Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 1, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 January 1912 — LIKES THE OLD SONGS [ARTICLE]

LIKES THE OLD SONGS

MIDDLE-AGED MAN ALLOWS HIMSELF TO WONDER. * P---v , * Will the Ditties of the Present Day Arouse Buch Pleasant Recollections as Do Those of tho Long-Distant Days? • • ' "Do you know what I wonder sometimes?” said the middle-aged man. “I wonder if any of the songs of the present day will live in the minds of the youngpeoplewiurstng them now to arouse pleasant recollections in them 50 years from now. “Do you see what I mean? I know, I guess, 40 songs—2o anyway—that we used to sing when I was a youth that we all thought were lovely. Some of these had come down tDus from older times and they are still living, and I suppose will keep on living. But there were other songs, written in that day, that appeal to us older people now as strongly as they dld %hen, and perhaps more so, though in a somewhat different way now because they bring back fond recollections. “1 have no greater pleasure than, hearing my children play and sing those old songs that were sung when I was young, and I wonder —I do wonder —if any of these songs written say around In the last ten years, will survive, to be sung by my children*,. 60 years hence, with an interest like mine now in the songs of my. youth. “I am inclined to doubt it. Lots of the songs of the present time are fool-, ish, fl'fdft’t they ? And with words poor or worse than poor. And still when I sit down with a book of my old songs and go over it In cold blood, -reading instead of singing, I have to smile over some of them, for some of them were pretty thin and meager stuff when you came to read them. Still youth likes high flown romantic things and it doesn’t apply the acid test. We don’t do that till we are older, and among the songs written in the present day there may be some that will survive, foolish though they may seem to be to people of maturer years. “And how do I know but that the old folks in my younger days thought the songs we sang then were foolish? Maybe they did; but we loved them then and as older people we love them now; they make youth spring up in us again. And It may be, it may be, that some of these present day songs that we older people now think of no account will still live, either by some charm of theiv own or by the charm of all things associated with youth, tu be sung SOyears fr*m now by our children then grown old, just as we now sing over the songs of our youth, and with just the same joy. It paay be. But I think they will then be singing too some if the songs that pleased us, the songs that go down through generation after generation.'*’