Songs for New Year's Eve

May God keep you for the next year to come. Not that there are any guarantees on this night, or any night.

But if you're a good drinking man, well, it's a fine night. Let's have some music from when I was... well, very young indeed.



It was 1973 when Waylon Jennings grew his beard; he'd been clean-shaven before that. Everyone was, who was of any account. 1973 was when it started to shift from the consensus. There still hasn't been a President with a beard, not since Benjamin Harrison.

From the same year, Johnny Cash sang a piece about the family coming together after death is transgressed:



AVI's recent post on a song of a similar age reminded me of how much better -- demonstrably, positively better -- the old music used to be. Even the stuff I don't especially like is head and shoulders above what is popular today. Not as a matter of opinion, but one of fact: for the people who did things I don't like in the 1970s nevertheless knew how to do them. They didn't just show up at a studio without talent or skill, trusting the computers and the engineers to clean up their ignorance.

Old Willie Nelson, for example:



The recently deceased Roy Clark:



But a completely different song, on the same thing, from the noble Clancy Brothers:



Drinc Hael. Waes Hael. Happy New Year, brothers and sisters.