975 to 1978, and several times thereafter until singalongs began to fade, at least for me, in the 1990s and 2000s as I faded into late middle age, its last ten years, 50 to 60. This booklet of resources reflected these several booklets of material I had previously put together over those years. By 2005 I had enjoyed more than 50 years, on and off, of singalongs. They had given me and others much pleasure. But for various reasons they insensibly had begun to fade from my experience, at least my guitar-playing part. Baha’i choirs had begun to emerge; Baha’i artists were beginning to put out CDs by the late 1990s, but getting people to sing informally, even with the song sheets from my booklets, seemed to be harder than ever. Slowly but surely over the ten years, 1995 to 2005, singalongs with the guitar became rarer and rarer events. I felt as if I had done my share when in 2003 I put up my guitar on the hook of retirement and in 2005 I retired from the local choir I had been a member of for three or four years. Part 3: Then I put a booklet of songs together in 2005, probably I thought at the time, a final booklet, for those rare occasions that did arise for a singalong in the years ahead. A resource that was used a great deal, then, in the twenty years 1968 to 1988 became a rarity in the following fifteen, 1990-2005. By 2001 I had a weekly radio program in Launceston for half an hour utilizing some 50 Baha’i CDs; a Baha’i radio station came on-line; professional and amateur choirs were popping up all over the world. The Baha’i music scene was developing a rich and diverse base. But singalongs seemed relatively scarce for a population that seemed more intent on watching people sing than singing themselves. My own disinclination to lead singalongs had led to a new phase of community music for me. As I say, I took part in a choir in George Town once a month(2001-2005). Part 4: Then in 2008 I began to lead singalongs once a year at an aged-care facility in George Town Tasmania using mostly “songs from the sixties.†Another phase of singalongs was opening in these my middle years(65-75) of late adulthood as some human development psychologists call the years from 60 to 80. In the last five years, 2008 to 2012, I lead these singalongs on average once a year with an audience of about 50 people all on their way to the proverbial bone yard as we used to say. I have tried here in this brief statement to capture some of my musical experience in groups over some six decades, 1952-2012, and my experience playing the guitar for singalongs from 1962-2012. Youth at this site may find this historical perspective of value. What will be their story in half a century? Time will tell, eh? Ron Price Updated on: 16 October 2012 (800 words)

This could be useful as I go through my 70s as a singer.-Ron

PART I The following 2000 word essay explores my singalongs and my two-2 ring binders: 1943 to 2014. What follows is the story of the gradual evolution of singalongs and singalong booklets in my life: 1943 to 2014. Both my mother and father had been involved in singalongs before I was born. In my prenatal, neonatal, and childhood life singalongs were part of my environment and my lived-experience. The first booklets of music in my life, at least those I remember, go back to 1950 when I was five years old. The first booklet of music that I put together myself in order to run singalongs was in the late 1960s, in 1968 when I was twenty-four. From about 1950 to about 1965, my years of growing up in the family home, I ran along on the singalong booklets of others: my parents', my friends’ and, of course by the decade 1959 to 1969, TV’s and radio's many-idiomed and formatted aural-texts. During the period of more than 70 years, then, from 1943 to 2014, I have been involved in singalongs in one form or another. In the years of this 3rd millennium, 2001 to 2014, singalongs using booklets of songs I created took place for the most part at an aged care facility, an Australian government-funded aged care home, called the Ainslie House. This collection of buildings is located beside the Tamar River, an estuary, that runs beside George Town and Low Head in Tasmania. The residents of this home in this the oldest town in Australia, live in a modern and attractive facility about one kilometre from the Bass Strait, an extension of the Great Southern Ocean at the other end of the world from where I was born and grew to maturity in southern Ontario Canada. I have been in at least two dozen aged-care buildings in my life. In the late 1990s I taught aged-care studies at a Technical and Futher Education college in Perth Western Australia. These are places where home--at least in one of the main styles of facility--means living with many other people under one roof, getting used to other people doing some of the everyday things you might have done previously for yourself and by yourself or with your immediate family. These places for the old and the dieing require a working-out of new balances between one’s need for privacy and the inevitable community nature of such a life. There are now, of course, an increasing variety of such facilities which this short essay will not attempt to explore in any detail. Aged-care facilities are slowly becoming an increasing presence across our culture as war-babies like myself and baby-boomers all come into their late adulthood(60 to 80), and old age(80+) incrementally year after year beginning early in this 3rd millennium. Any child born in the first year of WW2, that is, in 1939, was seventy-four