01-07-2014, 03:58
Belated thanks, pennywill, for your interesting little story. I'll add a note on James Taylor while I'm here.-Ron
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EMERGING OUT OF OBSCURITY: FIFTY YEARS: 1953-2003
In my years before puberty(1944-1956), I hardly remember any musical activity in my life, although both my parents played the piano and sang in choirs, so something musical must have permeated my psycho-emotional skin. The world of popular music gradually came into my life in the years 1953-1959, and this world of sound continued to influence me for some two decades until 1973-79. This popular music had a strong autobiographical, confessional, personal, emotional, introspective quality. I found it in folk, folk-rock and the pop strands. A whole generation of popular music was found here; it was the generation I listened to as an adolescent and as a young adult. Some of it attained a level of universality which helped listeners--like me--identify with its ideas and sentiments.
Artists like: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Crobsy, Steven Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs and Carly Simon, among a host of others--provided an influence, quite unconsciously, on my artistic sensibilities, my poetry and my writing that emerged later and slowly in the next dozen years, 1980-1992. Those four decades, 1953-1992, provided a base for a poetic-fertilization, a poetic-crystallization that resulted in the years that followed, 1992 to 2014. -Ron Price with thanks to âWalk On By: The Story of Popular Song-After the Gold Rush,â ABC TV, 9:35-10:25 p.m., January 13th, 2005.
After sixty years of music
one canât help but wonder
what actually produced
this prolific output of poetry,
this wanting to see the world
and see it better than ever,
concentrating all that I have
said and done since birth,
all grist for a tumultuous mill,
mildly confessional, nothing
like Lowell, Plath, Sexton
and others from those decades
when confessionalism was all
the rage in poetry and music
and seemed to insinuate itself
into my words as they arose
with all their autobiographical
candor and an unprecedented
personal aesthetic that takes
emotion and personality,
makes and escapes, argues
and embraces and tries to tie
self and world in one wide
embrace of past, present and
future in a oneness with life.
Ron Price
14/1/'05 to 25/5/'14.
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EMERGING OUT OF OBSCURITY: FIFTY YEARS: 1953-2003
In my years before puberty(1944-1956), I hardly remember any musical activity in my life, although both my parents played the piano and sang in choirs, so something musical must have permeated my psycho-emotional skin. The world of popular music gradually came into my life in the years 1953-1959, and this world of sound continued to influence me for some two decades until 1973-79. This popular music had a strong autobiographical, confessional, personal, emotional, introspective quality. I found it in folk, folk-rock and the pop strands. A whole generation of popular music was found here; it was the generation I listened to as an adolescent and as a young adult. Some of it attained a level of universality which helped listeners--like me--identify with its ideas and sentiments.
Artists like: Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, David Crobsy, Steven Stills, Graham Nash, Neil Young, James Taylor, Tom Rush, Phil Ochs and Carly Simon, among a host of others--provided an influence, quite unconsciously, on my artistic sensibilities, my poetry and my writing that emerged later and slowly in the next dozen years, 1980-1992. Those four decades, 1953-1992, provided a base for a poetic-fertilization, a poetic-crystallization that resulted in the years that followed, 1992 to 2014. -Ron Price with thanks to âWalk On By: The Story of Popular Song-After the Gold Rush,â ABC TV, 9:35-10:25 p.m., January 13th, 2005.
After sixty years of music
one canât help but wonder
what actually produced
this prolific output of poetry,
this wanting to see the world
and see it better than ever,
concentrating all that I have
said and done since birth,
all grist for a tumultuous mill,
mildly confessional, nothing
like Lowell, Plath, Sexton
and others from those decades
when confessionalism was all
the rage in poetry and music
and seemed to insinuate itself
into my words as they arose
with all their autobiographical
candor and an unprecedented
personal aesthetic that takes
emotion and personality,
makes and escapes, argues
and embraces and tries to tie
self and world in one wide
embrace of past, present and
future in a oneness with life.
Ron Price
14/1/'05 to 25/5/'14.