I don’t know if this would be a sensitive subject, but I wondered: if you have some awareness of your ancestry, is there any kind of music that you feels that calls to it?
I don’t even know how accurate or relevant it is, but the theme to The Last of the Mohicans sure gets my Scotch-Irish blood tingling. Likewise Scotland the Brave and The British Grenadiers. Makes me want to pick up a claymore and start swinging it about.
I know it’s all in my imagination, but still, just for funsies . . .
I’m reasonably sure that, plaid uniform skirt notwithstanding, any Scottish blood I have is extremely unofficial - but I think Scotland the Brave has a similar effect over anybody who grew up within the Western musical tradition (using Western in a very wide sense).
Every culture has a few songs which are “cry about home songs” (i.e., almost-guaranteed to cause strangled voices in people hearing them away from home, even if back home they’re about as patriotic as a cactus), but with the exception of a couple of those, I’m not much more likely to get roused by a jota than by a reel.
My ancestors were Eastern-European Jews, from Russia and Poland. My favorite composers are Rachmaninoff (Russian), Tchaikovsky (Russian) and Chopin (Polish). Strangely, I don’t recall hearing any of this music when I was a kid, hearing it for the first time in college . . . and not making the connection to my ancestry until some time later.
But I’m not particularly into klezmer music. I have one cd of it, and that’s quite enough.
But I have to add: I’m also into lots of music that’s not from that area. Opera (mostly Italian), Operetta (mostly Viennese or Hungarian), American “standards,” Broadway, classic jazz and rock.
The Clancy Brothers, the Chieftains, the Pogues…a sweetly sad Galway air will choke me up as I pine for the turf…
But that’s fantasy, as the OP mentioned. For REAL place-based memories, New York music from the late’70s. Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” gets the tears to flow.
The opening notes to Finlandia always bring out tears:
It was a protest against Russian rule, and one title faked to avoid Russian censorship was
“Happy Feelings at the awakening Finnish spring.”
My very first LJ entry was about a piece of music with a middle eastern flair. I and my Chinese boyfriend (relevant) were listening to it together, and I said, “That’s so…”
And I said;
“Homey.”
And he said:
“Exotic.”
I always thought that was an interesting view on the differences we were bringing to the relationship. But yes, Middle Eastern, Egyptian, Indian, Pakistani, Afghani, and many similar songs sound familiar to me.
This matches my experience almost perfectly. I come from an Irish family (all four grandparents were born in Ireland) but was born and raised in New York.
So, the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners have always touched some part of me, even though Ireland wasn’t really my home, and was a country I only knew second hand.
And Billy Joel strikes a chord because he was always singing about the New York and the New Yorkers I DID know.
I grew up in Montana. Country music pre-1987 is in my blood.
This post is going to be all over the place, so bear with me.
Ethnically, I’m a mutt. I have British and Dutch on my father’s side (footnote that may be interesting to only me: my great-grandmother married into the “Steenbergen” family. When she divorced my great-grandfather, she didn’t want him to be able to find her. So, rather than keep his last name, or revert to her maiden name, she changed the spelling by one letter, and the nationality changed from Dutch to German). On my mother’s side, her grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee, and married a full-blooded Irishman.
None of the music generally associated with those ethnicities really interests me. I like the Rolling Stones and the like, but they don’t strike me as being a “legit” British band anymore. Maybe when they were younger, but it’s kinda been watered-down by now.
I feel more…connected to “regional” music. For instance, there’s a song by John Mellencamp that features the lyric, “through the hills of Kentucky, across the Ohio River.” I’ve lived in Southern Indiana or Kentucky my entire life. Johnny Hoosier (as my brother calls him) was born and raised within an hour’s drive of where I live. I didn’t grow up on a farm, but I can certainly understand their plight, to an extent. When he organized Farm Aid, it meant a lot to me, for that reason.
Southern rock, particularly Lynyrd Skynyrd, for me.
I’m Irish/German/Slovenian. Irish I enjoy <any celtic, really>; german…well, nothing from the last century but the old composers I really enjoy. (technically I think the great-grands were Austrian rather than German, but that’s a political tangle I’ll never know about now). Slovenian…hrm. I enjoy all kinds of music, a lot of Arabic calls to me, but I’m trying to think of what ‘Slovenian’ really sounds like. I do tend to really like eastern-euro folk music; used to want to be a gypsy when I was little so I could play the fiddle barefoot in the moonlight, lol.
Great, now I have to go look up slavic music…
Well, this certainly does it for me!!
AND apparantly I inherit the like for bagpipes from BOTH sides of the family: Slavic bagpipees! And the drums in that song remind me of the bodran, another plus.
Same here. My aunt had a lot of Clancy Brothers albums, and Irish music has a lot more resonance for my than music from the German side of my heritage. Especially songs of rebellion like The Foggy Dew.
Having grown up in the Bronx in the 1950s, it’s doo-wop for me.
Bluegrass. (I love the mandolin.) With singing so nasal it sounds like it’s coming from between the eyes.
When I was little, in Navarra there were three questions which defined your “cultural identity” (this has changed in recent years, gotta love it when politics changes language).
Where are you from/where were you born? The two answers could be different, which was an interesting piece of data in itself.
Where were your ancestors from?
What languages do you speak natively?
Sounds to me like you’re one of the people for whom identity is linked to “where are you from”, rather than to ancestors who are just a curiosity.
When I’m feeling blood-thirsty, it’s definitely Scotland the Brave. When melancholy, it’s Braes of Sutherland. Or Outlaws.
Anything with a tin whistle sounds Irish.
Interesting point. No one in my family ever showed an inordinate amount of pride in their heritage, so I suppose the apathy I feel is at least partially because of that.
I absolutely feel this and I actually thought that I was weird because of it. Thanks Straight Dope!
The first time I heard Irish music I pictured myself standing on a high cliff on the coast of Ireland with a long flowy dress and my long red hair whipping around me. I could almost feel the sea mist. It was amazing and I was hooked. I love anything remotely Celtic sounding. It’s like a sound vacation.
Actually, John Cougar Mellencamp’s songs often remind me of growing up in Ohio. I don’t care for much of his work, but I’ll sit through it because I get it – the place where those songs come from.
Oddly enough, I’m from NE Ohio, which is this weird spot in the universe that spawned a bunch of different successful musical acts over the years. Not one of those acts has made any songs that I’ve heard that remind me of NE Ohio with the exception of The Pretenders My City Was Gone. That one makes me cry while I’m singing along. 