in 2014. Aged-care was becoming very quickly a vast industry. PART 2 So it was that leading singalongs with the very old was, in some ways, a natural event. In 2014 I was 70. This is an age of many of the residents of this aged-care facility here in Tasmania. So I was right at home as I sang my songs. I had been a lecturer in aged-care studies programs where I finished my teaching career in an Australian technical and further education college. I dealt with students studying aged-care and other specialist training programs in various human services certificate and diploma courses. I became, as I had so often before, “an instant expert†in a field about which I had previously known very little. I became a quasi-expert in more and more subjects as the years went on in my teaching career. The process tends to be the opposite of PhD studies in which one knows more and more about less and less---or so it is often said. A range of different levels of care as well as specialist services are available here in these buildings, this aged-care facility. This facility is beside a river, the Tamar River, an estuary, Port Dalrymple, a stone's throw from the Bass Strait. It's under one management and organizational structure: high and low level care, short and long term care, independent unit and shared accommodation, transitional as well as particular and multi-service care are all available under one roof. Care and services such as: respite care, care for particular cultural needs and health conditions, care for end-of-life clients, for war veterans, for the socially and financially disadvantaged, for the mentally-ill and for people living in rural or remote areas. PART 3 To a lesser extent I also led singalongs in the years 1999 to 2005 in the Baha’i community. I had, by 2005, been associated with the Baha'i Faith for six decades. By 2005 my singalongs with Baha'i groups were rare occasions but, it was my hope that they would increase in my life in the Baha'i community when and if my health improved. My final singalongs in classrooms took place as my teaching in FT, PT and volunteer teaching wound down in that same decade. These singalongs became rare events in my last years in Perth Western Australia in large Baha’i communities and the smaller ones in northern Tasmania where I lived after 1999, and in the several classrooms where I taught. During the first 15 years that I lived in Tasmania during my early retirement, 1999 to 2014, guitar-playing and singalongs slipped to the far periphery of my life with one main bastion of singing-activity with the old and dieing. In the last three years, and settling-in to a new cocktail of medications for my bipolar disorder, I have only played twice with an audience of some 30 people at this local aged-care facility, Ainslie House. The Distraction Therapists at Ainslie, the ladies who invite me to play and entertain the troops, tell me their work-load is too heavy to develop the music and entertainment program for the residents. In some ways it was fitting that the last few years of the singalongs in my life, 2002-2014, involved mostly senior citizens, the aged, old people, those in late adulthood(60 to 80) and old age(80++)--here in George Town, as I say above, Australia’s oldest town. I used large-print songbooks published in the UK with a small singing group, choir was not quite the right word, until 2005. I say “fitting†because the content of these booklets was mainly for the two generations born before WW2--in the first four decades of the twentieth century—the earliest years in Canada and Australia of the activity of the Baha’i community, the religious community I have been associated with now for more than 60 years. The Baha'i Faith began in Canada in 1898 and in Australia in 1921. By 2010, though, the material in my two volumes, my two 2-ring binders, that I used for singalongs was for all age groups. There are very few songs that originated in the period, the two generations that were born in the last 40 years, my years since arriving in Tasmania, from 1974 to 2014. The group born in the years after about 1974, the year I arrived in Tasmania, will find few songs that were popular from their years of listening experience in these two binders. I did not listen to the music of those two generations. For the music of some two generations(1974 to 1994 and 1994 to 2014), of the great mass of popular music; for example, the songs of groups like Abba, among a host of others, I never bought the sheet music nor did I learn how to play the songs in some personally inventive way by figuring out the chords. So it was that, by 2014, I did not know the songs of those under forty well enough to sing them in groups informally in the Baha’i community or in any other communities of which I was a part as a teacher in primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions, as an adult educator, as a quasi-entertainer or as a person in one of a number of other roles I have had during those years. PART 4 The resources in these music booklets, these files, this collection, are here for singalongs in the groups I am involved with as I head, in 2014, through the last decade(70 to 80) of late adulthood(60 to 80), and finally, old age(80++), if I last that long. I have multiple copies of what I have come to call 'the music of other interest groups'--for those not familiar with the Baha’i musical experience, booklets of songs I put together for students in classrooms where I used to teach as well as other groups. I have many editions of song books in multiple copy