liner notes: the voice at the other end comes like a long-lost friend

so listening to my ipod today and Bessie Smith is in the rotation- Careless Love Blues? One of the best songs ever.
Anyway, I start thinking about this amazing technology that allows me to carry thousands of songs with me, thinking about the fact that I’m listening to a woman singing in 1925. Thinking about the fact that 84 years ago when Bessie sang this song just the invention of the phonograph was audacious and radical. She could never have imagined that what she was doing would one day be... I dunno, digitized, compartmentalized, magically put into something the size of my hand and that someone like me would be walking around listening to it. That's just cool, but what's more interesting is: did she even suspect that 80 years down the line, long after she'd passed on, people would still be listening to her? Or that her songs would have such a powerful affect on us? How could she know that the blues she sang for a phonograph recording would one day be traveling through headphones, giving me words of comfort and understanding?
I read this book that Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls wrote with her father, Don Saliers: A Song to Sing, A Life to Live: Reflections on Music as Spiritual Practice. Granted, I’m a meathead, so for the most part it was too philosophical for me. I’m really no good when it comes to thinking about abstract ideas. But some of it really resonates- Like this quote from Emily: "Anyone who struggles with love and suffering and searches for the mystery ends up singing- or at least listening to music." It's so true for me and I’m so grateful that someone recorded Bessie Smith in 1925 and that when I listen to her, she still exists, singing songs that may have been written before my Granny was born, but still seem as though someone looked into my own soul and wrote about what they saw. To me that's one of the few examples of real magic, the few ways that I can possibly explain what music means to me, why it has always been and will continue to be my one true love.
-rick
*they published your diary and that's how I got to know you
key to the room of your own and a mind without end
here's a young girl on a kind of a telephone line through time
the voice at the other end comes like a long-lost friend* -Indigo Girls, "Virginia Woolf"