Quite Continental Mix IV: Daddy’s Girl
23/10/2012 § Leave a comment
As long as I can remember, my father has always had a guitar in the house. A member of a garage band when he met my mother, he’d frequently pick at his pretty Guild with its sunburst finish while we watched television that he wasn’t all that interested in, giving our TGIF sitcoms a folksy soundtrack (which we loudly complained about). But when I was about 13, I decided that I wanted to learn how to play the guitar, too. My father, delighted, promptly bought me a classical guitar of my own, showed me a few chords and then gave me all of the dog-eared songbooks he had: Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Eagles, Simon & Garfunkel, etc.
Ultimately, the guitar didn’t take, but the music definitely did. And this fall, I’ve been surrounding myself with the kind of music that reminds me of my Dad — rock with notes of folk and country, singer-songwriters with distinctively smoky voices, and more than a little melancholy. I’ve even included the first song that my Dad tried to teach me on my guitar: “Helplessly Hoping” by Crosby, Stills and Nash. Also featuring Dan Auerbach, The Allman Brothers Band, Ray LeMontagne, Ryan Bingham, The Avett Brothers, and The Head And The Heart, among others, it’s just as good for pensive drives in the country to look at the turning foliage, as it is for Sunday mornings with a steaming hot cup of coffee and a big fat newspaper or two. I hope you enjoy it.
You can find it via the player embedded above or via this link.
Image via the US National Archives.
Quite Continental 
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