form that I made for Baha’i groups, as I say, as far back as the late 1980s. Songbooks from the previous two decades, the years 1970 to 1990, and the two decades before that, 1950 to 1970, have all been lost, or they have been thrown away. Many just disappeared into the sands of time, the time that has been my life, as it has slipped irretrievably from my grasp. These musical experiences called singalongs have returned to my life now here in George Town in recent years, but only on the rarest of occasions. In July 2008, some six years ago now, I put together a package/booklet of 75 songs as requested by the local aged-care centre. Who knows when and who knows where and how these singalongs will develop in these years of my late adulthood. In the 5 year period, July 2009 to July 2014, I only sang four times at this old-age home. My wife and son had become more than a little tired of hearing the same old stuff back in the 1980s and 1990s, and when I sang at home it was in our spare bedroom with the door shut. I am not a particularly talented guitarist and it is understandable that my wife and son have got tired of hearing all these old songs, this repertoire of mine. Singing in groups seemed to become passe, perhaps even to become seen as declasse or lower in social status/standing in the wider society or at least many sectors of the wider society that I came to live and have my being in by the 1990s and 2000s. Of course, this is not true everywhere in the 1000s of cities, towns and hamlets across the planet. Part 4.1 This form of self-entertainment and group entertainment that does not rely on the electronic media is far from dead and I feel it will again be part of my life in these years before my demise, my passing from this mortal coil. In some ways it has been fitting, as I say, that most of the singalongs I have been part of in the last 15 years, 2000 to 2014, have involved residents of a home for those in aged-care, for people on their last legs. I often thought that American writer William Faulkner's spirit may have been present in those sing alongs. I often thought, too, as I led these old folks in song that the spirit Faulkner had when he wrote his now famous book As I Lay Dieing may just be at the back of the leisure-social-room where we had our singalongs; perhaps this great writer, this winner of a Nobel prize in literature, hangs around the ceiling or occupied another place in these rooms. Perhaps he was outside just by the windows where the poet-historian Arnold Toynbee says we are peopled by the lives, the unseen, unknown, unobserved souls, millions upon billions of souls at just one remove, one step, beyond our senses in a land of lights never to return to this earth, its beauties and its uglinesses, its bitter-sweetnesses and its joys. These people who now sing along with me from time to time all lay, sat up or palely loitered about, dieing slowly. Each month that I went back to this old-folks home during the latter years of these singalongs someone else had died, sometimes two or three had died or had moved to the very edge of their final hour. Some sat in some state of increased decrepitude to the state I had observed in my previous visit; some looked brighter and more alert. Sometimes I was brighter and more alert. The term ‘old-folks home’ was the term we used to call these places for the old and dieing when I was a kid. And of course it was just that, a home, the last for those who were old. It was their home, their last home on this earthly plane. PART 5 Slowly I got to know many of the names of these souls, got to know their life stories, their particular ailments in great detail—as some old people are want to tell you to the nth degree of finitude. I also got to know a little of their philosophies and their religious proclivities. The resources in my personally prepared, tenderly fostered, not-oft-used-and-repeated booklets of singing material that are here in my files, my collections, are getting a new, an occasional, lease on life. They had often been kept, in this first decade of the 3rd millennium, tightly sealed with a big rubber-band around them, in keeping for a future time when singalongs would once again return to my life. These singalongs would one day return to the groups I was involved with in these years of my late adulthood and what would become, finally, old age. The rubber bands are now off and its action-stations for singalongs once again. Perhaps, when I get my own life on medications sorted I will be more use in the singalong world. Old age begins, say some human development psychologists, at the age of 80. I've come to like that model since the 1990s when I was a teacher of a psychology course on human development. This model gives me now, as it has given me in the last decade, many more years before the onset of old age. As things stand now in 2014, I have another 10 years before I'm actually, officially, or shall I say psychologically, in theory at least, de facto, old. So, I have plenty of years left, potentially, for singalongs. Perhaps they may still be in my life in the 2040s, the decade when I become a centenarian. We shall see what those mysterious dispensations of a Watchful Providence provide in this the evening of my life as nightfall gradually approaches and “I go into a hole for those who speak no more,†as that great prophetic Precursor of Baha'u'llah, the Báb, once expressed life's experience of one's final hour so very graphically and so literally in His voluminous writings back in the 1840s. Ron Price 29/6/10 to 20/5/'14.