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Feb. 15th, 2010
The local NPR station produces a music history program called Echoes Of The Golden Age, and tonight's show was about drinking songs in opera. So that concept sparked a discussion between myself and Mum about her knowledge of drinking songs, and she told me a story...
...Back in college she took German langauge and for her second year, her teacher was an actual German woman (as opposed to a science teacher who had taken the job the previous year by default). Well, after one particular class, as everybody was leaving the classroom, some of the class cut-ups were serenading everybody else with a drinking song they had made up in German, and Mum recalled how funny the German teacher thought it was. Teenage boys who had never set foot in Germany making up a German drinking song about the Rhine River.
And then I told her that because of all those American soldiers being stationed in West Germany over the course of the Cold War, country & western music is relatively popular in Germany even today...and there are probably German kids writing songs in English about American landmarks.
History works both ways.
...Back in college she took German langauge and for her second year, her teacher was an actual German woman (as opposed to a science teacher who had taken the job the previous year by default). Well, after one particular class, as everybody was leaving the classroom, some of the class cut-ups were serenading everybody else with a drinking song they had made up in German, and Mum recalled how funny the German teacher thought it was. Teenage boys who had never set foot in Germany making up a German drinking song about the Rhine River.
And then I told her that because of all those American soldiers being stationed in West Germany over the course of the Cold War, country & western music is relatively popular in Germany even today...and there are probably German kids writing songs in English about American landmarks.
History works both ways.
