Probably not. About six years ago, a coworker saw a picture of me that was taken approximately twenty-five years prior to that, and in an extremely amazed manner remarked that I had barely changed at all. Part of being a curmudgeon is looking like one, so I believe I’m safe.
(Besides, I never have to chase whippersnappers off of my lawn, which means that the propensity isn’t even building up in me.)
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You might deserve an honorary title, here’s the test: what do you do when there are whippersnappers lounging on your lawn?
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Have you ever given birth? Yet you know at least some things about childbirth, correct? Do you participate in the violent crimes taking place in your country? Yet you are aware of some of them, correct? Are you now or have you ever been an active member in a white supremacy organization? Yet you know they exist, correct?
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I know, huh?
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(((The ones that end in -day, perhaps?)))
*Randolph ducks to avoid the large object that Thriftymaid has just hurled at his head.
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I concur completely. Although I don’t know the names of the groups, bands, or individual performers, nor do I know the names of the “songs”, I loathe the newer music that my children love. When I was younger, my mother had a violent and screeching reaction to the music I loved: songs by Prince, KC & the Sunshine Band, Cameo, Sade, the SOS Band, Blondie, Starpoint, LaVert, MC Lyte, DeBarge, Taylor Dayne, Gloria Estefan, Laura Brannigan, and many others. In fact, any song I listened to that wasn’t released by Black artists she called “country music”. She forbade me from playing any of it while she was at home, even if we were not in the same room as each other. I didn’t go that far with my own children; in fact, they grew up with better prosperity than I had experienced that allowed them technological options that kept their music away from my ears completely.
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I don’t remember anything specific that she’s ever said about Charlie Pride. My mother was born not only in the midst of the time period of Jim Crow “laws”, she was also born in the Deep South and was raised in a variety of places, some of which were quite normal in that race (ethnicity) was not a negative issue at all and in other places that were the worst examples of racism. For instance, I believe she was about 9 years old before she experienced the back-of-the-bus situation when they moved from a city that didn’t have it to one that did. Having grown up to that point without it, she and her younger sister (there were just the two of them, no other siblings) merely laughed it off as silliness and sat wherever they wanted to. Being so young, and cutely attired in dresses that my grandmother made for them and bows of ribbons in their that matched the garments, no one ever challenged them. My mother is just as talkative as I am (I get it from her), and being so well educated that she could converse with adults at a level uncommon for her age, she veritably charmed people with whom she came into contact.
All of her life, my mother has been embroiled in many issues concerning Black Americans, from our history to our struggles to our heroes and heroines to our roots/origins to our stories to our culture to our sacrifices to our accomplishments to our best people to our worst people, almost any topic. As such, she was front and center as the entertainment industry as a whole had a hand in the advancements and barriers to Black people’s successes in music (among other parts of entertainment, but that’s a story for another time). What eventually became labeled by white executives and producers as “rock and roll” has deep origins among Black performers, and was systematically stolen from them so the whites could reap the rewards and more importantly, the extremely lucrative financial profits.
Fast forward to Marian Anderson, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Nat King Cole, James Brown, BB Kong, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry, Duke Ellington, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, and dozens of others, these were the names I heard all the time growing up, even though I may not have been into their music because it was more of my mother’s era.
With Charlie Pride being a country and western (as it was known in those days) singer, it wasn’t a genre that appealed to her, and there were some Black people who didn’t follow his career at all for a variety of reasons. I do not know if my mother numbered among them based on the genre being more popular among Caucasian people than among Black people, but that is a distinct possibility. Sad but true, some people, regardless of ethnicity, turned their backs on him and even unfairly labeled him as a sellout. Personally, being of a timeframe well before my interests in any music whatsoever, and a genre that I’ve never followed, I know very little about Charlie Pride, but I have never seen him in any negative light. I believe he was a passionate lover of the music he put out, a lover of creating it for anyone who liked it, a pioneer and a trailblazer in his field. I wish I knew more of my mother’s thoughts on him, but I do not
[Oh, if only Randy D could concoct short and simple responses, right? Grrrrrrr, right?]
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Of course it’s possible: a statement or a stance that includes more than one element may present opportunities for another person to parcel out one or more for concurrence, while others may not meet his or her approval. To agree on a blanket level encompasses the entire issue or all of the separate issues, while stating, “You have a good point there on A, but I know nothing about B, and both C and D are way out in left field to me; I cannot co-sign on them.”
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Completely, or in part?
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Shuhak 