After writing yesterday’s post on MP3 turntables, I was thinking about all the great music of decades gone by. Some we continue hear relatively frequently, but there are other songs I wish were heard more often. Obviously that’s why we each get to build our own collection, be it analog or digital or both. But we’ll never get to hear it all, not enough hours in a life. How insane is it, that to live even a million hours, one has to be over a hundred years old? Talk about scary math…

Still, thanks to YouTube and music downloads and CDs, and yes, old phonograph records, new favourites can be found, and old ones discovered again. I hope you enjoy seeing The Kingston Trio in their early days via the clip below. I’ve enjoyed their recordings for years, but it’s neat to be able to watch them perform as well. While the group experienced a few personnel changes over the years, the overall sound and feel of the group remained.

As their website says, “In 1957 The Kingston Trio emerged from San Francisco’s North Beach club scene to take the country by storm, bringing the rich tradition of American folk music into the mainstream for the first time. During the late ’50s & early ’60s, the Trio enjoyed unprecedented record sales and worldwide fame, while influencing the musical tastes of a generation.

“Through changing times, the Trio has played on, remaining popular for a simple reason… great songs that sound as good today as the first time you heard them. And fifty-two years after Tom Dooley shot to the top of the charts, the Trio is still on the road thirty weeks a year, bringing back all the great memories and making new ones.”

Again bridging the gap between old and new, embracing the great technological world we live in, they even have their own YouTube channel.

I like seeing connections, especially ones that you don’t see coming at first. Perhaps I’m stretching a bit here, but unplanned though it was, I was musing about letting go of stresses and worries two days ago, and the next it was converting old recordings, and today, I feel like I’m almost inadvertently connecting the two. For the old song below is called “A Worried Man.” But there’s an interesting twist at the end; he “won’t be worried long.”