A little nostalgia for a simpler time!

We watched a documentary the other evening about the birth of pop music, all about the enthusiasts who went around the USA collecting recordings of unknown people singing songs that had not been heard out in the wider world. It wasn't all altruistic, of course; they wanted to sell records to a new audience, not just to the wealthier end of society. But people travelled huge distances to record their songs, caught ip in the magic of an idea advertised in a newspaper.

The Carter Family was one of the main examples butbthere were scores of other families in the Appalachians and other sparsely populated bits of the USA i the early 20th century who sang and played music to entertain their families and neighbours. Everyone in a district knew who were the good singers and the good musicians. The amazing thing is that there were so many of them. Presumably in a small place there was little else to do by way of entertainment and they made their own amusement.

Having watched that, I embarked on my super-rapid read, in preparation for the Winston Smith Reading Group, of Notes from a Small Island, in which Bill Bryson visits as many places as possible in Great Britain over a period of a few weeks. Someone described it as a love letter to Britain. I can just about agree with that but it is very much a case of "I love you, warts and all" for he is prepared to be amusingly and affectionately sarcastic about aspects of life here.

I mention Notes from a Small island because one of the places old Bill visited was Ashington in the North East of England. He went there to find out about some people called the Ashington Group, an association of miners turned amateur painters in their spare time. Dressed smartly, they got together and produced works of art and became quite famous for doing so.

The thing is that Bryson describes a thriving community from early in the 20th century who had thespian societies, operatic societies, a workers' education society, a philosophical society, reading rooms, cycling clubs, athletics clubs. You name it, they had a society for it. And as the century moved on all of these societies pretty well disappeared. All gone! The Ashington Group hung in in there until 1983, at which point the rent on the shed which served as a studio was going up quite considerably, miners were a disappearing species and fewer young men wanted to dress up in a suit and paint. So they closed their doors and that was that!

The point is that you can find references to this sort of thing all over the place. In D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, young men who are largely destined to go down the pit still have cultural activities going on in their village. In Laurie Lee's Cider with Rosie, the family is scraping along with little money but they have a piano and Lol has his violin.

Where did all of that go? Did it start to disappear when radio made its appearance? Did the same innovation that transmitted the music to people's home begin the end of creativity? And then along came television, now available 24 hours if you want it, and with the possibility of catching up on all the stuff you missed first time around. Add to that the internet, streaming, tweeting and twittering and the rest is history!

I'm surprised anyone has the time to create music, paint pictures, write books and all the other stuff at all nowadays.