Farewell to Musical Majesty

--Usually when I hear of a death of a musical legend or a musician who has been important to me, I grab a CD to play in the car.  That statement alone tells you something about my age:  that music has once mattered to me like that, that I still own CDs, that I have a car that's old enough to have come with a CD player, that I still play music on CD.  If I had a record player in the car, I might not have moved away from vinyl.

--Lately the deaths are coming quickly.  This morning, I heard about the death of John Prine, who for a few weeks had been sick with the new virus. Last week, it was the founder of the group Fountains of Wayne.  There was the death of Ellis Marsalis.  I didn't think of Bill Withers as being a musician who was important to me, but "Ain't No Sunshine" is one of those songs that always seemed to be on the radio of my 70's childhood, as was his song "Lean on Me."

--Others have written more beautiful tributes to these artists.  Here's a great analysis of Prine's genius, while this tribute looks at all the ways that Adam Schlesinger was so much more than just the founder of Fountains of Wayne.

--Of course, one of the reasons why these deaths hit me hard is that I remember the friends who loved the music right there with me.  Most of those friends aren't physically near, the way we were long ago when we would ride for hours in the car as we listened to music on cassette tape and talked and talked and talked.

--A side note:  I remember how miraculous it seemed when it first became possible to install cassette players in cars.  We didn't have to just listen to whatever the radio stations played!

--As I've been thinking about the loss of musicians, I've been thinking about past concerts I've attended. I'm fairly sure I saw Ellis Marsalis and the whole Marsalis family long ago, in the early 90's, at the Jacksonville Jazz Festival--back when that festival was free.  One of my friends created a Facebook quiz asking us to guess which concert he had not attended--and I was reminded that once I went to concerts, all sorts of concerts, concerts I almost forgot that I went to (REM), until seeing my friend's Facebook post.

I have now spent several hours trying to come up with both a title for this post and to figure out a way to conclude.   The title is less difficult, although I'm not happy with it.  But what to say in conclusion, in the face of these grievous losses, with the knowledge that more grievous losses are on the way?