Friday Night Videos: Boomers Rule!

I was kind of harsh towards the Boomers the other day, but I was mostly exaggerating. I don’t really hate Boomers or their music. To prove it, I thought I’d use some for this week’s Friday Night Videos.

When I was very little, a toddler, my brother and I would take showers with my father. This was a treat because a shower was a grown up thing, and therefore much more fun than my mother giving us a bath. My father always sang while he showered, and while I’m sure he sang others as well, I can only distinctly remember three of his shower songs. I can, in fact, hear him singing them so clearly it’s as though I have traveled back to 1979. His singing in the shower all those years ago is so deeply a part of me that, every now and then, as I’m taking a shower I realize that I’m singing one of them. These three songs are three of my favorite things in the world. And they’re Boomer songs (well, two of ’em are).

So yeah, I don’t really hate Boomers. Here are the videos:

Bob Dylan – Girl From The North County (1964) from Columbia Records on Vimeo.

Back then, Nashville Skyline was almost always on the record player in the hall closet, which was connected to the speakers in our family room. However, the version of “Girl from the North Country” on that album is a duet with Johnny Cash, and while Johnny Cash is cool and all, he couldn’t really sing a Dylan tune, especially not that one. So I went with Dylan’s earlier vesion.

If Nashville Skyline wasn’t on the turntable, Songs from Big Pink or The Band probably was:

How good were the band? That was seriously tight.

And the song I remember most clearly:

That’s from my father’s childhood. He was 2 when it was released, and I wonder if he sang it in the shower because, when he was a toddler, his father did.