When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, I didn’t know a family that didn’t have at least one Mitch Miller record album. And he had a TV show, too, that ran from 1961 to 1964.
He had a beard. Holy cow. Really, you had to be there to appreciate how unusual that was, back then. Almost like having a third eye.
Miller put together a “gang” of male singers and performed old-fashioned songs that everybody knew. I don’t know that we have that kind of cultural cohesion anymore. Who couldn’t sing There Is a Tavern in the Town? The main selling point of Mitch’s albums was that you could surely sing along. We all knew the words.
Today, in the midst of our now fractured society, there’s something fantastically appealing about the very idea of “sing-along.” But now what would we sing? What could we all agree on?
Not much.
Maybe we ought to be working on getting back good things we’ve lost.